After thinking about how I could go about making my idea, we were told to group up into our theme groups (e.g. Loneliness, Sorrow) and share our ideas, hoping to get feedback and potentially improvements to the project.
I volunteered to go first and shared my dream sequence idea with the group, who liked the idea a lot, but I still had my concerns with it, mainly showing that it is in fact a dream sequence and the unlikliness of a person getting their friend to wake up just to hand them a suicide note. There was also the difficulty of showing the loneliness in the first place if it's supposed to be set before the person suggestively killed themselves.
After voicing these concerns they were a little stumped at first as what to suggest, so I proposed the film being about a person who is already alone: a homeless person. This then sparked a tirade of ideas based on certain aspects of the script. after a short while the group had suggested some great ideas alongside my own and I finally had an idea I was ready to go with:
The main character is Unnamed, a homeless person, looks early 20's.
He see's a public pay phone ringing and decides to answer it.
he then walks to a location where he meets a well dressed, almost god-like person, same age, if they were to smile their teeth would sparkle. He hands our protagonist a nice-looking bag, it is clear there is something in the bag, maybe full of food.
After returning 'home' our protagonist is sat on a bench, obviously unhappy, sad even.
The bag is now a plastic shopping bag, and is empty.
What I like:
- Works very well with the theme loneliness.
- Ending is easier to understand as opposed to the previous one.
- Everything else, it just works well.
What I dislike:
- Some people may still not get what's going on.
So, to explain what's happened in the film further, our protagonist has lived on the streets for so long (safe to presume at least 6 - 12 months) that his mind isn't all there any more. He's seeing things that aren't actually happening such as the ringing phone, meeting the man, the bag of food. These things also suggest that what we are seeing are his desires: someone to talk to and food.
So the final question I had is: how do I subtly show what is real and what isn't? Since the film doesn't go back to show these and nor does it actually explain what's going on, I wanted to put something in for those who work out what is happening and to show that they're correct. I liked the idea, which I had a version of for my original idea, of hiding an object in the frame of every scene that isn't reality. For example: in the scene where the protagonist answers the phone an item will be in the frame also to show that this is a figment of the characters' imagination, an item that isn't blatantly there.
I thought of a black scarf, as this can symbolise the protagonists' desire for warmth.
So in the pay-phone scene the scarf can be hanging from a tree branch in the background, or on the top of the phone cover itself (discreetly though).
In the scene where he meets the god-like man, the man is actually wearing the scarf as part of his attire, but no attention is drawn to it.
I feel I have a solid idea to work with now.
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