Untitled Vampire Short :: Treatment

30Aug2006 [film]

• Immortals

Just uploaded a treatment to the ?film section. This is a story outline for a 15-minute short I'm writing this semester and plan on shooting in the first half of next year. Its broken down into scenes (by paragraph, more or less) and told in prose, meaning it sometimes doesn't give a very good idea of dialogue nor timing. And though the whole story is there, its still very incomplete; I plan on developing the missing aspects while I write out the screenplay. At the moment it remains Untitled. The main character's best friend (Sam) and Dr Jeunet (named, of course, for Jean-Pierre) remain ungendered. I tend to read gender-neutral characters as male, because it's real easy for me to relate to, but here I've made a deliberate attempt to not use any gendered references. I'm starting to read Sam as a girl, but there's the possibility (danger, even) of that bringing in unavoidable romantic complications (a fact I hate, and could go on about at length, but have to admit when writing a short film in which audiences have a very short amount of time to learn about a character).

The film is set in a world similar to that in The Journal of Paul Hunter, but it's supposed to be more real. Paul Hunter is set in a rather generic near-future city; this one takes place here and now. The difference, though, is that a lot more of this film takes place in Thom's head. Or at least, it's told in that style - lots of flashing, Thom getting headaches &c. Just that Thom sees what's really going on.

I wrote a short "pitching" paragraph to try summarise the film:

The film is about a man who believes that seemingly ordinary people are actually vampires who are fighting a secret war for the control of human society. He believes that his friend is in danger and that only he has the means to help his friend. He can only hope that doing so will free him from his nightmares.

There are two main goals at issue here (helping his friend and ridding himself of nightmares), and I'm not entirely sure how they're going to work together. That's something I'll have to work out as I write. The basics though: he achieves both goals; the question is: would you accept the cost involved in achieving them?