The House with Teeth : Short Film Pitch

Original artwork by Yayi Ding

I am developing a new short with writer Tom K McCarthy and producer Nic Crum and we've made it into the first round of the Enter the Pitch film competition. Please check out our pitch video and give us a vote if you'd like to see us win a budget to make this film a reality!

A Stately Suicide - Wrapped

Last week we wrapped principal photography on a short film I am directing called A Stately Suicide.  It was my most enjoyable directing experience so far and I was so grateful to be working with such a talented cast and crew.  The cast are;

Melody Grove as Hannah

Kern Falconer as Spencer

Ryan Fletcher as Tony 

and

Annie Louise Ross as Nurse

'A Stately Suicide' a short film in development.

In late September director of photography, Ian Forbes and his writing partner, Andy Smith came to me for advice on a screenplay they had been working on.  I liked the tone of the story immediately but it was clear to us all that it still needed some work.  I came on board to advise at version three of the screenplay and was asked to direct shortly after that.  We have since been through four iterations and made some drastic changes to the events of the story.

Synopsis:

The volatile Lord Spencer must be kept under heavy sedation if he is to be placed in a nursing home without a fight.  When Hannah, his private nurse takes all of Spencer's medication, she must enlist Tony, a small-town waster to find street drugs to replace the prescription.

Hospitalfield house, the primary location for the film

Falling Out - Developing the Screenplay

It has been about five months since I first mentioned to my writer Tom K McCarthy that I wanted to make a short film which focused on a small group of people dealing with the immediate aftermath of a nuclear blast in Scotland.  Last week he delivered the first draft of the screenplay.  There are several redrafts needed before we get to a shooting script but we both agree this draft holds the essence of the story we want to tell.

Writing

I've been giving myself a wee Aristiotle refresher course to get myself tuned up for writing a treatment for a short film (a requrement for the NFTS directing fiction course) and came upon this useful resource;

http://www2.cnr.edu/home/bmcmanus/poetics.html

I know it's not meant to be good practice to write by the rules rather than letting the story 'come alive' rada rada.. but reading this has so far helped focus my existing story ideas into a series of cause and effect events rather than a jumble of happenings. Here's hoping for success...

Meta; Toms blurb

It is a cyberpunk love story that looks at the nature of perception and deals with issues of dependency. In the not too distant future, IT has come to mean Immersive Technology. Cyberspace exists as a distinct and separate world that people jack into to do their jobs, play games or just socialise. Many people have become addicted to virtual reality and let their bodies waste away in the Game Slums. Among these addicts is a young couple: Mark and Grace. Grace has jacked into the net without a firewall giving herself an informational overdose. Mark searches the net for her soul, her data. All he can find is echoes. Data pertaining to other data – Metadata.

Screenplay

My friend Tom McCarthy has agreed to write the screenplay for my grad film based on my outline. We will continue to collaberate throughout the process but I'm so glad to have somebody who knows what they're doing to take charge of the script.

Tom has written a couple of short films, co-written a feature with his brother (Outcast) and is just finnishing his first solo feature screenplay.

He's given me some reading to help with the process, it's all pretty much cyberpunk;


Snow Crash by Neal Stephenson
Vurt by Jeff Noon
Strange Days
Videodrome

The Last Temptation of Christ

"The dual substance of Christ - the yearning, so human, so superhuman, of man to attain God - has always been a deep inscrutable mystery to me. My principal anguish and the source of all my joys and sorrows from my youth onward has been the incessant, merciless battle between the spirit and the flesh... and my soul is the arena where these to armies have clashed and met" Nikos Kazantzakis

Characterisation in graduation film

There will only be one rounded complex character, that of the male lead. The other two speaking parts will be flat characters representing the oppositions in the leads conciousness. The main opposition is between the flesh of biological life (represented by his partner) and the weightless freedom of digital life (represented by a software daemon character). The lead has a contempt for the flesh and tends to regard it as a breathing machine for his brain.

Philip K. Dick

Maybe each human being lives in a unique world, a private world, a world different from those inhabited and experienced by all other humans. And that led me wonder, If reality differs from person to person, can we speak of reality singular, or shouldn’t we really be talking about plural realities? And if there are plural realities, are some more true (more real) than others? What about the world of a schizophrenic? Maybe, it’s as real as our world. Maybe we cannot say that we are in touch with reality and he is not, but should instead say, His reality is so different from ours that he can’t explain his to us, and we can’t explain ours to him. The problem, then, is that if subjective worlds are experienced too differently, there occurs a breakdown of communication... and there is the real illness.


from How to Build a Universe That Doesn’t Fall Apart Two Days Later. Philip K. Dick, 1978

Sci-fi Treatment

Themes;
Dehumanisation / Post-human / The Nature of Reality / Isolation / Voyeurism / Loneliness / Paralysis / Greed / Hunger / Fractured Thoughts / Dream States / Jealousy

Locations;
A derelict industrial basement ties together leaps to unreal ephemeral locations. Industrial basement will be given context of a decaying unoccupied future city through 3D matte paintings.

Look;
High contrast desaturated cold look for reality and high key look for cyber-memories and places.

Story;
Two characters. A couple who have been living in isolation for some time. The guy uses cyber memories and experiences as a drug like crutch. The girl resents his increasing use and refuses to use herself until, lashing out, she jacks in but goes in too deep, losing any sense that she is in an artificial reality. The film starts with the guy trying to pull her out of her cyber-trance by going in after her. The back story is told through him reexperiencing recorded cyber-memories. As time goes on he becomes more desperate and hateful and eventually, not seeing another way tries, to shock her out of it. The film ends with a feeling that he may have permanently damaged her or even killed her in the process. No dialogue is used in the reality portions and the cyber portions are confusing.

Ideas stolen from Red Dwarf books and Neuromancer.

Next years film; feature film influences

Taxi Driver - Isolation, paranoia, self imposed loneliness and a hostile environment lead a fascinating yet unlikable character to an inevitable conclusion. [story, character]

Death of a Salesman - Delusion of the character is carried through in the form of the text, we are taken with him in delineated time, space and reality. [form, story]

Memento - Broken memory and post-human isolation combine with single minded revenge create a character willing to loose himself to the cycle of death rather than confront his own misdeeds. [story, form, character]


Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind - Dream sequences which use poetic connections to move through time, space and reality. [form]

The Matrix - Visual Effects used as an integral element of the story and its underlying concepts, computer generated realities. [form, story]

Evangelion - Investigating the nature of our human separation from each other and the fundamental loneliness that brings. Exploring the dangers and possibilities that would arise if we were able to bridge the gap between one anothers minds and be one. [story]

Next years film starts here.

After much thinking about what I want to make next year I have settled on making a short scifi set on a William Gibson influenced earth. I have been toying with writing about electronically altered states and artificial experiences and this quote from Andrei Tarkovskys book Sculpting in Time really seems to be a seed of truth that could help keep me focused;

"Let us imagine for a moment that people have attained happines - a state of complete human freedom of will in the wildest sense: at that very instant personality is distroyed. Man becomes as solitary as Beelzebub. The connection between social beings is cut like the umbilical cord of a new-born infant. And consequently, society is destroyed'

Easy Riders, Raging Bulls

Peter Biskind discussing film critic Pauline Kael's reaction to the beginning of the end of New Hollywood, brought on with the invention of the Blockbuster (Spielberg's Jaws) in his book Easy Riders, Raging Bulls.


Ironically, the very success of the New Hollywood, rather than rendering the studio system obsolite, as Hopper and Penn had imagined, had merely reinvigorated it. She wrote "these men were shaken for a few years; they didn't understand what made a film a counterculture hit. They're happy to be back on firm ground...." Voicing the utopianism of an earlier decade that still echoed faintly through the self-satisfaction of the mid-'70s, and no doubt thinking about Scorcese and Altman, she warned, Cassandra-like, of the death of moves.

Bow Down to the King

Many characters, themes, and symbols recur in King. More significant than any geographical world King has created is the integrated view of the way in which things in life happen and why they happen. He suggests that this work repeatedly emphesizes that he is
"not merely dealing with the surreal and the fantastic but, more importantly, [is] using the surreal and the fantastic to examine the motovations of peaople and the society and institutions they create" (Magistrale, Stephen King: The Second Decade, 15)