Alternative History Rethought...

As I continue to try and film, I increasingly feel like the theme of my movie might be too melodramatic. I've been filming scene ideas for another storyline, which takes on the idea of creating an opposite world where we operate the most basic parts of our lives completely differently.
A couple different scene ideas:

Beginning with the idea of someone being born and automatically put into a box.
Switch to sitting in a classroom, all the way up to college, and then have a line of people come out to receive their diplomas, all with boxes on their heads, each receiving an "educated" stamp on their box-forehead.
A family sits in the living room, watching TV. There's a box around the TV, boxes on all of their heads.
Someone sits down, takes off the box, and starts to cut it apart, and put it back together in a different way.

The world turns topsy-turvy.

Sounds work completely different. As someone walks down the stairs, it sounds like splashing water. Dropping the keys on the counter, it makes the sound of breaking glass, etc.
People eat with the table upside-down. They also eat with their hands.
Everyone takes showers outside in the rain.
Plucking the guitar strings, each one makes the sound of a woman's voice.
Instead of everyone sitting down in the living room to watch TV, they hang up a different painting everyday in the same spot on the wall and observe it.

The person who originally took apart the box reverts back to it. Instead of trying to make a completely different shape, the person tries to make something completely different out of the box. They paint it, cut holes in it, and parts to it, but the original box shape remains the basis.


I'm having a harder time developing this subject to what I want it to be. With parts of it, I feel I have the same problem as with my haikus - they all point to an interesting concept, but don't delve farther than that. I think the overall storyline has a lot of depth and meaning to it, but its individual parts still need to be developed...

I've been filming scenes for both ideas, and plan on taking the one I don't use for the 3rd project, developing it, and using it as footage for my fourth film.

Alternative History

I've been thinking about assignment three continuously since it was assigned and rented a camera this weekend to do some sketch recording. I've got several scenes I've been experimenting with and am centralizing the story around reversing bad experiences with intimacy, depression and phases of self-inflicted withdrawal.
I'd like to delve deep into this one, turning it into almost a repentance, and fiddle a lot more with various concepts of symbolism and allusion.
A few different shots I have planned out:

- someone repeatedly taking pills, showing a daily routine. I want to reverse the footage so that the person is spitting them out, until a sink fills entirely with pills, and I shoot them spilling out onto the floor.

- a woman is sitting on a chair, and a person begins cutting off her clothes with scissors. Her sweater, her blouse, her bra, until she's naked

- a man's hands reaching up around a woman's body, starting at her hips and going up around her stomach. There will be a trail of black, dirty smudges from where he put his hands, using soot or some kind of residue.

- a woman pulling an orange or an apple from her skirt, cutting it up, distributing the slices to faceless people until she has nothing left

- the woman is standing under an umbrella, crying, and lifts up the umbrella to look up under the rain, and the raindrops blend in with the tears to make them indistinguishable

- glass filling with liquid, over and over again being dranken, and filling up again

- blurred shots and in and out blackness, walking up stairs, suddenly in another spot

- woman cleansing herself, water pouring over her, down her face and body

- she's crying, and a man kisses her tear

- she wears cut up clothes all sewed up

- she takes a whole apple/orange and eats it to herself

Haven't experimented with sound yet, have mostly brainstormed about video shots... so that's the next step.