Congrats on developing an original premise - lots of potential here. My first instinct is that your current treatment is a little too complex for a 1-2 minute short, in so much as you've got a lot of set-up in act one and multiple characters etc. Your principle task is to get everything set up asap and find ways to establish information speedily. I don't think you've got enough screen time to go through the selection process at the beginning: I think your film needs to throw us right into the action; I've got some ideas as to how you might do that - for example, watch this opening scene from Lock, Stock and 2 Smoking Barrels - really it's the short bit at the end, where the characters are in slow-motion and a voice-over introduces them:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wSodvRnD3Qc
Take a look this too - the way the characters are 'popped out' of the action as we learn their names:
https://vimeo.com/31337415
I'm also thinking about this convention from the Indiana Jones films themselves:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5TY5Fp6O5iM
My broad point is that you could accelerate everything by a combination of a voice-over.. "Meet Ant Jones! Adventurer Archeologist! His mission - to find the legendary restaurant etc..." plus a map-style overlay, suggestive of a long journey already undertaken, so you can get to the 'start' of the adventure with the vacuum cleaner sooner. It means thinking about a nice, punchy funny script, and thinking imaginatively about how you kick things off.
In terms of your ending - again, there's a level of complexity there and I can feel your running time struggling to meet those demands. I'm wondering if it might work better if the 'restaurant' is actually inside the hoover-bag itself (logically it would contain lots of hoovered up crisps, chocolate peanuts etc) - so just when we think all is lost, because our hero has been vacuumed up, there comes the moment when it's revealed he's found the restaurant after all. (If you were to go with the voice-over idea, your film could end with something like 'Coming Soon - "Ant Jones & The Secret XXXX" - i.e. the audience leaves the idea that there are continuing adventures to come...
In essence, you're making an action movie - so it's really important you think about how action movies work in terms of cameras and types of shots etc.
So - I think you need to identify the means to up the energy, speed and entertainment value of your great fun premise.
OGR 21/01/2016
ReplyDeleteHi Ian,
Congrats on developing an original premise - lots of potential here. My first instinct is that your current treatment is a little too complex for a 1-2 minute short, in so much as you've got a lot of set-up in act one and multiple characters etc. Your principle task is to get everything set up asap and find ways to establish information speedily. I don't think you've got enough screen time to go through the selection process at the beginning: I think your film needs to throw us right into the action; I've got some ideas as to how you might do that - for example, watch this opening scene from Lock, Stock and 2 Smoking Barrels - really it's the short bit at the end, where the characters are in slow-motion and a voice-over introduces them:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wSodvRnD3Qc
Take a look this too - the way the characters are 'popped out' of the action as we learn their names:
https://vimeo.com/31337415
I'm also thinking about this convention from the Indiana Jones films themselves:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5TY5Fp6O5iM
My broad point is that you could accelerate everything by a combination of a voice-over.. "Meet Ant Jones! Adventurer Archeologist! His mission - to find the legendary restaurant etc..." plus a map-style overlay, suggestive of a long journey already undertaken, so you can get to the 'start' of the adventure with the vacuum cleaner sooner. It means thinking about a nice, punchy funny script, and thinking imaginatively about how you kick things off.
In terms of your ending - again, there's a level of complexity there and I can feel your running time struggling to meet those demands. I'm wondering if it might work better if the 'restaurant' is actually inside the hoover-bag itself (logically it would contain lots of hoovered up crisps, chocolate peanuts etc) - so just when we think all is lost, because our hero has been vacuumed up, there comes the moment when it's revealed he's found the restaurant after all. (If you were to go with the voice-over idea, your film could end with something like 'Coming Soon - "Ant Jones & The Secret XXXX" - i.e. the audience leaves the idea that there are continuing adventures to come...
In essence, you're making an action movie - so it's really important you think about how action movies work in terms of cameras and types of shots etc.
So - I think you need to identify the means to up the energy, speed and entertainment value of your great fun premise.