Andrew Jacobson Assignment 1 Step 4

Title: Existence                                                                              Length: 10-15 min
Writer: Andrew Jacobson                                                             Date: 1/26/2014

Goal

The goal of Existence is to tell the story of a man who lets his emotions decide his actions and is forced to figure out how to escape his mistake and live with his regret. The movie will probably be roughly 15 minutes at max. It will draw on technology of today's society and extrapolate it 15 years into the future.

The use of CGI will be used to create the sense of a futuristic society and to help emulate the idea of dreaming.

Story

In the first scene, Henry Coleman, the protagonist, is stuck in traffic on his way to work watching television on his windshield as he waits to drive forward. A commercial for iRemember, a chip that is implanted in your brain that uploads your real memories to a cloud service, comes on the screen, but is interrupted by a call from his significant other, Jennifer. The scene ends after the short call.

The second scene begins with Henry walking into work, meeting his clients that are already waiting for him. He walks them into a room with a lot of places to sleep and a machine in the middle of the room. It then cuts to a shot where Henry is by the machine and the people are all in there respective beds and he is walking them through what is going to occur. This is where his job is explained and another character, Joe, is introduced. Joe has sleep apnea and he hasn't lucid dreamt in some time. Henry gives him a mask to help him breathe and reassures him that everything will be fine.

The next segment focuses on what Henry does while they are sleeping. His job is to monitor them while they sleep, in order to ensure that nothing goes wrong, but Henry has difficulty passing the time. Cuts to shots looking at his smart watch or watching a video on his smart contacts, but then show him walking around making sure people are alright still. While he is walking around, however, you see him begin to watch peoples' dreams. Henry not only watches their dreams for entertainment purposes, but also as way to better understand his clients. This will be evident when he watches his first dream.

He then chooses to watch Joe's dream, and discovers that Joe is having an affair with Jennifer. Henry in a fit of anger, strangles Joe and puts his body in the trunk of his car. Then, knowing he'll get caught if the rest of his clients wake up, Henry decides to delete the recent memories of his clients. The next sequence shows the clients waking up, leaving, followed by Henry driving home and getting in bed thinking about what he's done.

The next scene shows a detective arriving at where Henry dumped the body talking to another detective about the victim. They then mention that they talked to his roommates and they said that he went dreaming the night before. One of them mentions that they have to track down dream stations near his apartment.

The next scene shows Henry at work with more clients, when someone comes and says that detectives are here to ask him some questions. Henry goes and talks to the detectives about the previous night and gives them a list of his clients from that night. They leave and discuss calling them in for questioning.

The detectives are interviewing a client and hooks up some lie detecting equipment to her. She answers all the questions truthfully, but detectives find it strange that she has no recollection of the previous day. It then cuts to them outside wondering how none of the clients have any recollection of the day before. They decide to go back to Henry's workplace.

This segment is short, but involves Henry at work again. The detectives show up and walk in this time. They say they have a warrant and need him to come in for questioning. Henry in the last few seconds he has is panicking. He decides he has to delete his own memory to escape his guilt, however the detectives are walking over to him to arrest him. He accidentally deletes 2 years of his memory, rather than 2 days.

The last part at the station, Henry is being questioned. He is passing all of the questions. The last three questions are, “Do you have a significant other?” (No), “Are you a certified dream monitor?” (Yes), “Are you responsible for the murder of Joseph Cox?” (No). All of them pass.

Style

I like the visual style of the movie Looper (2012, Rian Johnson) or Inception (2010, Christopher Nolan) That is stylistically similar to what I am aiming for.

Thumbnails of Henry being bored at work.

Similar visually to when he is at work.