Cut to the bone

So we talked to Mike about our idea today and I left college with feelings of frustration and confusion. When Sam pitched his idea a few weeks back it was as a gag oriented piece. A simple short about a Hitman trying to kill his target and through a series of hilarious interventions this proves harder than it should.

It was picked as this idea however it seems now that we are expected to create something completely different to this with themes of redemption or moral ambiguiety as opposed to a comedy piece.

This is a fair enough suggestion, however why was this film picked after being delivered as a gag film if we are now supposed to make it into some epic story of a Hitman trying to eliminate his target while revealing to us the audience his motives for doing so as well as revealing the nature of his target. A lot of the things we were told seemed quite contradictory. For instance we were advised to not take ideas from existing media similar to our idea yet could not be advised enough to emulate something like Leon. Another thing that frustrated me was the "why do this in animation?" when honestly you could ask the same about most of the films being made this year.

I could go on about this for a while but that wouldn't be productive and I'm not so much angry as a little frazzled by the whole ordeal. One thing I took away from this which I think the entire group agreed on was getting an ending that was strong or had a twist to it. We were advised to have the Hitman question his morals or something along those lines or have a flashback? revealing his reasons and what not. This confused me more as to come up with something believable along these lines it would take minutes and one of the things that we were told was important in the pitch was keeping it short and manageable. I mean Leon is a great film as Mike and Dave seemed so eager to convey to us however it runs over an hour and a half and even in that time they very sparsly visit his backstory. We have 2 minutes.

So in my mind we can flesh out the backstory of both the Hitman and the target but it's unnecessary to delve into this in the film itself. It should be enough that he's a Hitman , he kills for money. If we set it up as him having some big moral dilemma then it really will become like every other Hitman film ever. i.e. Leon- A proffesional killer becomes complacent in his proffesion due to the influence of a young girl who he develops feelings for and it leads to his eventual death. Grosse point Blank- A proffesional killer loses his taste for killing and pursues his lost love in an attempt to "pick up" where he left off.