Proposal

Title/Working Title: Prisoner #1247

Format: Short film

Target Audience: young adults and adults’ predominantly aged between 16-40 and who are into the science fiction genre.

Detailed Description of Product and Narrative: Prisoner #1247 is a short science-fiction film, set in the future, a man with no name is only referred to as Prisoner #1247, or just 1247. He has been taken into custody and is being interviewed by an integration unit called ‘X6-88’. 1247 is under arrested for dealing and being caught in possession with drugs called ‘chems’.

After the droids attempts in making him talk succeed, 1247 says he only dealt with drugs in order to support his son, and was putting his own interests straight at the bottom. After the droid shows very little sympathy for him, 1247 involves words like compassion, love, and heart which despite the droids superior intellect it does not understand these words. 1247 convinces the droid that these words were restricted from him by his superiors as they didn’t want it to be free-thinking and develop emotions like sympathy.

He tells the droid that they’re only using him and one day he’ll be merely a pile of scrap. Angered by this the robot removes it’s restraining bolt and seals the room. This alerts the security guards who attempt to get the door open. X6-88 gives 1247 a chip containing the evidence against him securing his freedom. After giving him some words of advice he activates his self-destruct mechanism whilst opening the door. The film ends with an explosions cutting the feed from the camera and what actually happened is left to the imagination of the audience.

Influences: The overall story is very reminiscent of something out of blade runner where the ‘replicants’ are interviewed by Blade runners and have to answer a series of questions to define whether there human or not. The robot although you do not see it is a resemblance of the mind probe droid that is used to interrogate Princess Leia on the Death Star in Star wars.

It also resembles the ‘Mr Handy’ robots in the video game ‘Fallout ‘The voice of the Droid is influenced by that of a Dalek in Doctor Who.

The number 1247 is the badge number of Detective Cole Phelps in the video game LA Noire. The Droids number X6-88 is the name of a synthetic Human working for the Institute in the video game Fallout 4, the character is very arrogant and shows no sympathy towards his enemies, much like how the droid acts towards #1247. Prisoner #1247’s character loosely resembles Tom Cruise’s character John Anderton who took futuristic drugs called “neuroin” to cope with the trauma of his soon being taken from him, this is similar to #1247 selling chems, that resemble the appearance of the drug, in order to provide a better life for his son. Chems are also what drugs are called in Fallout.

When Prisoner #1247 says “It’s as lows as you can stoop, but it’s that or living in poverty. We aren’t all as lucky as those that sit in the lap of luxury I could work for them like every other poor smuck not even earning enough to eat with” this is a reference to the film ‘Metropolis’ in which many people worked to fuel the lifestyle of the rich people. The Interview style camera angle is inspired by the briefing scene from the game PlayStation game ‘Metal Gear Solid’ in which the camera only shows the main character, Snake.

- The scene involving the Mind Probe Droid from Star Wars (1977)

- Image of the ‘Mr. Handy’ robot from the video game Fallout (2015)

- Shot of the briefing scene in the video game ‘Metal Gear Solid’ (1998)

- Images from the scenes involving the ‘replicant test’ in the film Blade Runner (1980)