The opening will consist of cross-cutting between the two worlds. The voiceover of the character living in our world will explain that she keeps having dreams about an alternate reality, and, in particular, a person seemingly around her age who seems to be struggling to survive there. This voiceover will create a sound bridge at the very beginning, leading on from the titles until the final few seconds of the opening when we see the girl wake and sit up from yet another dream of that alternate planet. The shots of this girl’s life and the dreams she has about the other person will be intercut, dispersing throughout each other as seamlessly as possible. At first, the gender of the person she dreams of will be unclear; we will simply see a figure in a helmet/hat, mask and goggles (implicitly) fighting, running and assisting the wounded. Meanwhile, we will see the girl from our world live her normal daily life with a montage showing her going to school, practicing her music and spending time with friends and family. Later in the opening, we will finally see the other girl take off her mask as she mourns one of her dead. There will be a multitude of graphic matches to suggest the fact that these two girls are linked beyond these dreams, and, if setting allows, even hints at the fact that their two worlds themselves are parallel to each other. There will also be many close ups and extreme close ups concentrating on the details of the scenes and characters, so props and costume will be fairly important in this piece.
The story of the whole film revolves around a girl in an utopian society who, for the first time in her life, starts having bad dreams about another planet rife with war and pain; things this world had, apparently, never experienced. The dreams only come in flashbacks when she’s awake but the longer this goes on the more vivid and extended they become. Soon, she realises that the world she is seeing is actually real and, rather than simply dreaming about it, she actually wakes up in it when she goes to sleep in her own world. The girl she keeps dreaming about is her close friend, and she is helping her and her fighters save that world. The entire thing is fairly secretive, but she finds herself trusting this other girl despite her own instincts. Over time, the main character, Ulyssa, finds out that this second world is fading, as it is dependant on people from the utopia world to visit it in their dreams and then remember pieces of it when they wake up. However, less and less people had been visiting and remembering this world, and that is why it is in war and ruin; its people were scared, and desperately looking for any possible way to ensure the continuation of their existence. This is why Akkiah, the other girl, is chasing an ancient legend; that, in order to save this world, the god that created the two must be resurrected. The problem is, in order to do that, they must desecrate his grave, and his grave is the utopian world, meaning his resurrection would tear Ulyssa’s home planet apart. Ulyssa thus faces the difficult choice of whether to resurrect this god and crush everyone and everything she’d known as a child, or to allow this otherworldly, inexplicably familiar futuristic civilisation die out slowly and painfully by allowing herself to completely forget of its existence.
Style and Tone
Characters, Costume and Props
Only two main characters are needed for this opening, and perhaps around
five background extras who are fairly irrelevant, and will only be used to make
the two worlds more realistic and extensive. They will likely be wearing normal
casual clothes, either distressed and ripped or very neat, depending on which
world they’re in. Other props will include fake guns (possibly water guns
covered in tin foil to make them more futuristic), bandages, coffee cups,
school accessories such as books and varying musical instruments.
The
character who lives in the perfect version of our world is a girl named Ulyssa.
She’s around 16-17, simply for casting convenience. She has mousy hair and dark
eyes, and wears mostly vaguely floral dresses and large sweaters. She comes
from a fairly rich family, and, in all, has a calm, balanced life, just like
everyone else around her. She really loves music, and plays many instruments.
The most important thing about her is the fact that she is very religious.
She’s quite shy and not at all athletic. I couldn’t think of any particular
actresses that could play her, but the closest visual match I could find was
this model. This picture is especially apt as I mentally place the setting of
the town where this girl lives by the sea (I may be unable to actually film
there because it’s quite a drive, but it nevertheless remains a possibility).
The girl who she keeps dreaming about, fighting in the war-stricken
parallel world, is called Akkiah. She is the same age as the other girl, and is
strong, wily and clever; she would be the perfect soldier, if she wasn’t so
emotionally unbalanced and so unwilling to take orders. She has blonde hair and
blue eyes, and her head is shaved on one side because of the multitude of scars
on it (I will be unable to recreate this faithfully, as not only am I unsure of
the quality of most wound makeup, but also none of my friends will shave their
head, and so we’ll have to just do cornrows instead). She wears maximally
comfortable clothes which are somewhat tattered and misused due to her many
battles. She carries whatever weapons and armoured protection she can find.
Her image is very similar to that of Natalie Dormer’s character Cressida in the upcoming “The Hunger Games: Mockingjay” film. Considering the similarity of genre and the fact that Dormer always plays very strong roles, she seemed a good model for this character.
Graphics
The graphics used in the opening should be fairly minimalistic. The actors’ and directors’ names will come first. The title, “De(i)fied”, will appear in lowercase letters, except for the “I” in the middle, which will serve as a line between the two halves of the word. This means the title can be read as either “defied” or “deified”, which suits the theme of the film fairly well. If I cannot find a font to this effect or am unable to draw the title myself, I will use one of the pictured fonts instead.
The ident I would like to attempt to produce is something similar to the style shown in the picture here, from one of the cut scenes of the video game “Alice: Madness Returns”. I could achieve this with a little practice, considering I have a graphics tablet and have been using Photoshop for a while now. The paper-motion effect could even be attained using actual paper and stop motion technique. The alternative is to physically make a mobile similar to the Pathé ident, albeit with paper instead of plastic, and use that to either create shadows or to spell a name.
DY
