Plot Ideas - Five minute Short 'The Descent'

Pre-screener / Short - towards final project 'The Descent'

Themes:

• Climate Emergency

• Women and nature - but subverted, the destruction of nature via symbolism of women being polluted.

• Storytelling

Not an explicitly obvious Pandora story, just the basic plot points otherwise way too complicated.

• Story needs to start in action / conflict?

• She can just have the temptation?

• Doesn't need to be a box - what's the modern equivalent of Pandora's Box? Maybe not, I like this being an archetypal type piece, want to keep it in the realm of mythology.

Opening Scene

• Starts in darkness with the sound building up slowly. Rain, thunder, whispering, branches moving, eerie sounds, building to screams, wind etc.

• Out of the darkness, creatures emerge. Ripping out of black membranes (eg. black bin bags, black tights something like this), contorted and twisted figures, birthed from the void.

• Very movement/performance art based, exploration of the surroundings, gradually building in movement towards chaos, increasingly feral.

• Forming a twisted fairy circle / Maenad revel, twisting bodies, dancing, ripping things apart, dirt, filth, fluids etc. Pollution coming out of them, black liquid, trash etc. Like pure chaos has pollution occuring in it.

• The sound builds and builds, mirroring the chaotic revelry, up to a fever pitch, then cuts out completely.

• Silence - but the revelry continues, the figures screaming into the void of silence, bodies twisted and wrenching, peak chaos, then cuts to black.

Scene idea

• A woman wakes, lying in the landscape, her body covered in plants, moss, mud, roots etc.

• Dressed in a white medievalist style dress, evoking archetypal ideas about Gaia, she is an entity, a power of nature, not a person, creation itself.

• She sits up, awake as if she's been sleeping for centuries, woken form her slumber by an unknown force.

• Wide shot of her standing, and embarking out into the landscape. (hopefully grey, foggy background, would compliment greens of the ground with flat lighting).

• Very movement based as well, something visceral and archaic, she is not human, she is nature itself.

• As she moves, her body gets more and more polluted. Starts off subtle at first, black drop of oil escaping her ear, oozing down her neck. A stray piece of plastic escaping her dress. The trash and oil accumulate, trailing behind her, weighing her down, affecting how she moves. She's more erratic now, there's a sense of desperation. She must keep going, towards some futile hope that she can outpace what is happening to her.

• Cut between micro and macro shots, mirroring how on both these scales we are affected by the climate destruction happening in the world.

• By moving between shots, the pollution can accumulate in the cuts, taking inspiration from stop motion in how the pollution spreads. Way of having it grow in a high concept way.

• The dress becomes ragged, black liquid pouring from her orifices.

• Eventually, it is too much, she appears like an animal caught in an oil spill, or a deer stuck in a bog, fighting and fighting, but its too much and she collapses, the pollution spreading out of her.

Scene

Rotting vanitas scene - focus on the skull - zoom into the socket and fade to black. Momento Mori, reminder of death. Maybe the glasses can be filled with congealed black liquid.

Scene

Woman waking from the quagmire of filth she finds herself in, polluted, decaying - her face is skull like, around her the world is fetid.

Hands clawing towards her, contorted, feral.