The first topic mentioned was Dance. Abi and Dan had previously discussed this and thought that this subject could be portrayed in a visually appealing way, with a variety of different camera movements and angles. Also Abi has a friend who has recently acted with Tom Cruise, and who has dance experience, so we thought that this would work well. However, the premise: A girl who dances to express emotions or relive memories, seemed to be quite cheesy and we feared that the short film may turn into somewhat of a teen-dance film like Step-Up which is really not what we wanted, and so we carried on thinking of ideas.
The next idea was a personal account that my friend had told me previously. It started with him and his friends asking a homeless man to buy them alcohol when they were underaged, in return for money. My friend told me that one day he received a phone call from an unknown number and when he answered, somebody told him that a man would like to speak to him. The person on the other end of the phone was a nurse from the hospital that this homeless man was admitted to, and my friends phone number was the only one he had. He explained to my friend that he was very unwell- dying and asked if my friend could talk to him for a while.
I felt that this situation could be translated really well into a short film and that it would be a good starting point with which to build upon. Dan and Abi also found the story very interesting but pointed out that a lot of students' worked is based around the issue of homelessness and that it may be somewhat homogeneous to focus on this as well, and so we carried on discussing other ideas.
We outlined what we did and didn't want to do:
Dan mentioned that he is interested in intertextuality and thought that it might be interesting to include this in our idea. We all agreed that we would like our film to be quirky in parts and that the storyline shouldn't have too many aspects to it. A simple idea executed well would be better for the length of time that we have.
We all discussed the topics of Hoarding and thought that a character with this trait/illness could be perhaps quite interesting to depict. However, in terms of mise en scene this would be very complicated to execute. Following on from this, we discussed the idea of a person who collects photographs and then I suggested that perhaps the person could make up stories about the people in the photographs and pretend that they know them or tell others that they are their family. As a group we liked this idea and decided we'd go away and think about the idea's we'd discussed in more detail and write something for the next time we met up.
I tried to develop the "Photograph Collector" idea further by myself after the meeting. I thought that perhaps the main character could be a late-middle-aged woman who is very lonely and employs lots of people to come to her house (i.e. cleaner, electrician etc.) as an excuse for telling them about her fake "family" that she creates based on the photographs she's collected. I thought that perhaps the stories she tells about her family could change from person to person, and thought that perhaps one day, one of these people could find out or overhear this woman telling another person a completely different story about her "family". However, I felt that there wasn't enough conflict in this story line: why would the electrician/cleaner/plumber care that she was lying? Also, aside from being lonely, what is this lady's motivation for fabricating all of these stories? I thought of questions to ask the rest of the group, and provided some suggestions, for when I next see them:
- Perhaps this woman couldn't have children/had miscarriage(s) and so imagines children are alive? Pretends the people in the photograph are her son/daughter/grandchildren?
- Does she/he have a partner? Maybe claims she is a widower but did have husband they just split?
- Is she/he the main character? Or someone who knows her/him?
- Perhaps she could love to buy things for imaginary grand children?
- Perhaps there could be a scene where she does arts and crafts with the child of her cleaner which would give way to nice aesthetic/visual shots.
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