Ideas
My ideas for this project have been going through many different iterations, mainly due to the challenges of Covid Restrictions. As I discuss in my Covid Effects Section, I am very aware not only of the various and varying Covid Restrictions and uncertainty especially regarding when changes could happen in either direction, but also the importance of keeping my College Group of 6 of us (90%Bloopers) safe from Covid so that we can all complete our Year 2 FMPs, especially the filming since that is an element that becomes more challenging for any of us who end up having to self-isolate.
When I started this UAL course, one of the things that attracted me to it was the Year 2 FMP. I loved the idea of being able to take all the knowledge and self-discovery from the previous 2 years and crafting it into a film that I really wanted to make, rather than being told what film to make.
Covid has certainly made that a challenge. Over the 2 years I have played around in my mind, and in discussion with others in my group, about different ideas.
First Idea (before my Proposal)
One thing that me and my 90%Bloopers Group would have loved to do, is each write, film, direct and edit one part of a larger film. We would each have been cast and crew for the others. This would have been a great opportunity to demonstrate our teamwork which is a great strength of ours. We all know that we are all reliable. We learnt the importance of that in our first Year 1 project, due to others not being so reliable. We similarly learnt the importance of professionalism. I discuss this in more detail in my 90%Bloopers Section. This would have been a great project for us all to demonstrate what we have learnt and how we have developed over the course.
However, it would have needed a great deal of planning, which, in itself, isn’t a problem. And it wouldn’t be a problem if Covid wasn’t a “Thing”. However, the uncertainty of Covid meant that we didn’t know how much we would be able to be in College after Easter, one of us was only allowed to go to the College location, not any other places, due to family members shielding, and we would be limited in the variety of locations that we could use under Covid restrictions. It just seemed to be asking for problems. I’m quite happy problem solving, but, as I have said elsewhere, I think it is more sensible to work with the Covid restriction and build contingency into our projects. So, we all decided to save that project for a time with less, or hopefully no, Covid.
Second Idea (before my Proposal)
My next idea, that I would have loved to do, was a film using lots of different camera movement. My Year 1 FMP was a Mark Kermode style documentary about how directors use camera movement in films to make the audience feel what the director wants them to film. Before Covid hit everywhere, I had planned on doing a short Fiction Film actually using camera movement rather than a documentary about it. It was going to be based on a chase scene that I could see in my head. However, last year, all the Covid restrictions over our Year 1 FMP period about how far you could (or couldn’t) go from home made that idea impossible. I was limited in cast and crew to my parents. They are both extremely supportive, and were cast and crew to my documentary, but I really couldn’t see them doing a chase scene. Nor could they. Hence why I changed my idea to a documentary.
I learned loads about camera movement, due to my extensive research, and last summer I was planning on making my original idea of a chase scene using extensive camera movement for this year’s Year 2 FMP. At the beginning of Year 2, people were hopeful that Covid would all be over by now. We were shown a distinction level Year 2 FMP by Samuel Sellers, in which he had made a homemade dolly to get some of his camera movement. I was very keen to try to make one myself. I also was looking forward to going to a Filming Equipment Show to try out camera gimbals and stabilizers with a view to buying one so I could do smooth camera movement. I had been doing lots of research into them and was narrowing down my choices. But over Christmas it became obvious that none of that was going to be possible. Far from getting better, the Covid situation was so bad that not only were we not in College, as no one in the UK was, but it was actually getting worse. Nobody really knew what was happening, so at this point I decided I should start to try to plan something within Covid Guidelines.
Idea Problem Solving
At this point I decided that to solve the problem of what to do for my Year 2 FMP under Covid Restrictions I would need to do some proper brainstorming, really trying to think about things that would otherwise “be outside the box” for me, but that would work within Covid Restrictions.
To start with, I made a list of things that I like doing and that I would like to demonstrate in my Year 2 FMP:
I made a second list of particular additional new skills that I have leant over this course that I particularly want to incorporate into my Year 2 FMP:
I kept brainstorming ideas, but I wasn’t finding anything that felt right. Then, shortly after the Christmas Holidays, I had a group interview for a BFI Film Academy Short Course. It was a Zoom Interview. We were split into groups and put in 2 breakout rooms of about 15-20 people, with one of the interviewers, to brainstorm a short film idea, which we would pitch to the rest of the group later. The brief was that it had to only contain 2 characters and be set in one location. About 4 of us suggested ideas. Mine was a comedy idea, of 2 incompetent robbers trying to rob a location and making a mess of it. The other 3 were moody, thriller style films. After discussing what we could do with each of our ideas, our interviewer picked one of the other candidates to choose which idea our group would put forward. The interviewer actually said that it was refreshing to have a comedy suggestion since they didn’t often get comedy ideas suggested, and she that liked my idea. My idea didn’t get chosen by the candidate choosing though. But it really got me thinking about comedy.
Comedy Drama Twists
I realised that all the film projects that I have done so far on this course include a twist of some kind, usually a comedic one. For instance, in my “Poker Hand” short film I have one of the 2 Poker players being dealt UNO cards, and winning. My “Toast” advert involved a James Bond style Spy, fighting his way through a bunch of bad guys to deliver a silver briefcase containing 2 slices of delicious looking … toast. I like a comedic twist, and started thinking that this could be the start of a Year 2 FMP idea.
I kept thinking about my “incompetent robbers” idea. Our interviewer had introduced the exercise by saying that due to Covid we could only have 2 actors, hence that brief. Shortly after this interview, in late January, I spent just over a week as a Runner on a feature film production for the Director Damian Power. (TOWIE, Made in Chelsea). I had met him not long before the first lockdown, in January 2020, when I had the opportunity to shadow him for 2 days on a “proof of concept” piece that he was filming, using our College as a location. I had had a great 2 days, and was able to get involved, for example holding the boom mic during filming. Damian had remembered me and contacted me to ask if I would like to be part of a small crew he was putting together to film a feature film based on 2 cousins who are trying to make a film about the Big Cats of Buckinghamshire. I was delighted. It did mean that I had to decline the BFI offer, but there is next year for that. I was very excited to be asked to be a Runner, and College were very supportive too.
What was particularly interesting, and relevant to my Year 2 FMP is that Damian explained that, like the BFI interviewer, he was taking the Covid situation and using it as a challenge, to write a script with only 2 main actors and with a small crew. He could see benefits to this, for instance it would be much quicker (and hence cheaper) to film. It would be easier to keep it Covid Safe with a smaller cast and crew, on average we were about 6 cast/crew.
It made me look at my “incompetent robbers” idea, with just 2 actors to see if I could turn it into a short comedic drama. Then over February half term I took part in a number of webinars from BFI Future Film Festival. One particularly interesting webinar was by the Comedy writer Hannah George and was called “Writing for Comedy”.
Hannah George
After this webinar, I decided that I wanted to try to develop my Comedy Drama idea of the two incompetent robbers further.
Two Incompetent Robbers
As a result of my research so far, my favourite Robbers Idea was to have them robbing a Museum.
I did lots of research into this, films such as The Thomas Crown Affair (1999) with Pierce Brosnan and lots of YouTube short films such as STUPID ROBBERS (2018) and Bad Burglars | Surprise Party (2014).
I got very excited about this idea, I settled on having the robbers try to steal a valuable James Bond original trilby hat prop. My research had shown me that the steel-rimmed hat that Oddjob wore in “Gold Finger” sold at Christies Auctioneers in 1998 for £62,000 so it is feasible that an original “James Bond” hat from a movie would be valuable and worth stealing.
From my research, I could see that it was a feasible story to tell. It had a good story arc, with the start introducing the audience to the robbers in a “reveal” type way, setting up their characters as one slightly less incompetent than the other, lots of opportunities for little “conflict” incidents, a “climax” in “will they or won’t they get the hat?”, then just when the audience thinks the robbers have finally been successful, the twist is that they stole the wrong hat, enforcing the message that “crime doesn’t pay”
It had lots of good shot potential and I could already envisage what I would do with the editing. For example, my idea for the final shot is that as the robbers realise they have the wrong hat, the screen colouring changes to look like it is on a security monitor, then we pull back to see a security guard’s feet up on a table and that he is holding a large carton of popcorn and saying “What a bunch of idiots” indicating that he has been watching the whole comedic drama unfold. Then we see his face as he laughs the robbers. The final twist is that as the robbers walk off this screen, dejected, the guard sees someone else, a COMPETENT robber, quickly overcome the security measures and steal the hat. The last words of the film are “oh SHI-” it gets cuts off before the end of the word, but the audience know what it would be.
This was going to be my Year 2 FMP film.
However, just before the Proposal deadline, I had to drop this idea, due to total uncertainty about how many days we would have in College after Easter making it infeasible.
I was devastated. But I picked myself up, looked at what I’d done, and began some heavy-duty problem solving.
Where do I go from here?
I have written in my Journal about how I problem solved this issue and came up with the idea of a series called “The Wrong Hat” from seeing the BBC 2 series Inside No.9 (2014). I have also written about the various ideas I came up with for the series and which one I chose.
My Final Idea
It is a Time Travel story and it has a similar story arc to the part of Back to The Future Part II (1989) where future Biff takes a book with all the sporting results in for the last 50 years back to past Biff so that past Biff can bet on all these sporting results and get very rich.
In my film, the trilby hats are the Time Travel machines.
It is set in the wood right by my house.
My idea is that in a similar way, a future Sam (Sam F1) is fed up of being broke, so he travels back to give present Sam (Sam P) the lottery numbers for a future lottery draw, in the hope that he can change the future, win the lottery and get very rich (£150 Million). Being a comedy, the future was changed, but it obviously doesn’t go according to plan.
So next we see second Sam from the future (Sam F2) who has obviously been able to buy some more expensive clothes, we assume due to the lottery win, but then he lost all the money because it was such a big win that he was a target for robbers. To add insult to injury, one of the robbers was killed in his house and he got sued for all his money, so he is broke again. So he wants to try to change the future by giving a different set of lottery numbers to still get money but not as much (only £2 Million this time).
Again, he does change the future and wins this lottery, but unfortunately dies. Anna, a friend of Sam’s, comes back from the future (again with a different trilby on) to tell Sam P this and to take the lottery numbers away so no one gets hurt.
Then yet another Sam (Sam F3) comes back, this time he is dressed exactly the same as Sam P, implying that he is from a much nearer future in time, except he has a multicoloured trilby on, He has come back just to stop Sam P from picking up the stick that the previous Sam’s were using to put on top of the pieces of paper with the lottery numbers on. Sam F3 warns Sam P not to pick it up or he’ll get a splinter. But Sam P picks it up anyway.
I still have to work out the final scene and conclusion, but it revolves around a mysterious stranger who’s face we never see, who drops the same multicoloured trilby that the last Sam, Sam F3, was wearing. I want to leave the ending a bit open, so that the audience can make their own conclusions, but it still has to be a satisfactory ending, with a twist. I will work on that.
Another thing is that all the Sam’s will be played by the same actor. This gives me a great opportunity to experiment in my filming and editing with having one actor on screen twice at the same time. I am researching how to do that, and I plan on doing some test filming and editing to research how best to film to enable me to edit 2 of the same actor on screen at the same time.
I need to flesh the script out more, but the premise is that the trilby hats are the time travel devices. I am pleased with this idea, and actually I feel that it the best out of all the ideas I have considered here with the most potential for creating an entertaining, comedic film, whilst also allowing me to demonstrate what I have learnt over this course and what I have researched and learnt specifically for my Year 2 FMP.