Idea Generation

I was put into group with Maureen, Alana and Callum to create ideas for short films with inspiration from poetry, photographs, newspaper articles, song lyrics and art.

The first idea that we came up with was inspired by the poem "infidelities". The poem was about a women collecting penny's from her husbands pockets and places them on the windowsill. When one day he comes in, takes the penny's and then uses them in a phone-box to make a call "he could not make from the house".

Our short film based on this was going to follow the poem closely. We would start by having shots portraying the them as a happy couple, eating together and her folding his trousers and taking the change out of his pockets and placing them on the windowsill. The film would then have shots of the coins with voiceover from their perspective feeling guilty about how they will be spent. The coins gather dust, which reflects their guilt.

Eventually some of the coins are taken up by the husband and the camera cuts to a phone-box in the street at twilight. The camera takes up voyeuristic positions of the phone-box as the husband turns up, looks around and enters the phone-box, before the camera fades to black.

Our second idea was inspired by the lyrics of the song "Mr Tambourine Man" by Bob Dylan and an ABBA song. The idea was based around an ex-drug seller who has died but cannot enter heaven until he does enough good to pay for his sins. He finds a depressed businessman who he begins to follow around playing the Tambourine as a kind of guardian angel. The businessman then meets a girl who he wants a relationship with and rejects Mr Tambourine. The relationship fails and he looks for his guardian angel Mr Tambourine but only finds another guardian angel who cannot play the same songs.

I have realised that the Mr Tambourine idea is not realistic for a short film, as there are too many aspects to the narrative to get across in the 4 minutes that we have. The idea is also very abstract and I am not sure how we would get any kind of message across to the audience.

Our first idea, based on "Infidelities", is a more realistic idea for a short as it has a very simple concept that can be portrayed easily to the audience. Our final idea will need to share a similarly simple concept, but at the same time be more creative.