treatment

Premise

The Main character wakes up into a dark and sinister world. He tries to escape using drugs, but he keeps getting pulled back into reality until it consumes his very being.

Synopsis

A man takes drugs to escape from reality, but never manages to detach himself completely.

Treatment

This short film is about how people try to escape from the often harsh reality surrounding them and how hard it can be to face that reality. In the story we follow an African man walking through the aftermath of a civil war. He takes drugs to get away from the situation, but he cannot fully escape.

The movie will be around 90-120 seconds long and contains both real life characters as well as animated ones. The real world will be filmed using real actors and sets, while the world shown during hallucination will be animated using 3D and 2D animation and models. The target audience is a more mature and/or film festival audience.

The main character is a guerrilla soldier who is tired and alone, he only shows happiness when he is high. He tries to stay separated from the often cruel and horrifying things happening around him, but he keeps getting dragged back into reality.

The story starts (with real life filming) with the main character waking up in a small hut made out of scrap metal and wood. He picks up his stuff and lights up a cigarette, then walks to the door. There will be a transition to an animated environment as he steps outside. The outside world is rendered in 3D with 2D elements. It will have a more radiant colorpalett to create an unreal vision of the world. We see the events of war through the eyes of the main character, flickering between hallucination and reality. In the end he is confronted by the grim reality, and is consumed by it.

The 3D animation and modelling will be done in 3D Studio Max, texturing in Autodesk Mudbox and Adobe Photoshop, Composition and effects in Adobe Premier and Adobe After Effects.