In preparation for my script writing I decided to research some of my favourite short films (I call it research, it’s also just an excuse to watch them really). Because as good as feature-length examples are, watching short films also gives me ideas about pacing and structure within a short time-frame, like the one given along with the brief. First of all I re-watched ‘The Cat with Hands’ a short horror fable (3 minutes) by Robert Morgan.

The story is simple, yet effective in this one. A tall tail being told by a single character, with only limited dialogue thanks to the use of stop-motion and disturbing imagery to move the story along. ‘The Cat with Hands’ (2001) is a neat folk tale with a horror-edge, where despite narration being used the visuals display a clear sense of dark and disturbing atmosphere, something that I’d wish to utilise within my script, as many ideas that spring into mind have a certain dark edge to them.  It reminds me slightly, not because of the stop-motion, of Tim Burton’s ‘Vincent’ short film, in which a young boy longs to be as tormented as the actor Vincent Price. The tone is gleefully dark in a way, a bit lighter and less-hostile than ‘The Cat with Hands’, which is perhaps a little too dark for its own good. Both films use heavy narration (‘Vincent’ has no actual character speech at all) and although this works for those particular films I believe that I’d rather keep my characters interacting with each other throughout my script.

Another Robert Morgan short ‘D is for Deloused’ taken from ‘ABCs of Death 2) 2015 is a favourite of mine. Pitch dark and disturbing, again it is presented in stop-motion and creates a foreign, strange and alien atmosphere with very little dialogue at all. It feels like a fever dream throughout and is almost hypnotising in its storytelling and intensity that I struggle to blink throughout its entirety. The notion of only having to write the script for the film and not actually create the final product perhaps would allow me to develop a more ambitious and ‘alien’ idea such as this within my work.

I want to remain personal within my project whilst maintaining a sense of world-building. Something along the lines of Charlie Brooker’s ‘Black Mirror’ but a shorter segmented version of it. Spike Jonze’s ‘I’m Here’ is a good example, though at a longer runtime, it maintains the world-building aspect whilst tackling more of a coming-of-age tale, something that I will be keeping in mind when coming up with ideas.