Week 9 Story Planning: An Eye for an Eye, but Cuter

It is somewhat important to note that this story planning will spoil a major part of the film Lobster (Yorgos Lanthimos 2016).

Source.

So next week I will be retelling the story of "The Blind Bride". The story goes as follows: Dedrash, Pandu's brother, has been born blind due to the situation of his birth. When he marries, his wife decides to support him by covering her eyes, never to see again.

When I read this story, it reminded me of an indie film that was released a year or so ago to much critical acclaim. It's story is far more complicated, but basically, love has been institutionalized to the point were if you do not get married, you will be turned into an animal of your choice. The cathc is that in order to marry someone, you must share a significant personal feature, such as both being excellent swimmers. The idea is that you two will "match" better.

Anyway cutting to the end of the film, the main character couple wants to marry each other. Previously they had shared a love for reading, but The female had been forcibly blinded by the villain of the story in order to prevent her from marrying the guy. In order to fix things, the guys blinds himself with a sharp knife so that they can marry.

There is a clear similarity here, and I want to mesh the two stories into one.

My plan is to use the strange world of Lobster and the stand alone narrative of the chapter of the Mahabharata to create a new unique tale.

Week 6 Story planning: Combining Sherlock and the Mahabharata

An image of Sherlock Holmes. Source

I was reading the story of King Shantanu and Ganga (by Donald A. Mackenzie) and I was really interested in the basis of the story. When all the extraneous elements are stripped away from it it is the story of a person not understanding why someone they trust is doing something seemingly awful. The character of course later learns that his partner had a very good motivation for doing this.

The story from the Mahabharata we read had a wife throwing her babies into the river despite her husband's confusion. As this is an Indian epic we as an audience know from the beginning the reason, but the king husband does not.

I like the base concept so I was trying to think of a new way to present the story, while still havig the same core backbone of a trust issue breaking two people apart. While I was thinking somehow a Sherlock Holmes short story came to mind, The adventure of the six napoleons.

Basically in this story, a thief has hid his jewel in one of six busts of napoleon before he was locked up. He got out and now must find the jewel. He doesn't know which napoleon bust it is in and he must find the bust's new owners. Meanwhile Sherlock has no idea why people's busts are being broken and neither does the audience.

I want to combine the stories by taking the trust element from King Shantanu and the jewel hiding in pottery element from the Sherlock story in order to create a fairly interesting original story. One major element I will change is to have the audience not find out about the twist until the main character does, to add more suspense.

This is the kind of story I could adapt into one of my short films, hence why I wanted to take another week to plan it out.