A Science Fiction FIlm

Pre-Production

The second project given to us was to create a short film (4-6 minutes long) on a genre that was pre-selected for us. This film also had to be based around the plot or ideas of one of 5 popular fairy tales or children’s novels. The 5 novels are Little Red Riding Hood, The BFG, The Three Little Pigs, The Emperor’s New Clothes and Rumpelstiltskin. We started our project by doing some research into each of these and came up with some key ideas and plot details that were associated with them.

·         The Emperor’s New Clothes: Vanity, Trickery, Embarrassment

·         Three Little Pigs: Survival of the Fittest, Evolution of Thought, Brain over Brawn

·         Red Riding Hood: Impersonation, Karma, Naivety, Contrasting areas of danger and safety

·         The BFG: Secrecy, Self Sacrifice, Prejudice

·         Rumpelstiltskin: Deception/Lies, Consequences, Climatic Ending, Gambling, Desperation, Social Hierarchy

After this we started to come up with some basic plot ideas. I put forward the idea of a synthetic eye that had gained a consciousness. This eye was implanted in a person and you would see that person’s life from its perspective. This could have been related to any of the stories as the host would have been one of the characters from a story. It is called A-EYE. Our next idea was a combined effort and stemmed from the story of the BFG. Using the idea of dreams being used to convey a message or to tell a story we decided to put the main character inside a dream. We also wanted to go classic science fiction and this meant we definitely had to have a robot. The idea formed into a story about a boy who dreamed of being a robot. He was miserable in real life but had all the power in his dreams. This idea appealed the most to all of us and we began to brainstorm ideas.

We came up a three piece story which developed his confidence and power in his dreams. He will start in his room bringing to life inanimate objects to be his friends and communicate with him. In his next dream he will have full control of all the elements of the dream being able to move all the objects in the room with his power and be able to move with speed not possible of a normal being and in the final dream he plays round in his dream teleporting from place to place. All these things we would consider to be science fiction. In between the dreams you get a glimpse into his real life to see the stark contrast between his two realities.

With the story set we drew up a basic story board and script and headed out to take some pictures of shot angles and locations for the movie. After this was done we decided it was time to move onto production.

Oh and we also made the suit