Film Ideas

January 15th 2018

This year for our Year 14 5 minute short film, my group and I have decided that we want to do something very different from what we had done last year. Last year, our film was a homosexual romance film which highlighted the difficulties of relationships - however, this year we want to completely switch it up and do something completely different from that. Originally, we wanted to film a 5 minute short on a really shocking and chilling idea, like a school shooting, and it seemed like a great idea but ultimately it would be really hard to sort out in terms of location and acting. It was definitely a big idea which would be difficult to portray in the space of 5 minutes, so we decided to look at other approaches for us to bring a twisted and chilling scenario into the film.

We're looking at lots of different stories to do with murder that we could incorporate into our film, to add a really shocking plot line. Serial killers seem to be the most common theme of a lot of the murder stories we've seen, which is making me more curious to look into different serial killers. We're currently looking at many high profile killers, such as Ted Bundy, The Zodiac Killer, Edmund Kemper and Harold Shipman. The stories are really fascinating and crazy to think about, so I really think they'd be interesting to incorporate into a film, or even make up our own serial killer and base it around that.

At the minute, we're bouncing around lots of ideas in terms of genre and plot line, so firstly we're trying to find a decent idea for us to go off of. I'm liking the idea of an interview style, serial killer documentary type of film - kind of like the Netflix Original 'Mindhunter'. It's a show basically surrounding 2 FBI agents who attempt to catch and understand serial killers by studying their damaged psyches. Along the way, the agents pioneer the development of modern serial-killer profiling. (Sidenote - Edmund Kemper [one of the serial killers we had researched] actually features in the show, obviously not the real Edmund Kemper, but his character is one of the serial killers who are investigated in the show!!) The show features a lot of scenes where the agents interview these high profile serial killers who are currently facing time in jail, and ask them lots of questions and eventually try to find common areas between the killers - such as how they were treated in their childhood etc.

 I'm really fond of this idea, it's really interesting and I feel like it would really draw the audience in if we tried to recreate this type of idea - speaking from experience too as I was definitely hooked on the show 'Mindhunter' within one episode, so I'd say its a pretty interesting topic. Not to mention that lots of people seem to be instantly drawn to shows/documentaries/podcasts about serial killers because it really is so odd and something so many people can't understand, so naturally we're drawn to these type of topics because we want to understand how someone could do such a thing as killing other people so horrifically. I think it would be a really smart idea to take advantage of this curiosity within us and make our short film about that because it instantly catches the audience's attention because it's such a tabu subject.

We're more than likely going to stick with this topic idea but we're still exploring genres so there's still plenty more to think about regarding our plot.