A Fortnight's Rest

I'm a huge fan of the film noir genre. I especially love it when people do satires of the Film Noir genre. In most detective stories the usual story is based on someone, normally a girl being a damsel in distress asking the detective for help when involving a loved one committing murder, or if they are murders themselves. The Detective usually takes the case knowing that he can not trust anyone, including the person that comes to him for help because in every case, everyone is a suspect. 

The toughest part of the case for the detective is to stay alive while gathering the information that he needs to understand what happened in the crime and who was involved. The other challenge is to not let the damsels feelings of despair cloud his judgment. Once the case is solved everything goes back to normal, and its just waiting for the next case to come.

Watching enough film noirs, I wanted to tell a film noir story with a different perspective. I didn't want to tell a story that had already been told time and time again. As I was writing the script I thought to myself 'What if instead the detective himself was his own case? What if a situation presented itself that solving the case depended on the detective's life rather than someone else's?' The idea came to me when I read an article in the news about a University student who died and it was believed that a fraternity was involved in the killing. 

As I continued to write the script I came up with some crazy idea's that would make the detective want to pursue answers. The one that stuck out the most was the moon disappearing. Something about the moon represented mystery and danger which is what I wanted the story to be about. I also wanted a couple of comedic elements here and there too just so that the audience didn't get bored. Even with a short film, people can feel like a 5 minute film lasts forever lasts forever if they are not entertained. 

The most difficult part of doing the film was to introduce a more reasonable threat to the detective's life, rather than a disappearing moon and then incorporate the reasons for everything coinciding with one another. That's the toughest part of writing any script. I believe that even the silliest thing written into the script has a point to it, even if people overlook or don't give it a second thought. 

What is also interesting to me is point of view. The story is told from two different perspectives. The first being from the detective and the second from the villain! Both however speak only through narration, while the rest of the characters act through the sequence of events!