Planning Our Narrative

Having already decided to create a Teen post-apocalypse film, we decided to use Lord of the Flies (by William Golding) as an idea to work from. We wanted to create an environment that would enable the rapid breakdown of social structure. But, we did not want to be cliché and use the desert island and we certainly did not want to simply remake Lord of the Flies. So we came up with an idea of all the people over a certain age disappearing.

We began thinking of a reason why this would happen and we toyed with ideas such as disease, but this could have led down a zombie-apocalypse path- somewhere we did not want to go. We wanted our film to have a sense of realism. We thought about films such as The Hunger Games, where the government runs the lives of all the people, this gave us the idea that we could have it part of some government conspiracy. In order to create a more elite race of humans, we the teenagers would have to fight until on the strongest remained- survival of the fittest/natural selection. Another personal inspiration was the graphic novel and anime series: Battle Royale which is a similar concept to The Hunger Games only more brutal.

Although we liked the idea, we thought that having it be an accident would be a lot more interesting, there is no encouragement to fight, but there is no discouragement. This meant it was a lot more critical of society's structure and ideas of authority. Like in Lord of the Flies we envisaged the rivalry of two groups, but we wanted to introduce some sort of object that would heighten the conflict.

We came up with the idea of a folder that would hold the key to what had happened and possibly how to fix it. Just like in Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone- the good and bad characters are scrabbling to attain an object it gives a sense of physicality to the journey the characters will go on.  But, we had to have a reason that the characters knew about the folder, so we developed the idea that one of the main character's parents was involved with the government project and so they knew the folder would help them understand what had happened.

From this we decided that the age which people would disappear would be 17, this was a year younger than us, but this meant the characters were not yet adults and that we would be able to be more logical but also more violent. The idea that the characters would also disappear at 17 meant there was an urgency to the plot and we thought this would come in useful in the trailer.

When we thought about the idea of two rival groups, we imagined having a Patriarch and Matriarch for each group. This meant that they could both reflect and contrast each other and this could be useful in the distribution and marketing such as posters.