Section 5: Treatment

The film idea that we decided to develop is idea 1-Who Am I? We decided to use this idea because it was a better suited idea to the results that we gathered from our research. The ways in which it was suited better was that the target audience and the classification of 15 were close in age to more than half of the people who completed the questionnaire, also because the more popular sub genre chosen by people was a psychological thriller suited this idea because it is of the same sub genre that people chose as their favourite.

FILM TITLE- Who Am I?

SYNOPSIS
For small town hard working student Stephen Smith, everyday is a formality of itself. The plain everyday life of a teenager...But this night changes his life forever. In this dark deep psychological thriller, Stephen awakens into his reality and shocks not only his town but himself.

TREATMENT

BEGINNING (opening sequence)

The alarm rings and Stephen Smith gets ready for school, he’s wearing his usual plain t-shirt, jeans and trainers, and he leaves the house after saying goodbye begrudgingly to his mother Janet Smith. After a hard days work like usual he arrives back home and goes upstairs (cuts to scene outside) and then a weird sound meets his ears, it wasn’t the alarm on his mobile phone, he was used to that it the morning, this was different,  he was cold and he could hear birds. He sits up and realises he’s outside, he then comes to the sudden realisation that he is completely covered in blood, panicking he jumps up and looks for the source of his bleeding but he cant find it. He comes to the realisation that the blood is not his own, he panics and he starts to run as fast as he can in the first direction he sees. (Opening credits, dark ominous music).

MIDDLE

After Stephen arrives home he locks himself in the bathroom and gets a shower, he tries desperately to get the blood out of his clothes with bleach from under the sink but it doesn’t work. The rest of the night he sits up wondering how he got out last night.

(Cuts to police station in detective’s office)

Detective inspector Derek Thompson walks around the office talking to his colleagues who are all professionally alert, he tells them of a 17 year old girl who was reported missing at around 7:15 earlier that night, he also tells them that he has a gut feeling that this case might be linked with the call that a body had been found in the woods just outside the town. He decides that he will go to the home of the missing girls’ parent and break this possibly soul crushing news to them.

(Cuts to Derek Thompson getting out at girls home)

Derek Thompson arrived at the home of the missing girls parents at precisely 11:45 pm, he knock’s on the door and apologises for the disturbance so late into the night but he has some potentially devastating news for them and he would like to come in as this news is not for the prying eyes and ears of the neighbourhood. He sits them down and tell them of the found body and that they need to come and identify if that’s ok, when they arrive at the forensic lab they are heartbroken as they see the distinctive tattoo their daughter purchased the day of her 17^th birthday 3 weeks ago. Detective Derek Thompson launches a full scale investigation into the murder of the girl and tells her school. The next day Stephen arrives at school and is told of the girl who has gone missing and it was the girl he’d liked for his entire time at school but never plucked up the courage to talk to her, but it was where she was found that linked with his place of awakening the morning previously that bothered him so he starts to doubt his own non involvement in this issue. He also thinks about the weird event this morning when he was followed in a car by a strange bearded man, but he shrugs this off.

(Cuts to a week later)

Derek Thompson sits alone in his office pondering the papers in front of him, all depicting images of dead women all recently taken photos of the last few day’s events that had turned his once clean nice town into a media frenzy hell hole. He goes to the scene of the first murder to try to find some clues like countless forensics before him had tried. When he arrives he sees a tall man roughly mid 40’s standing at the scene, he shouts asking him what he is doing but the man turns and starts to run, Detective Thompson gives chase and calls for back up suspecting this man might be the one he’s after, as he rounds the corner he realises its quiet as he turns to leave the tall man he chased hits him with a thick branch from a tree and the last thing Thompson remembers before the black veil descended was the man stood over him.

(Cuts to hospital)

Detective Thompson wakes in a hospital bed surrounded by his family, he is there for 2 weeks recovering from what was a serious head injury, when he gets back to work he launches a joint operation to the one already in place and this time he has a purpose, an image to look for, a possible suspect.

ENDING

Stephen was on the run, on the run because of the now crushing guilt he was suffering from, he knew not why he was murdering and he could not remember doing it, it’s raining and he’s tired cold and hungry. As he walks along the motorway he cannot escape the feeling of being followed, this same feeling had been with him all month and he kept thinking of the man who had followed him to school a few weeks ago, tall and possibly mid 40’s. A few hours go by when a car pulls up in front of him and an arm appears out of the window signalling him to come forward, Stephen approaches slowly wondering if this is it, finally someone is going to tell him what’s going on, finally give him some answers. He wasn’t scared he had a gun in his pocket, he fingers the trigger not fully trusting his hidden “friend”.

Stephen gets in the car and he realises it’s the man that followed him to school a few weeks ago. Stephen pulls the gun on him and asks who he is and why he has been following him.

The man tells Stephen that he is his father, Paul Smith, and that he knows what has been happening to Stephen. ( music comes on emotional violin) Shocked and sickened Stephen exits the Ford Escort in complete and utter shock, he starts to walk down the road crying overcome by his overwhelming guilt and his new told apparent truth, Paul Smith gets out of the car screaming for his son to come back so he can explain things to him but Stephen persists on down the road wishing the voices in his head would be quiet for 5 minutes so he could start to make sense of it all, but they kept on screaming( music turns deep toned and ominous heightening sense of danger)  ‘kill him, he never cared about you!!!’, his father catches up with him and pulls him to attention but Stephen whips the gun round and points it in his fathers face. He starts to cry, he asks him why he left asks him what had he done, Paul Smith explains and pleads with his son to calm down. Stephen wants to know why, why he has been following him. Paul tells Stephen about their family history and that every generation of male has suffered from the mental disease Schizophrenia and they all started to do things at the age of 18 when it is said that the brain matures properly. Stephen cant believe it that all this time he was so perfect at everything he did and now he knew he was nothing more than a murdering freak, he points the gun at his temple and shouts at his father to leave because he doesn’t want anybody to find him his father pleads with him not to do it that there is a way out, he tells Stephen of his own illness being cured.

Stephen shouts and says that there is no way out, only death is the answer. The voices in his head were getting louder, they were blocking out the noise of the pounding rain, his head hurt he wished the pain would stop, and the voice was telling him “death will become our medication”.

(music stops and only sound of the rain can be heard, voices are still louder) Stephen pulls back the pin with him thumb

He looks his father in the eye “I’m sorry”

(Cuts to woods next to the motorway)

Derek Thompson is at the scene of the first murder when He hears a loud banging crack echo through the trees, he runs in the direction of the noise, when he arrives at the edge of the motorway he looks left and then right and in front of him is a body in the road and a tall man mid 40’s stood over it screaming, crying, holding a gun

Derek pulls out his own weapon and screams at the man to "put the weapon on the floor and raise your hand s behind your head!!!" , the man obliges, Thompson kicks the gun into the road and tells the man to "get on your knees!!!".

Thompson recognises the man as the one who put him in the hospital a few weeks ago, he asks who he is, Paul replies “I’m the man your looking for , the killer, this boy is my son”

Paul looks Thompson in the eye “I killed him”

(music returns and credits end the film)