Short film Idea
Setting: Small corner store, Brooklyn or Queens New York
A small man takes care of the store all day. Each night he closes up the shop to "Billy Jean" by Michael Jackson on a beat up 45' player. All his months, the spider watches the man close up shop, as he closes, the store, he dances. he moves about the store. The spider sees how the man and herself are alike. How they move with precision, how they make marks on the floor as they move. The man is shown dragging his foot, making a line in the dust on the floor. The spider admires the man-and the man admires the spider for her beautiful web. He lets the spider live. In secret the spider practices the dance moves, the moonwalk, the spins and the points he has seen the man do over and over for as long as he can remember. One night, the spider works up the courage to show the man his moves while he dances in the store. When she crawls out from the wall, shiny glittery glob of dust on her front leg she sees what is an ambulance being loaded up. The door is locked up with chains from the outside and the lights in the store are off. As she watches, the doors of the ambulance are shut, the emergency lights are turned off and they drive off indicating death(learn code for lights). the spider see this, and lowers her head(close up to all eyes with ambulance lights reflected, driving off). Camera shows her obliquely, then shows her picking up a small jackson style black hat. Cue the opening music from Billy Jean being played by the jukebox player, which has been "left on".. .The spider is shown at a distance, crawling over buttons on the jukebox, some of which are on and others are off(ala the MJ video) and spark on or off as she crosses. she gets over the buttons and is superimposed on a street side(Maybe an illustration inside the jukebox?), doing the moves-as a spider would do them, showing close ups of the pads hitting dust motes and kicking them up, like MJ and some fun visual jokes about silk, webs and spiderman. As the song is nearing the end, the camera pans back from the spider dancing alone in the corner, spotlight by a crack in the back of the jukebox and the shop is shown to be otherwise dark and quiet, the songs fades out as the viewer realizes that its really just a spider, sitting alone in this closed up shop-but she is choosing to dance anyway. Maybe there would be some way to communicate something about appreciating the smaller things and their strength in our lives, that we are part of a larger 'thing' and not just in charge because we want to control what we see. that all these worlds are shared, from our reality to the bugs and further on...
1 comment:
I'm leaving the gender pronouns messed up because I can't decide whether the spider should be a boy or a girl.
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