Pre-Production Unit: Research - First Ideas Part 4: Grit Reborn

With my criteria set I needed to still come up with an idea that would fit these requirements.

I stuck with the drugs and crime route but this time thought of looking at the mental repercussions of doing that job.

This would then give the subconscious character a purpose: they can be a visual representation of the protagonists' emotions.

I began my messy brainstorming again noting anything down:

I thought of trust becoming a major part of the story to give it a psychological purpose. I thought of a tagline "Who can you trust?" which would feature on the poster and be posed to the audience as well as the protagonist. The problem I still had was the strong focus on the plot, for a film that's going to be around 30 minutes, a plot like the one described in the note above combined with a gradual psychological breakdown would just be far too big to fit into that short of a time. 

I was being too ambitious and needed to tone the story down to something more manageable.

I felt as though I was extremely close to a good idea; I just needed to pinpoint it down further. It was then that I suggested multiple characters and making it about them rather than an overall goal or story.

The ending is different to the final version but the plot is the same albeit with a couple of tweaks.

I was very happy with this new approach: I had the psychological aspects I was after along with a rather brain teasing story that would require thinking and possibly several re-viewings.

The ending changed based on my doubt towards the ending proposed above. I liked it for the ambiguity but I felt the 'twist' was a little too predictable and cheap. I decided to leave the ending for now and focus on tightening the story up, hoping that this would naturally give me an ending eventually. Instead, one day, my mum suggested the idea that the protagonist kills himself. She was aware of the plot and that all the characters were one person so she thought of Sean shooting Vision but it then cuts and shows only Vision lying on the floor dead. After playing the idea through I found that this idea worked very well with the film. Vision suddenly dying and then being the only character left in the room would create a conclusion but also enough ambiguity to make the audience think and actively work out what they have seen.

I altered it a little by going from a hard cut to instead having the camera tilt up after Sean shoots Vision: alloying a subtle edit on a single frame when the camera is pointed upwards to set up the next shot with Vision lying alone on the floor.

I'm glad my mum made this suggestion as I was struggling to find a way to end the film with a good combination of satisfaction and ambiguity. I honestly never came up with an idea similar to this!