BVA 203 S1W1 : My Idea

So the idea that I decided to explore is as follows:

How can I make the audience experience what if feels like to remember a dream just after waking in a short film?

This originated because of a different idea that I explored originally (which revolved around making a short from fresh from old narrative cliches - like the Protagonist waking up at the start of a short or the big reveal behind so many bad stories: that it was all a dream). I rolled the two cliches into one and created a story that I think subverted both in an interesting way - essentially making something old fresh again.

My story idea is:

A man wakes up from a nightmare, he is next to his Girlfriend who is leaving that morning for Canada, he exits the room and finds someone else in the room opposite - a stranger, who says that he won't leave until the man's girlfriend does. He can't find his girlfriend, who had just moments ago gone to take a shower, things slowly descend into a type of undefined dream-like chaos. We find towards the end that the events are unfolding in reverse order, the movie ends with the man going to bed with his girlfriend the previous night.

The man wakes up at the start as is common in so many short films, but it's integral because it is actually the end of the series of events that follows, as the film moves backwards (like Memento) into his dreams. The nightmare he wakes up from is what we see throughout the duration of the film, it just takes some time for the audience to realize this fact.

At the end its revealed to all be a dream, but we don't feel cheated because its a twist that is set up effectively and accurately explains away the strangeness that preceded this reveal. The whole movie relies on how we remember dreams, it just takes until the story is almost complete for the audience to know this.

It's a movie told backwards that opens with a man waking up, and I think that in itself is just a really cool idea.

I also want to explore his psyche here, all the events that happen throughout correlate directly to the events in his own life, the fears he keeps subconsciously. His girlfriend is going to leave for a time so the nightmare explores ideas such as cheating, meeting the parents and losing her.

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It won't be a very long film, my next step will be to come up with a beat sheet, after which I will look in to practical and theoretical texts. My ambition is to have a mock-up of the film ready when pitching my idea to the class for everyone to get a good idea of what exactly I want to achieve. This would probably just be me and a DSLR, after which I can assemble crew and cast and plan my shoot.

To Do:

 Beat Sheet
 Theoretical Texts
 Practical Texts
 Proposal

I also still need to work on the wording of my question, it doesn't yet flow right for me.

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Can I make the audience feel like they are remembering a dream through the medium of film?

Reason I structured my question in this fashion is because we don't remember dreams from start to end, we remember the last part first and work our way backwards. It's a very interesting idea and I think it is another use for the very limited structure technique of films like Memento, which are told in reverse. 

Some Practical Examples:

 Memento (Told in Reverse - subjective narrative device)

 Watchmen (Manhattan Sequence)

 David Lynch (Dreamlike tone)

 A Beautiful Mind (subjective experiences)

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In class we were tasked with setting up a blog ,we have to make two slides by next week for our proposal presentation. At the moment I assume that we're just thinking about what we want to do.

It seems that we have the actual proposals in Week 5, and will work at our projects until Week 14, giving us 9 weeks of development.