The FULL Plot
Before I delve into the specifics of the opening scene, I want to present the greater plot of the film. Here it goes:
When attending a therapy session, a young woman, Alice, who has been dealing with terrible family trauma for some time, receives a series of mysterious phone calls, which effectively thrusts her into a time loop. Now, as she relives the same therapy session over and over again, Alice must find a way to get out of the time loop and figure out why she was put there.
For the film, I wanted there to be a lot of sci fi elements, that being the time loop, but I felt the need to include a lot more of the human elements, especially within Alice's character. It's never enough just to have cool sci fi effects. You have to care about the characters for those to even be cool.
With that plot summary from up above, there are still some other facets of the story I would like to touch on. For instance, the reason that Alice is in therapy is because of some issues she has with her mother. Now, what these issues are, I am not completely sure. Perchance, abandonment issues. Nevertheless, we are certain that the phone calls that Alice gets will have something to do with her mother, whether that be that her mother is the caller or something else (but it will probably be the former).
The Opening Scene
To create an opening scene based on this plot was a bit of a struggle for us, but I think we have create as structure that does a good job of doing several things: one, establishing character and two developing mystery. When we were conjuring up the idea, the main thing that we had to accomplish was establish she was in a time loop without it looking like a mistake.
So, how we decided to remedy this was to make the structure of the intro so that the protagonist along with the audience has to reconcile with the fact that she is in a time loop.
Above is a visual representation of the structure we came up with for how the time loop will work. So, the opening will begin towards the end of the therapy session, maybe there is ten minutes or so left. After a little while of talking, Alice gets a phone call. When she looks at the number, she does not recognixe it, so she hangs up. Her and the therapist talk for a little while longer, and then she leaves as usual. As she is about to get into the car, the phone rings again. The same number. She decides, to pick it up. Maybe it is important. Right as she picks up, a voice through the phone says something ominous, and just as she wants to say something, she finds herself appearing back in the therapists office, at the same time when she did not answer the call the first time. When she realizes what happens, she has some interesting dialouge with the therapist, and then runs out and starts essentially freaking out.
Okay, I understand that was a lot to digest. But, I think it makes a lot of sense. We get some good tme to be introduced to our main protagonist and we learn the conflict and get the audience roped into it. I understand that there could be some serious problems with the timing, but I'm hoping that as we write the script, we will get a better visualization of how long this will actually take to develop.
Personally, I have a lot of high hopes for this film intro. From the moment we started this project, I knew that to make it work we had to have a solid idea, and I think that is what this is. The main thing is not to be boring, and I fear that this is the exact opposite of boring.
And now for the movie quote of the day...
"I didn't expect to get so old." - Thelma, Thelma (2024)
No comments:
Post a Comment