Eternal sunshine of the spotless mind (2004) - Non-linear storytelling
Figure 1. Movie poster (2004) Non-linear methods: Chronicle (Linear storytelling) - The film starts off with a non-linear storytelling method. This is as the audience are unaware as to where they are, who the characters are and what they are doing. The scenes also change suddenly and time shifts backwards and forwards. The story then becomes linear once Joel starts to get his memories of Clementine removed. This is as he is in a dream state trying to stop his memories of her from leaving him. Figure 2. Joel and Clementine meeting Retrograde (Events in reverse order) - This is shown throughout the movie without the audience realising until they are nearing the end of the film. At the start of the film the audience understand that Joel and Clementine have only just met and that Joel and Clementine's feelings towards each other grow, but towards the end of the film it is made clear that not only did Clementine and Joel know each other previously, they were also
OGR 25/01/2018
ReplyDeleteHey Tia - your treatment is very interesting in so much as it helps me prove a point: because you know what's happening in your story, your treatment makes sense to you. To me, it doesn't make much sense at all because the crime your surgeon is guilty of 'isn't in your actual story. Nowhere do we see the act taking place and we have no way of knowing what is going on between these two characters or indeed how long this thing has been going on. All your audience gets is two men in different spaces and then a confrontation we don't understand. Your audience needs so much more information if they're going to understand what is going on and I think you're going to need to revisit this quite dramatically if you're going to get this story to work.
I'm just going to suggest some pointers here and I'm going to use the 3 act structure to do it; but first, let me just ensure I'm clear about the basics:
So - you have a brain surgeon who is stealing parts of patient's brains in order to make himself more clever. So he is a 'brain pirate' in this respect. You've decided the brain is 'the battery'. Hmmm - I can't help thinking that you need a bigger, more design-led idea here and maybe need to embrace the pulp sci-fi/horror trappings of your story. I can see an image of this brain surgeon in a room with brains exactly like batteries - so whole brains with wires leading from them powering some helmet gadget that, once the surgeon puts it on, will power his own brain with all the other brains' combined intellect. This would externalise your idea and put it in full view and make your villain's plans completely obvious. This secret brain-powerstation could be in the basement of the hospital.
Act 1 will need to set things up; for example, the audience will need to be introduced to the surgeon character and we'll need to think he's okay in the first instance: we'll also need to be told that people are going missing (maybe famous scientists all over the world though we don't understand the connection with the surgeon yet)... then we understand what the surgeon is doing - we're shown his secret lair in the hospital and we see that he's got all the missing scientists or whatever with the tops of their heads off and wires plugged into their brains - a dastardly plot - the surgeon is planning to become a super-brainiac and take-over the whole world - booo! That's his goal!
Act 2 - you need to introduce the obstacles... and this is where I think you need to think about your second character. At the moment you've got a character we don't know anything about, who turns up, but we don't know why. I wonder if you've got time to introduce a second character or even show how this person figures it out. As I'm typing I'm wondering if you might want to up the cartoon/comedy aspect of your scenario and maybe introduce a non-human character - for example, Bond villains associate with cats:
ReplyDeletehttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oSACOcLqW0c
Could it be that the cat (or whatever) is somehow plotting against the villain - because the villain is always mistreating him? In a story like this, the villain needs to get his just desserts - so how can the plan backfire? How does it all go wrong? Does he end up under the brain-helmet thing only for the cat to have changed it so it does the opposite - maybe the cat ends up under the helmet thing - and that's your ACT 3 ending?
I'm just thinking out loud here really, but right now, you don't have story - you have some characters doing something, but you audience has no idea of what. You need to set things out for us; you need to show us what we need to see, and I think you need to make much more of your central idea of the 'brain pirate' and 'brains as batteries'... I don't think this is a particularly serious scenario - it's too wonderfully silly and over-the-top and I do think you could be having much more fun with it...
I think it's all a bit more 'Pinky & the Brain/Austin Powers/Looney Tunes' than 'thriller'... what do you think?