Brainstorming!

Hey guys! As you heard from my last post, Nick and I met up yesterday and began throwing some ideas to one another. From the start, we learned that we are both want to create an alternative narrative/nonlinear film, essentially meaning the some scenes wouldn’t be placed in order. We used the app “Notes” on our iPhones to sketch out a few of our ideas.

An example of a nonlinear film. This is a draft of how the film, Eternal Sunshine is laid out.

We like the idea of making the viewer think in order to full understand the story, instead of typical films that usually spoon-feed the story to the viewer. Funny enough, we started talking about some genres and the main one we both liked was the Psychological Thriller genre. If you haven’t been following me for a while, you may not understand that this is also the same genre in which I used to create my film opening last year for AICE Media Studies AS! Be sure to check out my film opening from last year :) 

Like I was saying before, Nick had a list of a few ideas he’s thought of over time and as he started telling me each idea, I would add onto it or come up with a few different concepts. It all started with the idea of “stuck in repeat”. This could either mean that the viewer feels as if the film is being replayed due to a nonlinear storyline or the actual characters themselves are stuck in some sort of warped time zone where they are constantly repeating their actions. This was the first idea that Nick told me about and the idea he had was that it followed a male figure who killed someone. The first and last scenes of the film would be the same, however the rest of the film is used to develop the story, and at the end, the viewer realizes the male figure is the one who was killed. Shown below is a sketch of the layout for the film. The yellow circle represents the connection between the first and last scene.

As we were discussing this, we thought that this “stuck in repeat” idea is typically leads to a death within a film and we wanted to do something that hasn’t been seen before. We discussed creating a more light-hearted version of the stuck in repeat storyline but we couldn’t come up with any ideas on the spot so we moved onto the next idea.

The second main concept Nick had was surrounding the idea of ignorance is bliss. Essentially, the story would follow a young man/woman who was diagnosed with Alzheimer's disease from a young age. However, they become more content as their memories fade when they age. I really liked this idea and as we continued to discuss this type of film, we began to think of how we might be able to tie in this idea with the first one of “stuck in repeat”. We thought of showing a person’s growth and development of this disease over their lifetime and connecting the first and last scenes together. 

We kept talking about the ignorance is bliss idea and we began relating it back to the film, Momento. Within Momento, the black and white scenes were in chronological order and the scenes in color were played in the reverse order. Then I thought of creating a parallel structure of Nick’s idea of the person with Alzheimer's disease. As shown below, we could alternate scenes between the young and older versions of that person and tie in that idea of being content as their memories faded at the end.

Although these ideas aren’t fully put together, these 2 main ideas helped us come up with numerous alternate takes on them which opened up our optioned even more. As of now, we are still undecided as to which idea we want to use as our short film but I liked our thought process. Comment down below which idea is your favorite! 

                                                                                                                    ~rtmedias