Statement Of Intent: 4 Inches Of Danny Jefferson

For my Capstone project, I will be making my longest, most ambitious film to date: Four Inches of Danny Jefferson. I have chosen Jason McKahan as my Capstone director. I'll be moving on to graduate school after Shepherd, and this might be my last chance for a while to make a film. I've had this screenplay drafted since July of 2013, and it's received quite a bit of polish as a result of continuous drafting.

The movie will tell the story of Danny Jefferson, a nerdy college dropout (after only one semester) with a taste for collecting toys and drinking whiskey. When Danny's father dies suddenly, he is convinced to return to his hometown and attend the funeral, much to the ire of his stepmother, Beth, that's only three years his senior. When he gets home, old feelings for his high school sweet heart, Jenny, come back, complicated by her revelation that she is pregnant with his child. These factors come together to a point that Danny is forced to grow up.

I plan to also integrate some fantastical elements, such as Beth, the evil stepmother, turning into an 8-bit dragon during a wedding reception. Animation for this sequence would be a simple After Effects job with image manipulation and particle effects.

Rough idea of the 8-bit Dragon, wings would flap in final version.

So far as tools, I'm looking at editing in Premiere, doing titles and the aforementioned dragon scene in After Effects, and composing a soundtrack in LMMS's synthesizer, allowing for a mix of realistic synthesized drums and bass guitars with synthesizers that emulate the sound of Game Boy to fit with the overall nerd-culture feel of the film.

A lot of nerd-culture films and TV shows are either overly referential (Scott Pilgrim) or somewhat reductive (The Big Bang Theory). I want to make a film that integrates nerd-culture in a way that acknowledges the mainstreaming of nerd culture. Research into the mainstreaming of nerd culture would be necessary. I will also be researching the Mono-myth, as I hope to explore how a melodrama can fit into or not fit into the criteria of Hero With A Thousand Faces, despite not being a mythology per se.

A theme of the film is the idea of belonging. Danny proposes to Jenny with an action figure because he attributes a sentiment of belonging to the toy that he wants to attribute to his new family. The use of this theme in other films would be worth looking into.

Of course, to link this work to later research I have planned for graduate school, I'd like to explore Linda Williams's work in the idea of "body genres". Here, the "body genre" is melodrama, as opposed to horror or pornography. Although, Jenny's employment as stripper, and Beth's transformation into a dragon could allow for some degree of crossover, even if the dragon looks cartoonish.

Despite a 35 page screenplay at the current draft, I think that, because I have most of the cast already picked out and committed, I can begin shooting almost immediately, and burn through most of the script in a minimal amount of time. Editing will be very straightforward, and I predict that the soundtrack can probably be composed in a day or two. This gives me plenty of time to do research on the topics outlined above. I am confident in my ability to make this project work well and be well thought out.