My only problem was that hitmen have been done to death, from Agent 47 to Hitman's Bodyguard (yes I know it's a comedy and not in keeping with what I am going for genre-wise but i'm just using this as an example of how widely the whole hitman angle has been done). Another inspiration for the style I wanted to be in keeping with was DIRTY LAUNDRY by a youtube user BOOTLEG UNIVERSE. This was a short film spinoff of the 2004 film Punisher, in which the actual actor used in the film Thomas Jane was cast and his character (the Punisher) is living in his van. He gets out of his van and does his laundry at a launders when a young woman is assaulted and he intervenes after battling his attempts to try and just be a passer-by. It is full of cinematic shots, has a dark "dirty" colour grade (similar to Fight Club), and is full of violent fight scenes.
So hitmen where out of the equation what could I go to now? Well the mafia are always a fascinating topic to me however it is hard to not slip into cliche when trying to portray the stereotypical gangster. So instead of a bunch of slick haired pin stripe suited Italians around a table playing poker with cigars and whiskey, I thought I could take a slightly modern approach. A young boy about 10 or 12 gets beaten up in an alley by the school bullies and as he's snivelling picking his things up off the floor a man in a lonhg coat appears at the end of the alley. He works for the Mafia, he's the guy you send when you want a job done. So he see's what happens to the boy and offers to teach him how to "knock punks down a couple notches". Through touch love and testing training the boy gains skills and goes back to his bullies and teaches them to leave him alone. But the man who took him isn't happy with that, he wants the boy to finish the job. He hands him a gun and tells him that if he does the right thing, the gun is his and he can work alongside him in the business. The boy holds the gun up to the beaten bullies on the floor trembling as he is battling his morals and inner thoughts. Cut to black and you hear a gunshot. Fade from black after a few seconds and the barrel is smoking, slow pull out shows the boy is pointing it in a different direction. Cut to the boys mentor, holding his upper abdomen with shock on his face, he slumps down and the boy now looks distraught. He turns the gun on himself, fade to black, and another gunshot is heard. I liked the idea of the kind of mix up of Karate Kid style mentorship with Leon The Professional type of theme.
I churned over this idea for a while and realised well it hasn't been done before per say and I feel like it would be idealistic for locations and cinematic shots, it does bare resemblance to a lot of films and has an overused common narrative of victim becomes the saviour. So it was back to the drawing board. This is when I got an inspiration from a tv show called Lucifer. The show is about the devil who decides he has had enough of running hell and takes a break on earth. He has the power to see into peoples souls and allow their deepest desires to spill out, a sort of "truth stare" if you like. It isn't long before he meets a young police detective who his powers don't work on, which intrigues him and leads him to accompany her on criminal investigations as an advisor. I liked the idea of an other-worldy being leaving thier dimension to take a vacation on earth, so i thought that it would be a cool idea to incorperate Norse gods into this.
The premise would be that this Norse god (most likely Thor) last visited hundreds and hundreds of years ago so when he decides to come back for another vacation A LOT has changed. Whilst trying to get accustomed to this strange new world he befriends someone and they are killed by a gang or crime syndicate. He is crushed by this loss as he is not used to losing people (because all his friends are gods and gods are immortal). He becomes enraged by this organisation's actions and hunts down every member in epic style until he reaches the boss, who tries to cut a deal with the god but is thrown into a container of liquid in his criminal hideout and electricuted by the gods powers. However as the camera fades to black on the god walking away into the unfocused background, it then fades from black to a shot of the liquid and the steam rising from it, then a hand emerges from it. I was almost certain I wanted to take up this idea however after a talk with George my other group member we decided it was far too much of a big budget production film and would struggle to make a quality short film on our budget and time restrictions. In the same discussion, myself and George came up with the idea of doing a documentary, as we both felt confident in our ability to make a documentary and would like to explore it further.
George came up with the idea of looking at the topic of the legendary horse Shergar. This was a horse from very good bloodlines that won every race it was entered into. It was retired after only a hand full of races because it's breedability was worth more than it's success at sport. However it was kidnapped at the breeding stables by suspected IRA members and has never been found to this day. I liked the idea of this as a topic for our documentary because there is an ayre of mystery about it, a sense of intrigue becuase someone out there somewhere knows the final resting place of this Irish legend. Unfortunately, when we researched into it there had already been a documentary made recently about Shergar which covered pretty much everything we wanted to look at in our doc if we were to do it about him. So no more hitmen or Norse gods, but we did know that it was a documentary that we would be undertaking.
The next idea to hit us, well George was Dynamo. Dynamo has always struggled with bullying in school so he learned magic tricks to impress his peers and earn respect amongst his fellow classmates. George wanted to make a documentary about his life and the experiences he has had that have shaped the man he is today. I believe a heavy influence for this doc idea was the rapper Professor Green's new series of docs and the one about his father's suicide. We presented this idea to Simon but he raised the point that he is not a current celebrity, therefore, is not as relevant and that we should try to stay out of the way of falling into the trap of using celebrities as the main factor for a piece. So we swiftly moved onwards and upwards.
I briefly looked at a subject I had researched a year ago which was a group of people known as preppers. People who prepare themselves for the apocalypse or end of the world. However, there had been multiple documentaries made about these people and we struggled to find an angle for this topic. This is when we came up with the idea of Snowflakes. We had seen many many videos online showing confrontations between millenials and generation X which had prompted us to think about the generational differences in society and we began to look at topics of debate that were around at the time, one of which was the controversial topic of the Snowflake Generation. We devised a pitch and showed it to our tutor. He asked us what our angle was and we said what we thought our angle could be, however his comments highlighted that we need to have an answer as to “why does anyone care” about the topic. He felt that we were doing the topic of Generation Snowflake because we were the generation that were being accused of not being tough enough as it were. Therefore the documentary would be one-sided immediately because we were making it to try and prove a point that we were not a bunch of gentle little snowflakes. Which would brake one of the many rules of a documentary which is you cannot make a documentary with an agenda or already having a strong opinion on the topic.
Following this we decided to stop trying to just come up with ideas, drawing from either just our minds or own experiences. So we sat down and started looking through new news stories to see what was going on that was current and relevant right at that moment. That is when we came across the story of Liam Allan. Liam Allan was a young man who was accused of rape and almost convicted until his barrister found a disk that contained evidence on it that destroyed the prosecutions case. We looked into the topic of false rape allogations and while there seemed to quite a few cases reported, we could see there was practically no coverage of the subject unless it was to do with Liam's case. So we did a solid weeks worth of contacting people and gaining as much research as we could then took our idea to both our tutor and another voice of wisdom that had been brought in who used to work for the BBC. Both our tutor and the lady that was brought in liked how brave we were being by tackling this subject but they both said it was far too risky and could spark a backlash both on us and the course.
By this time it was getting quite close to the deadline, about 4 weeks away and our idea was still on the ropes, but we had done so much research and were really passionate about it so we decided that we would still use the contributors we had attained we would just adapt the topic. It would go from focusing on the theme of false rape allogations to the problems with evidence. Of course "Problems with evidence" was far too vague a too big of a subject to look at so we cut it down to digital evidence after running that past our tutor and gettimg the thumbs up we decided to roll with it.
This changed slightly however when we went up to take some test footage of an event that Liam was hosting in Manchester. We noticed that a far more accessible and relevant topic was disclosure of evidence. So we decided after filming we would get in touch with charity groups etc to find victims of Evidence Disclosure problems. This was an absolute gold mine and we had an abundance of people really willing to help, to try and get their story out so people can hear what really goes on in the courtrooms of today. Obviously we had a few problems like no governmental institutions wanting to have any part of the doc due to us being students. I even phone HMP Maidstone to see if they would be able to pass me on to someone which they did but after emailing them they declined access. And this is where we are now, all prepped and ready to film our Doc for Evidence Withheld.
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