4. Generating ideas

This sheet had random visual stimuli for mise-en-scene and it's connection to genre and narrative. The first image, a large empty staircase, made me think of echoing music, the character/s in this would hear the music up the stairs and be intrigued or enchanted to look for the source. When looking at the third image, the misty forest, I first thought of why someone would go in, maybe to collect food, maybe to find ingredients for a spell, or to find someone who went in there before and didn't return. My second thought was what if someone was coming out? This lead me to think of changelings, the folklore surrounding them is interesting, and a changeling coming into a town to replace somebody, or maybe even a creature tries to join the town, but as they are from the woods, the people of the town don't let them.

The next image that gave me inspiration was the seventh, the use of light in a film can represent salvation or hope, but then I thought about what could be lighting these lamps. Fireflies could be in the glass, or fish that glow and swim about in the fish bowl held up high. The lamplighters in Victorian times, instead of going to light the lamps, could be going up to the lamps to feed the glowing fish within.

The last image that gave me any ideas was the chair. I questioned why it was empty, and thought that perhaps the person who would usually sit in the chair passed away, and the film's narrative would be someone who was close to them confronting their grief. This could be done by talking to the chair as if it had the person in it still, or maybe be started by a long shot of the chair.

Using Charts:

We wrote down random sets of two numbers from 1-5, and then looked at these charts. The numbers we had chosen provided us with which column and row our selected character, location, situation, object, and time it was set. The character I got is a 'Tiny Monkey', the location is a 'Lost Submarine', the situation is an 'Erupting Volcano', the object is a 'Gun', and the time is 'Soon'. This is an interesting combination but there are definitely some colours that I'm thinking of just from 'Lost Submarine', I would want it to use a lot of blues, with a little red in the characters or objects that are important. The submarine could be lost because a monkey was driving it, or perhaps they were transporting animals this way and a monkey got lose, creating mayhem. How a gun will enter the story I'm more unsure on, but it could just end up being a mention to add to a character or setting.

Story Idea:

In the near future a submarine is taking a journey to transport a large group of animals to another country, to be put in a zoo. However, there is a tiny monkey who didn't like the sound of being put in a zoo, so she fits through the bars of his cage and runs free throughout the submarine, with no one noticing her, as she is incredibly small. She makes her way through to the Captain's room, who is occupied by other things at the time, and steers the submarine off course. When the captain comes back to the room he is astonished that they are far from where they are supposed to be, and to his horror finds they are near an underwater volcano - not quite so planned by the monkey. He quickly runs to tell others about this erupting submarine volcano, but the submarine is too far under and the only thing that could trigger it to go up to the surface in time is a flaw in the machinery. So the monkey, feeling quite responsible for this disaster, sort of pipes up to inform the captain that he could cause the malfunction before the volcano does, so the captain shoots the machinery and the submarine goes rushing up to the top of the sea, away from the erupting volcano. Bill Murray would play the captain, because I've seen him in The Aquatic Life with Stephen Zissou, and the voice actor of the tiny monkey would be Anna Kendrick, as she has done voice acting in family films before.

    

The genre of this piece is probably a family film, as the plot is quite far-fetched, with a happy, and equally elaborate ending. It could work quite well as an animated feature, but I this a live-action piece with animated animals would work quite well, especially as there are more of these than fully animated films being released at the moment, e.g. Paddington.