Short Proposal

Tag line: There are no boundaries to a child’s imagination.

Log line:  The exciting journey into an insight of a 5 year old child’s imagination, as they discover their own magical world hidden through their bedroom wall, only at night-time.

Scene synopsis

A young child sits on her bedroom floor, surrounded by picture filled storybooks. Tired, she rubs her eyes and starts to tidy the books up to carry them towards a large bookcase in the corner of the room. She stands on her tiptoes to try her hardest to reach the top shelf, but a sudden noise – a clatter - makes her jump, and she drops one of the books. She sits down on the floor again and finds she has knocked a photograph off the shelf. The picture shows her as a baby, in her mother’s arms.  She turns the photograph over, looking instead at the open book next to it.  She stands up and steps onto the book with both of her feet. She closes her eyes.

We see her faintly from a muddy view underneath her feet, as if through the eyes of the storybooks open page. She takes a step forward and wraps her arms around her pyjama top for warmth. She looks around her. The dark sky gradually turns to a magical blue, and stars start to appear and sparkle. She smiles, noticing muddy footprints carving out a path in front of her. There does not seem to be anyone else around in the woods that surround her.  Shivering, she skips ahead, following the footprints which lead her to a door. She tries to knock but the door disappears, revealing a figure of the child’s mother standing in its place.  

Introduction to Module Brief

This morning's seminar was an introduction to the Creative Project Realisation module, which involves exploring and experimenting with different ways to approach Production Design on a film set. The brief requires us to make a short film piece on the topic of 'the uncanny', working together as a group to plan, design and build a set and creatively solve any problems that arise in doing so. The actual film does not require a narrative, but instead the focus is on understanding the creative side to the production, and making decisions as a group to problem solve and experiment creatively.

I am looking forward to getting started with this module and putting a lot of effort into planning and designing the set, as this is an area I have never really explored much previously when working on productions. I like the idea that the focus of this brief is to try new things and experiment creatively, instead of being assessed purely on the technical aspects which other modules on the course seem to rely more heavily on. I enjoy coming up with and developing creative ideas, and on other modules I have also found an interest in Producing, so to be able to do a module which is practical seems like it will be enjoyable as well as useful.

This week's seminar also involved trying out a short creative meditation exercise, which was supposed to help in getting into a creative mind-set. Although I had a basic idea before this, I did use the time to think about ways to develop my idea further and I found imagining being in a room to be useful, as I was able to fully explore the space I had initially thought of in more depth.

From this, I took away an idea that focuses on the theme of imagination, and visuals that could be representative of childhood. A lot of the examples we looked at of special effects and production design within this week's session seemed to be associated with fear in relation to being unsure if something was real or not. I thought about developing the idea of imagination further in a different way - exploring the imagination world of a child, the excitement in a belief something is real as opposed to the fear of it. A film that I thought about whilst trying to visualise this idea more clearly was Pan's Labyrinth (Dir. Guillermo del Toro, 2006.)