BVA 203 S1W1 : Beat Sheet

I have started developing the exact beats of my story, and have decided to split it into three distinct thirds:

1) The main character waking up
2) Main character finding stranger in house
3) Strangers multiply, asking people to leave, seeing her being led away
4) House full, looking for her and finding her with her parents, she starts flirting with another guy, guy leads her away
5) Going to bed 

Obviously its not a very long film, but hey its a small idea I'm exploring and a longer narrative I think would become frustrating for the audience. I'm only intending for it to be around 3 or 4 minutes (aka 2 day shoot?).
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I've started doing some theoretical research on dreams and how our we recall them.



When asked about why we lose the memories of dreams the longer we're awake Matthew Walker (professor of neuroscience and psychology) says in this podcast:

"It's simply a reconstruction when you wake up so you have these fragments of activity and what your cortex does when it wakes up is what your cortex is designed to do when you're awake normally which (is to) try to package everything and make a good story, make logical fit out of the world". 

I like this sentiment, it implies that dreams are often very bizarre and nonsensical and that when recalling them we insert our own logical explanations for why things happened the way they did - we create a story for what is actually random subconscious mumbo-jumbo. From personal experience, which I think we all have, I can relate to this - when I wake up first after sleeping and having dreamt I almost always try and recall the dream, often deriving conclusions as to what happened from what I can remember, even if this isn't exactly what I dreamt - I know that its sometimes hard to differentiate where the dream I actually had begins and where the blanks I filled in upon waking ends. The two become inseparable in the mind.

The first thing I though when I heard this is that it gives me more freedom in my story of how I can approach him remembering the events backwards, if he remembers the beginning first he could insert his own ideas as to why that was happening before having full access to the rest of the dream. Meaning he could immediately start looking for her and stuff and be as lost as the audience is, maybe even acknowledging the strangeness.

On re-evaluation I find that it would be better if the audience makes sense themselves of the events being recalled by filling in the blanks, its a much more accurate depiction of the experience one has when recalling dreams - we are always able to make sense of things just by putting together two and two or by making our own assumptions, would be much cooler for my short film to give the audience those blanks and have their cortex make sense of the missing information - exactly like one would upon waking from a dream.

While this doesn't change the original direction and series of events from my original intention, it does add an extra layer of reason for why I'm doing it the way I am. It's the audience's assumption that things are unfolding linearly and because of that interpret what they see on screen as one particular story unfolding in one particular way, while it actually is unfolding in the opposite direction.

Of course the professor in the video says that he doesn't actually agree with this theory but whatever, it seems to be commonly accepted.
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The story told backwards:

A guy wakes up and his GF goes for a shower, he leaves the room and discovers a stranger in his house who tells him that he won't leave until the guy's GF does, who seems to be in a room with some other guy, he panics and goes searching for his girlfriend where he finds that the people have multiplied tenfold, filling the house. He spots his girlfriend being led by the hand into the room, which he cannot enter. He goes back to the party which keeps getting livelier and his girlfriend's parents introduce themselves, he embarrasses himself, and suddenly his girlfriend is there but flirting with another guy. She is disappointed by him and leaves with the other man. At the end him and girlfriend go to sleep. 

The story told linearly:

A guy and his GF go to sleep, he wakes up in a party setting where his GF's parents introduce themselves, soon he makes a fool of himself and spots his girlfriend flirting with another man. Who leads her into a room and locks the door, the guy is unable to get in and decides to put an end to the party asking everyone to depart. The last person left is an old man - the GF's father who says that he won't leave until his daughter comes out. The main character is unable to open the door. He wakes up from his nightmare next to his GF who leaves that day to go overseas for a long period of time.

Writing it out like this kind of helps, the linear one definitely feels like a dream but the first is more narratively engaging and I think that's a good sign. One is a shitty art film about how a man's subconscious interprets his Girlfriend leaving, bringing up his insecurities about her cheating, the fear of meeting her parents and generally just losing her. The other is a mystery about things slowly deteriorating in a man's home as he looks for his girlfriend who has gone missing. One's straight into dreamlike follows the weird pacing of dreams, by telling that backwards it becomes more interesting as a short film and the pacing is better in terms of bringing it to some kind of conclusion (the reveal that its all just a dream).

Now that I've written that out it seems like my question could also be something along the lines of how can I make a dream which is surreal and without structure or a indie art film thing feel like it has escalation and fit with more conventional narrative tropes.

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Okay so now I've got one theoretical text, with sufficient reason for how I want to apply it to my own work as well as a pretty simplistic beat sheet - next blog I think I will break down a practical text as well as annotate my beat sheet, explaining each beat better and describe what scene is like, as well as why I made the decisions I did. This will set me up well for writing the treatment, which I intend for the blog entry after next. )