Junior Project Proposal II

I have an idea for my next piece. I want to play with the order of presentation of a chronological story. Basically I want to take a chronological story and show from some point in the middle and then go out to another point and then back up past the starting point to show the part before that and then go back again to show the whole story. I got this idea from the movie Memento. It presents the story in reverse order, but we see it in shorter pieces. If you took a movie, chopped it up into 20 segments, and then showed number 20 first, number 19 second, number 18 third and so on all the way to the 1st segment shown last, this is how Memento is presented.

So here is a working story to explain my idea. This is probably not the story I will end up with. More than likely I will change the story in several ways, but here is what I have right now.

The opening scene is a man in a kitchen making a sandwich, he starts eating it and then gets a beer out of the refrigerator. After taking a drink he hears a noise. He goes to the doorway and peers around the wall. He sees a woman in a robe or a towel going up the stairs. He smiles, sets down the sandwich on the table, and then goes up the stairs himself. He will be doing this in a playful manner so that we get the impression that this might be his girlfriend or wife. He finds her in the bathroom getting ready to take a bath or shower.

The video will pause and then go backwards. We would see everything that we already saw in reverse. Once it passed the point where the man is in the kitchen making the sandwich, we would see him come out of the kitchen and pick up a bag or some sort of sack on the way out. He would start taking things out of the bag and placing them back on shelves and in drawers. The sack would fold up and go back into his pocket. A small folder of tools would come out of his other pocket. It would unfold and a tool for picking a lock would come out. The folder would then go back in his pocket. He would back out the door and the door would close. We would see him back up to his car that he parked just slightly past the house. Once in the car he would back away.

Just off the screen the video would pause again and then go in forward motion. We would see him drive up and park the car just past the house. And the video would continue past the parts we already saw. At the part where he finds her in the bathroom, she would hear him or see him, some how she would notice him. There would be a struggle of course. I don’t really have a good ending, but I am working on that.

I did have some good input from Joe today. I was telling him my idea and he came up with a way to make the story more interesting. Instead of having the man in the kitchen go up the stairs in pursuit of the woman, he would look out of the kitchen suspiciously. The intent would be to make the audience think someone was breaking into his house. Then we would think he was trying to find out what was going out in his house. Then just before we get the info that he is the one breaking in, the video would pause and then go in reverse to the beginning. Then reverse again to show the whole story. Still don’t have an ending, but I am working on that.

Any suggestions or ideas from anyone would be greatly appreciated. Any comments would be nice too.

Thanks

Frank