Ellens Ideas for Short Films

Section 3: Initial Ideas for Short Films
By Ellen Wilkinson
Idea One:

Basic Plot:
A teenage boy has the house to himself to for a month as his mother visits his sick grandmother abroad. He is left a substantial amount of money in order to buy food etc. However he has other ideas on ways to spend the money, and enlisting the help of his friends holds “The party of the year.” With drugs, music and no rules the party gets out of hand. The boy wakes up to discover a dead body of a girl in his house and no recollection of who she is or what happened.

Genre:
I thought of this idea when watching an episode of skins. Which has similar themes and storyline.

http://www.channel4.com/entertainment/tv/microsites/S/skins/episodes_p2.html
Plot of Skins Episode Season 1 Episode 4:

Happy-go-lucky party animal Chris wakes up one morning with a hangover and a hard-on. Nothing unusual there. Until he discovers a grand in cash and a note from his mum saying she’s gone away. So, like any not-so-average pill-popping 17 year old, Chris embarks on a bender to end all benders. But what do you do after you’ve thrown the mother of all parties and blown all the money? Well, you sell everything that isn’t nailed down and go again - and just hope that everything else will start to make sense. Sometimes though, life can make a little more sense than you want it to and Chris has to face up to the fact his mum might never be coming home

Style:
I wanted to create the style of madness, no limits out of control that skins manages to achieve.
The following images show what I am trying to capture.
http://image.guardian.co.uk/sys-images/Arts/Arts_/Pictures/2007/03/16/skins460.jpg
http://blogs.guardian.co.uk/tv/skins_460.jpg

The story would be told from the point of view of the protagonist, showing how the drugs affect him and then his reaction to discovering the body.

Target Audience:
Teenagers and younger adults; the themes of drink and drugs would not be suitable for a younger audience and would not interest an older audience.



Main Themes:
• Growing up
• Drugs and the danger of them, though this is an underlying message it is not what the film is intended to do.

Mise-en-Scene:

In order to capture the authenticity that is needed for it to be successful then it would have to be shot at a real party


Possible outcomes:

They dump the body:
This would be difficult to shoot to make it look realistic.
Tell the police:
This ending would allow both open and closed narrative; we could either show the decision being made the ending so it is inconclusive of what happens, or it could be a closed narrative showing how she ended up there
He wakes up in hospital/or bed it was a trip but cuts away to a shot of the dead girl in the house but no ones found her yet, and on some sub conscious level he new about her.
This is my personal favourite and would be easiest to shoot and creates a open narrative and the audience asking more.