GIVE ME YOUR INPUT

So our county does a competition called CCSME which is a short film competition, and this is my last year of high school so all my friends are entering this competition with me, and theres 8 people in my group, and the genre we drew was Thriller, so we have to make a 5 minute thriller movie and we have to use the names either Ricky (boy) or Ricky O'shea (girl), a prop which is a bandaid box, and we have to say the line "this is no reality show". We spent about 2 hours today trying to come up with an idea for the story. And all of us are really creative minds so naturally we were all yelling at each other trying to solidify a good plot, and i want your guys input on the plot we came up with and let me know if you see some holes in it or what is unclear. I WOULD APPRECIATE IT.

There is a detective and a therapist. The detective is currently investigating a series of murders, searching for the killer. The detective has been traumatized by all the murder cases he has seen in his past and is currently visiting a therapist to help him cope with all the traumatic events. The detective has been taking a drug that was prescribed by his therapist for his extreme anxiety which keeps him awake at night, and has to take the drug before he sleeps and after he wakes up. As the detective searches the crime scene, he finds one item at each scene that for some reason trigger a flashback of how the victim at the scene died. But he does not know where these flash backs are coming from and starts getting suspicious of the true killer. (One of the items that trigger the flash back is a band aid box) Every time he has a flashback he wakes up in his bed, thinking that they are just dreams. After a few “dreams”, they progressively start becoming more and more vivid. Eventually he has a dream so vivid that he see’s himself committing the murders. All during this time he has been telling his therapist about the “dreams” he has been having at his daily meetings. The day after he realizes he is committing the murders, he wakes up and forgets to take his drug and goes back to his therapist and tells him about the dream and how he thinks he has been killing all these people he has been investigating. He also tells him that he is thinking of turning himself in. The therapist asks him if he took the drug this morning and he remembers that he was in such a rush to see his therapist that he forgot to take it. After hearing this, the therapist then pulls out a gun shooting the detective because since he didn’t have the drug inside of him, the therapist would not be able to brainwash the detective and use him as his bait to be convicted of the committed murders. BOOM.

Ok after rereading what i typed i already found a plot hole... why would the therapist want to kill the detective if he is about to turn himself in? HELP ME FIX IT!

Well, he's a detective... I figure you could just have him figure it out at the end and then have the therapist shoot him. To be honest, the story is actually an interest idea. My main problem is the suspension of disbelief that there is a drug that effectively allows brainwashing. If you're going for a sort of mystery/thriller-ish type thing, that kind of Drug X type of stuff kind of ruins the reality of it. If you somehow give enough hints, I guess it will work out. You could also try to be as realistic as possible and claim that the drug just makes the detective more sleepy and therefore more suggestive. The therapist then hypnotizes him, etc. Having a drug that straight up allows brainwashing is a little weird

Thanks I will try to make the drug idea more solid, I talked to my friend and he said his vision of it was that the therapist doesn't shoot the detective, but lets the detective turn himself in and then the video ends with the therapists assistant calling the therapist saying he has a new patient to see him. (so its like the therapist uses all of his patients to commit his murders)

That's a cool initial idea! I'd like to know why the therapist wants to commit these murders, but I'm not sure if you guys wanted to leave that as an open ended question. It is probably better that the therapist doesn't shoot him, because if his method is to get other people to commit these murders for him, it doesn't make sense that he'd suddenly and recklessly commit one himself. More likely, if you did want the therapist to end up killing the guy, you should show him brainwashing someone else to kill him.

Everyone already pretty much said what I would have. I like the other ending, which ends in the therapist having a new patient to see. I think squeezing in a motive for the therapist would be nice if you can make it fit, but not necessary. As for the therapist killing the detective, I like the alternate way better, because If he just kills him himself, it kinda defeats the purpose. I'd like to see the drug thing a little more defined too.

And it does sound pretty cool, I'm interested to see how it turns out. I wanna see the finished product when it's done.

Here is the finished video, you guys get to see my horrible acting. thumbs it up so we look good

THAT WAS AMAZING. THANK YOU SO MUCH FOR SHARING THIS.

But really though, not even for just HS level, just in general that was really great. I hope you win!

Thanks, I appreciate it and I hope we win too! I will let you guys know how it goes but the competition isn't until the 4th of December so i won't know for a while (we technically weren't even supposed to put it on YouTube but our teacher didn't care)

Dam, that was pretty impressive. I like the foreshadowing of describing the criminal's appearance with the parallel of actually seeing the detective. The way it was done at the end also really made it an impressive twist with the ring box and everything. I think you have a pretty good shot at winning with this, and there is definitely a lot of time and effort put in.

Woo, that was pretty good. Everyones acting was pretty decent INCLUDING YOURS OMAR.

The plot was well done and so was the ending. I honestly couldn't ever see anyone in my high school do something like this... ever... I mean seriously this is the best my school can come up with:



Please dear god do not watch the whole thing, I didn't even. I just went on youtube and picked the best thing I found from my school. Comedy gold right there.

But seriously, everything went well, I can't imagine better. The camera angles, acting, mood, all of it was good. I thought the music you guys chose really fit, too.

Oh my god, look at those cheap windows movie maker effects.

I almost threw up when he said his name was quarter pounder.

I need to know what the inspiration for that video was.

You had some really nice camera affects going for you at times, good pan in and outs but the main qualms i have is about how the camera is constantly shaking, no stand i presume. :S
Aside from that and a few transitions that felt a bit fast it was pulled off pretty well.
Good job Omar '3'

Yeah we had 9 days to make it and a 5 minute time limit so we had a lot we had to cut out and there was a lot of stuff we wanted to do but couldn't... if we had a month and no time limit it would have been a lot better, but I think given the circumstances we were in, it was great.

Very good haha

Did anyone else think this was a new topic and started reading the post until eventually realizing what it was..
GG topic revive.

Yeah, I did, but I figured it out pretty quick.