My basic concept was originally going to set the murder mystery in a universe where a specific drug is so good, and has so few negative side effects, that the government has legalized it and now everyone is on it, especially the cops and families in the vicinity of the crime. The more I planned the scene out in my head the more I liked the idea, but I felt like I don't have any authority on drugs in general and making a film with that as its centerpiece would be inaccurate.
Instead I decided to just make it a very incompetent group of people, and have the actors just overact anyway. This makes sense considering New Zealand has never had a proper serial killer and it would be utter chaos if there were to be one. Of course I'll be playing this up a lot in my film.
The idea I had was never for a standalone short film, instead as a feature or even longer format narrative. For the project we have to make something that is short form though, and since I came up with no other idea before the hand in date for my proposal I just decided to go with the same idea and say that it's just one scene or excerpt.
I had thought about this before, specifically last year when a number of third year film students produced trailers for their third year projects instead of full short films. The idea with these were that they could use the trailers as a teaser for a longer narrative and entice producers with the concept/tone of what they've produced. I don't think this really worked, for one the trailers weren't very good trailers, and two, they felt very small scale and were (in my mind) misrepresentative of what a feature length movie would actually look like.
Back then I already thought that they should have just produced one good scene from their film each, this achieves the same results in providing a good idea of what the feature would be like as well as entice producers. Making one scene also means it wouldn't be that weird to have it set in just one location with a small crew.
So for mine I've decided to just make the opening scene of my film.
I don't know how well I communicated this in the actual presentation since the questions people asked indicated to me that they weren't sure what format my film would exactly take the form of.
I have a very particular idea in my head of how the scene should play, and the tone and feel that it should have. In the presentation the best that I could do was just explain what it would look like to people and describe it in simple terms - such as a comedic subversion of the genre.
Choosing one main emotion/idea such as chaos was a good idea I think as it really helped communicate what I was going for and will inform a lot of how I make the film itself.
The scene as it is opens with a soccer field, it's a fade in most likely, and we slowly zoom into a corner of the field where a hedge lays. It becomes very soon apparent that there is something laying there, while it is still hard to tell a ball soon hits it and reveals to be the body of a young girl. A boy comes over the reclaim the ball and stops when he sees what he hit, fade out again into title (?).
The opening is very slow and I think takes a lot of inspiration from the South Korean movies I am using as my artist models. It is realistic, grounded, and I imagine it without any music, just the sound design of the kids playing. I say in this slide I want to stylistically go for more fun and colourful camerawork (something like The Lovely Bones in my mind), but this is very reserved and steady. Zooming in and out is something I plan on incorporating as a technique though, to show whether they are getting closer to solving the crime or further away. It's just an idea at the moment though.
The rest of the scene is the real meat of what I want to do, we start with a detective in the bathroom, he's talking to someone on the phone (his significant other most likely) and displaying his frustration and boredom with the job, illustrating that he's overall just unhappy with his position and job. He says that he's "tired of this place and these people", an emotion I'm sure everyone can relate to. I want him to describe it as utter chaos and then go ahead and have that come true.
He walks out to where the body is and while the specifics have yet to be decided upon I want the scene to play out like a murder investigation usually does but with complete incompetency displayed by the police force. The example I used in my presentation was like how there are too many people on set sometimes, it feels crowded, there's a lot of miscommunication and everything takes ten times longer to do than they should. In the film there will be too many cops and stuff around, as well as bystanders and the victim's family and yet the forensics team is late to set, people are close to the body and all types of other shenanigans.
My idea is to simulate chaos with people just falling over each other and a thousand different things happening at once.
I did a quick breakdown of my time frame, I simply looked at when what was due and built this around that. It's very rough and not nearly as detailed as what I saw in some of the other people's presentations but it helps me a bit and I think does what it was intended to.
I used these as my practitioners for two reasons:
1) The way the characters in these films, especially those by Bong Joon-ho, react to their environment and peers and the physical comedy that arises from that is something that directly inspired the vision I have for my own work.
This clip demonstrates what I mean, it's a sad scene in theory but the way its executed makes it funny:
I read these out pretty much as they are written here, obviously there are other things to consider (like transport and catering, like everyone else mentioned), considering the time limit I didn't think these were worth going over and stuck just with the ethical stuff - which I feel are more interesting to discuss.
A big consideration that I failed to mention was that I will be using a young girl as the victim - the ethical and legal problems this brings up are countless but you can fill in the blanks yourself. Hitting her in the head with a soccer ball is also problematic. Okay the whole thing is problematic, I'll see how it goes.
I have lots of reason to explore this idea and I feel that this section was one of the strongest in my presentation.
One of the big reasons I want to explore this subject matter is because I think murder mysteries and crime dramas are a very good genre for small time filmmakers to use. Like horror it's low budget but interesting and can usually accumulate quite a large audience. One of the big skills I need is to work with a large cast, this is something that I've always desired to see and something that other student films rarely, if ever, explore.
The thing I like about my idea is that there is very little pressure on the actors to deliver good performances, it's comedic and I'll probably even have them overact, There also isn't a lot of pressure on each because it is an ensemble thing, this will hopefully result in a fun set the likes of something like Guy Ritchies' films.
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I only did this hours before the presentation delivery and decided on the idea only the night before, during this period of brainstorming I did have two other notable ideas though, but it has to be said that neither work in the short form format.
1) Kiwi exploitation heist thing
I was watching Good Time (2017) and wondered what kind of NZ film I could make that is similar to that in execution. I had half an idea and combined it with an older half idea and came up with something that might work for a film.
The old idea was how the organised crime community in New Zealand might operate. This idea originally originated when I thought about how small the NZ film industry really is and how weird it is that we can be one or two people away from some of the biggest names like Taika or Peter Jackson.
I crafted a small scene in my head which left some strands for potential ways a story could go. This scene was a simple get together at someone's house like you would find anywhere in NZ, but the small gathering of people here were all criminals and the main character finds how easily he is connected to some of the biggest faces of crime in NZ.
The new idea came from the pace and structure of Good Time combined with pure exploitation: a heist movie (in New Zealand) where the thing they have to steal is a kiwi bird.
So the story would go as follows:
- On a job
The movie starts with a classic getaway driver situation where we meet the main character and he has to prove himself by fleeing the scene of the crime and getting his associates out of there (e.g Drive, Baby Driver / both of which I think steals this from The Driver), the twist of course being that it's in little old New Zealand.
- After Party (meeting buyer)
A small gathering of criminals celebrating a job well done, the main character meets someone who either knows or themselves buy exotic animals and then illegally sell them to certain rich individuals. Kiwis are of course very valuable and the park close to our protag has one of those.
- Heist Planning
- Heist Execution
- Selling and sale gone wrong, maybe (?)
The ending I'm still very unsure about, but I think it's a good foundation that provides a lot of freedom for where the plot could possibly go.
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All the ideas I had for this project are rooted in the crime genre, I think this is because what I mentioned before about its similarities to horror, but also I think because it's automatically more interesting than just a drama. It's true that putting a gun in a story doesn't immediately make it better or more interesting but for us, where we are and what people generally produce here, I think making a crime thing is a good idea to not only stand out but also engage people.
As demonstrated by South Korea this is also a great genre with which to kick-start a film industry.
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2) Killer VS Killer thing
The other idea I also got from watching another movie, specifically I Saw the Devil - one of those films I still ended up mentioning in my presentation.
In that film the two opposing characters fight in a very violent way, that at times reminded me of the torture porn genre. I thought it would have been cool if they took the idea even further and went all out with it, so I formulated an idea of my own (kind of) that would be able to fully embrace this.
I needed a setup that would allow me to have to characters engage in a form of combat that involved torture porn techniques, so of course I thought of films like Saw and Seven. Here's the logline as it stands now:
Two serial killers with methods and motivations akin to those in Saw and Seven start a relationship when the police mistake their crimes to be the same case, they soon realize they have very different outlooks on life (and death) and engage in a torture porn based form of mortal combat.
I think structure wise I'll have to play it off like a subversion of a rom-com thing for the first half, and have the two turn against each other during the second half, with it going full action in the last third.
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