"Eureka! This year Christmas will be ours!"

Right, we've come up with a (semi-decent) final idea that we think is still (mildly) interesting and is (just about) feasible.

We looked at the notes for the last blog, and we came up with some more small ideas that sort of tie together some of the themes from the seperate ideas we previously had.

Our plan is to portray a United Kingdom in the not-too-distant future, which is ruled by a corrupt and oppressive Government. Basically, the Government is now all-seeing and all-knowing, and controls almost every aspect of life for the people living here. We took the idea of corrupt government, and decided it worked well with the themes of being stuck in a small town with no prospects, as the future-UK is now poverty-stricken and generally a shit place to live. CCTV all over the place, police kicking peoples teeth in, it's not very nice.

We now need to come up with a storyline. After someone watched Enemy of the State, we had the idea of having someone running. The audience doesn't know why at first, but we eventually find out that he is being chased by agents of the Government looking for secret information that he has stolen that could bring down the entire institution. We never have to know exactly what information he has, we never have to actually see the people chasing him, and the run-down aspects of future England will create a dynamic backdrop that is actually kind of easy to film. We can simply go to crappy-looking parts of town.

One aspect we need to work on is how the audience will be able to figure out that the film is set in a dystopian future England. One option is to use a voiceover narration, but nobody liked that idea. Another option was to have the backstory brought up in conversation between characters, but this does not really work either. For example:

JOHN

Remember when the Government started monitoring everyone with CCTV and computer databanks back in 2010?

PETE

Why yes! They instilled a sense of fear with their roving police units that still lasts to this day!

This does not work, as it sounds contrived and generally shit.

What we decided to go with in the end is a pre-title preface crawl, such as the opening to Star Wars or Blade Runner:

The opening crawl is quick, simple, and gets across important backstory without making the audience feel like idiots.

More soon!