Unit 8 Brief

Short Film: Dumb Danny

Loris Thacker
Date issued: 19th March 2019

Interim Deadline: 24th May 2019

Final Deadline: 7th June 2019

Competition: Rain Dance Film Festival

Starts: Wednesday 25th September

Ends: Sunday 6th October

The Raindance Film Festival encourages UK and International Producers and Film makers to submit
films that they have made. The festival takes place from 18th – 29th of September in central London.
.
Date Deadline Feature Fee Shorts Fee

26 April 2019 Early Deadline £55 £25

17 May 2019 Regular Deadline £70 £35

31 May 2019 Late Deadline £100 £50

Categories for Submission

The Festival accepts feature films (over 45 min), short films (under 45 min), music videos (under 6
min), VR and AR experiences (under 25 min) and web series. Projects of all lengths and genres are
welcome. Raindance Film Festival is committed to showing the boldest and most innovative work that
challenges the boundaries of filmmaking.
 Narrative Feature
 Documentary Feature
 Narrative Short
 Documentary Short
 Animation Short
 Music Video
 Queer (Feature)
 Virtual and Augmented Reality Experiences

Final Short Film Idea: This film will have little to no dialogue at all, everything such as the mood to be
set with just images. The main character, Danny will be shown walking home from college on different
days on a derelict short cut and constantly getting robbed by the same bully, he just accepts the
constant robbing and beating up as shown. It is not the only thing that builds up inside him, minor
inconveniences make him more and more frustrated such as his mum always shouting at him etc. One
day the bully takes it one step further and starts to strangle Danny, both character faces are shown
close up; the bullies cruelly smiling and laughing and Danny's face filling up with rage. Danny then
slaps the bully who obviously comes in unexpected shock, he then starts slapping him more which
becomes closed fist hits repeatedly even when the bully falls to the ground Danny is still unleashing his
rage with angry cries. It then cuts to Danny's face in shock with splats of blood, he vomits and eerie
music comes on with him sitting around and pacing what to cutting to the beat with the music. He
then starts to drag the body towards a bridge at the same time there's a dog walker towards him, this
is shown with parallel editing. Danny just about manages to hide the body in time but the dog walker
knows Danny and starts to talk to him in a friendly but with Danny's suspicious behaviour they have
their suspicions shown by their facial expressions. He is shown walking home in a very paranoid state,
looking everywhere behind him, jumping every time a car drives past. Cut to him struggling to get to
sleep, tossing and turning. A zooming effect will show that we are in his
dream, there will be drastically different scenarios that play out in his
head, the last one where someone points and screams at him. He wakes
up gasping for air, he looks down to his hands which have blood on
them, he stumbles to the bathroom and washes his hands, he looks up
to the mirror showing his extremely pale face, his facial expression
shows how shocked he is. He looks back down to his hands which have
blood reappearing on them.

Rules and Regulations:

Follow the watershed rules, these rules consist of having limited violence, inappropriate language and
sexual references/scenes. I will overcome these limiting obstacles by getting characters to do things
that will connote what the character has or is about to do, for example: in one of the scenes in my
short film I will show a hit then cut to the character with a shocked face with blood on his clothes and
face connoting that he has done something fatal to someone.

Target Audience:

My target audience for my short film will be teenagers, from the age of 14 – 20 since my production
will have violence and disturbing scenes. Since I will show violence without even showing it e.g: Danny,
the main character will be dragging a body without the body being in shot, I have a feeling that a
younger audience wouldn’t understand what that would be denoting since they could easily get
confused with what is happening.

Production schedule:
Problem Solving Chart: