How is a place important to a story?
Examples: Princess Mononoke and Nausicca
When it comes to both films, their environments play a heavy role in their stories. In Princess Mononoke, all the characters have some part of their home that they’re trying to protect. The creatures protect the forest, and the humans protect Iron Town. Even though both are against each other in the film, they are both fighting to protect the same thing that matters to them: their home. In Nausicca, the story follows along the same lines; Nausicca’s once peaceful valley is under danger for most of the movie, to the point of blackmail. Nausicca herself pushes herself out there into danger nearly every day to care for and protect her people. Overall, both films follow the themes of defending what they care for, their environments, when being threatened.
Video Concepts/Proposal
For my video concept, I want to explore the theme of time, or more so, the trope of the “time loop,” the endless cycle of repetitiveness that the character doesn’t realize they are in until the end. I want to center my story with a character going on about their daily morning life, getting ready for work or school, whichever it would be. For my filming strategies, I was hoping to film my story in a first-person position to almost match the classic video game RPG look. With this perspective, I want to shape the viewers into feeling that this time loop is also part of their life, or if they could imagine it being their reality.
For more of an outline –>
Situation: The main character lives in an endless time loop, unaware of their situation, they follow an endless daily life schedule as they prepare themself for the day.
Desire: As of the beginning of the film, the main character has the basic task of getting ready for their day accordingly, whether that be picking out the perfect outfit for a meeting or packing a homemade lunch on time.
Conflict: Once the film reaches the middle, the character has a conflict where it makes they become aware of their situation, they are trapped in a time loop and are unable to find a solution to fix it with such limited time.
Change: The character begins to change certain habits while getting ready, seeing if it would destroy the balance of their loop, but this will end up bringing more problems and harm to them than good.
Result: The time loop never truly ends for them, but instead, it becomes edited at a cost.
Inspirational Models
While brainstorming for my story, first, I thought of how I wanted to film it, at least angle-wise. I wanted to follow an angle that didn’t feel set up to be a movie; I wanted it to be something more realistic or mysterious. Therefore, I went for a first-person point of view. I looked into an example of this camera technique with more thriller-based pieces of media, like the Backrooms videos or even a short film I found called ‘Trust Me’, which I will have linked down below.
When it came to the concept of time, it was actually simpler for me. I wanted a concept where it was something that felt somewhat apocalyptic or, at the very least, conflicting. I had just finished reading a book called ‘Before the Coffee Gets Cold’, which heavily explores the concept of time. Although the plot does not involve a time loop, it still gave me the idea to use the concept of time in a conflicting way. For other examples, I also thought of the video game ‘Life is Strange’, where the concept of the game is that the main character, Max, discovers the powers she has to travel back in time. She tries to change the course of time repeatedly, but only makes her outcome worse towards the end, creating a conflict that becomes too difficult to amend. I wanted my story to have a short but tragic theme, similar to those, with a focus on traveling in time and its consequences, or how you can never control time yourself or change your outcomes.
Links to Resources:
Before the Coffee Gets Cold Summary
Short Sample for Video
Above for my feature image, I have a small photo to show the type of camera angling I am hoping to aim for, and the daylighting I want to use.
(My feature image seen to be more cut off at the top so I have also added it here down below, I apologize if the quailty is blurry on wordpress I was unsure on how to adjust that.)
