Ab - 01/12/12
Our First Film Proposal
This is our first film idea and proposal, including feedback from classmates:
Dead Men's Socks Proposal
Summary of Dead Men’s Socks
George Goffney is an old school detective. He has worked as a detective all of his working life and a few years earlier, cheated on his wife in order to get evidence for a case. When his wife left him, and took their daughter with her, George was at breaking point and attempted suicide.
Jump forward two years: George is in the morgue talking to his friend Ellie who has worked with him for a number of years. (Opening scene to the film). In conversation, Ellie tells George about the two bodies that were brought into the morgue that morning. One is Simon Stallone, a rich man, recently married to Eva Stallone. The other is Dan Mitchell, a poor boy who lives on the streets and in Oxford’s homeless shelter.
Ellie tells George she believes it is suicide but George becomes suspicious when he notices that they are each wearing one dark blue sock and one grey sock.
George talks to Kelly about the bodies as it is his case. Kelly is a young detective and is new to Oxford. Kelly disagrees with officers interfering with the job of pathologist’s in the forensic department and refuses to look at the bodies or listen; she believes it is best to wait for the paperwork to come through. She is blissfully ignorant, relying on computers and mobile phones.
George takes it upon himself to solve the mystery and visits Stallone’s house. When he arrives, his wife isn’t in but the maid is. She explains that the Stallone’s had recently married. She also points out that Simon Stallone never drove his car around Oxford for fear of it being damaged, so she calls a driver for him.
George goes to the gym to talk to Eva. She tells him her husband had been melancholy lately and she believes it was suicide. She is surrounded by ten large men who attend the gym for boxing. Other than herself, the only woman who works in the gym is a young receptionist.
George goes to the homeless shelter to talk to Dan’s father. The people in the shelter live in poverty, young children playing in tattered clothes with broken toys e.t.c. Dan’s father explains that Dan and himself run a small taxi service and his son went out onto a job and didn’t come back. (Driving Simon Stallone).
George goes back to the gym but this time Eva is on lunch. He calls all the men into Eva’s office and holds up a grey piece of paper to the men with the word Prison written in blue. He asks if any have been there and they all answer but one, Stephen.
George confronts Sven. He explains that when his daughter was younger, they believed she was colour blind. The nurse told him all about colour blindness including the different types. He explains how he realised that Stephen must have Triranopia, a colour blindness focusing mainly on the colours blue and black. He and Eva planned to kill Simon in the sauna and realised that Dan is in there too. (Dan and Simon had become close from Dan driving Simon around). He killed them both and had to redress them, not noticing the different colour socks, dressing them in each other’s socks.
George has Eva and Stephen arrested and explains to Kelly how he did it. He explains that sometimes it is not enough to just look at paperwork or at a laptop.
Our movie will be set in a world with no adults. Because of this, we will use teenage actors. We feel that using younger actors presents the idea that teenagers can solve complicated puzzles, no matter how young they are.
Length of Film:
We are a small production company and therefore the film will be approximately 1 hour long. It would be a short story, as we do not have the budget to do anything extreme.
Genre and target audience:
Our genre will be drama / crime - murder mystery as it is about a detective finding a killer. Our target audience would be mainly teenagers, as the acting will be done by teenagers of a similar age. However, anyone would enjoy the story as it is full of depth and gets the audience to really guess the ending.
Feedback:
We had to change the format of the file, as MPEG is not supported by blogger.
The main question in our feedback was 'why would you use teenage actors in your film?'
Our first response to this was that a no adult world shows that teenagers are just as capable to solve complex puzzles. Also, it is something different and interesting that is not usually done. Teenagers would become interested, as it is based in an 'all teenage world' and may possibly become more interested in the crime/mystery genre because of our film. One example that came to my mind was "Bugsy Malone" which used child actors to play gangsters. However, this is a comedy/musical and almost completely different from our idea. Teenage actors are the easiest to find as we can use or classmates and friends, and we would also be able to film in school and during school time. Overall, unfortunately, we decided that this element of our film idea was too big to just ignore. The use of teenage actors put the film at risk of looking clumsy and unprofessional and so we chose our other film idea to use for our opening scene. (See other Film Proposal post).
However, I feel that our first idea was important to mention, and that we did consider how to overcome this problem before we moved on to a new idea. This was a complete trial and error process, which we feel we overcame quite successfully.
