Final Idea Proposal

Working Title:  Chimera Narcotic

Genre:  Fantasy/Sci Fi

The premise is that dreams are bought and sold as a pill, as a form of relaxation, you can also buy nightmares but this is for the people who actively seek scares like horror lovers; but there is also a lot of back alley selling and trading to make dreams more intense, or more explicit/violent/scary/ whatever effect someone desires. But at some point they start noticing that these back alley dreams have started killing people, they either die in their sleep (sleep apnoea, choking on their own vomit after a seizure, blood clots leading to brain or heart failure, sleep paralysis that paralyses the heart or lungs), or the dreams lead them to kill themselves (by either the nature of the dream being too personal or even aimed at certain people to drive them into depression, or when they wake up they experience a form of sleep paralysis where the hallucinations never end and they are pushed to kill themselves). And we meet the protagonist, a psychology/technology double major who believes he can stop this when the authorities don’t believe there’s a problem and his journey to solving this and ending the drug ring involved.

This was influenced considerably by the film Paprika, and the video game Assassins Creed; this is because they are great examples of the positive and negative side effects of technology when applied to the human psyche, especially when it gets into the wrong hands. Because of these strong influences, the idea didn’t vary greatly through time; the basic concept remained the same.

This would probably end up being a TV film, or a feature film, if I could realise it to its full potential. 

Obviously that’s extremely impractical as a student project but these are its ideal requirements, and not its realistic solutions. I would obviously need it to have a generous budget too to allow the effects to be at a professional level, and to get the costumes/ props I would want. As a student film, I want it to be about 15 minutes long, and I reckon that I could muster up the props, costumes, and sets I would need with a budget of around £200.  I would use a canon DLSR camera, and a standard tripod; I would shoot both on green screen and on location and then edit it on Sony Vegas Pro 13. For the time it would take to plan/shoot/edit, I estimate it will take 4/2/2 weeks respectively.