Short Film : Initial Idea

Here is my initial idea for a short film:

Characters:

1. Brother 1 (B1) – Cool and intelligent elder brother
2. Brother 2 (B2) – Very quiet, collected, and unhappy younger brother
3. Cousin – The Brothers’ “boss”, or the person who organizes and plans the burglaries while the brothers execute them.
4. Stranger Girl – Talkative, cute, happy-go-lucky girl who has just recently broken up with a long term partner. Talks incessantly to “avoid”  thinking about her recent separation with her partner.

Synopsis : Brother 1 & 2 and Cousin are burglars in Leeds. Brother 2 is fed up with being a burglar. Brother 2 admits this to Brother 1, who tries to convince him to stay on, B2 finally agrees to do one last job. A night before the final job, B2 meets a stranger a girl in the city, and spends a couple of hours with her. Nothing intimate happens between them, B2 almost never speaks, while the girl never stops to talk about her past/home country/recent breakup – to be decided. Next day, B1 and B2 does the final job. B2 enters one of the rooms of the house they break into, and finds in it the jacket/scarf the stranger girl was wearing the night before. Police sirens are heard, END.

I repeated this story to my Brother, my flatmate and a few other people from whom I could get an honest feedback from. They liked the story, and to my question of whether or not it was “enough” as a story for a short film, they answered Yes, Thus I got the confidence to proceed with this idea.

Problems and limitations:

1. No budget : Having no budget meant very limited set design, which in my opinion is a lot of what makes a picture visually beautiful. To over come this, I structure my story to revolve in dark places, so as to be able to hide a lot of the what’s in the frame in shadows, and to pick out the characters, interesting textures and details with lighting. That’s why all of this short film will be shot at night. For example, this scene from Citizen Kane (1941).
2. No experience in directing or acting. I planned to give all the characters as little lines as possible so as to make acting easier. I wanted the characters to always be doing something whilst they act, for example, smoking a cigarette, rolling a cigarette, eating, drinking, walking, because I think this way is much easier to act than just speaking dialogue.