I spent some of the weekend working on the script for this horror short that I thought might work for the 2 Days Later competition. I think I’m glad I’m not now - or maybe because I’m not, I haven’t limited myself. When I was chatting about the competition with some friends, I made some stipulations about what I wanted to do. Or rather, what I didn’t want to do - namely nothing with vampires, zombies, serial killers or slashers. As my friend described it, I wanted to do something more Tales of the Unexpected than Hammer Horror.

I came up with what I figured would be a workable idea. Also a filmable idea as I’m more or less centering it on the village I live in. So far, so good. The problem, predicatably, is with the script.

On the face of it, I’m fine - I have a beginning, a middle and an end. It’s all a bit ropey at the moment but it is only a first draft. I can get from the beginning the the middle without too much trouble but I’m not sure quite how to get from the middle to the end. I can see scene in my head but I can’t quite yet connect them together. No doubt it will come.

The biggest problem, however, is the timeline. The story depends on a rapidly advancing timeline (by which I mean there are anything from 6 week to 6 month gaps between scenes) but because this is a short film, that means that scenes are, by necessity, likely to be short but in story terms may have jumped forward in time by quite a bit. At the moment, on one page, I have three different periods in the timeline.

The thing is that the creepiness in the story (or at least, what I think is the creepiness in the story is as I haven’t actually run the idea past anyone else) very much depends on this timeline. (If I said it should cover 9 months, that might give an idea of what it’s about).

Even if I decide not to worry about the fact that a half page scene (i.e. about 30 seconds or less of film) covers a moment in time totally seperate from its neighbouring scenes, I then begin to think about it from a directorial point in how I would do it. I don’t want to rely necessarily on explicitly informing the audience via subtitles - I’d prefer to do it by showing them. Generally, this is fine for most scenes except one. And I just cannot for the life of me figure out how I’d show the passing in time for this one, damn scene without making it entirely obvious. (Yes, I could include it in dialogue but that seems clumsy. “Hello Colin. You’ve been here for what, 2 months now? My, how time flies! Why it only seems like yesterday since you first arrived!”)

On the positive side, I reckon that using dark red food colouring and KY Jelly might provide exactly the type of effect I need for one shot.