Treatment

Title: The Fall and Rise of a White Collar Worker

Duration: 5 minutes

Audience: The potential audience the film may attract would be young people aged between 16-24. This demographic is seen to be mature enough to understand the film that has an age rating of 15, the audience should understand the comical elements that are seen as dark for many audiences such as the suicide attempts and the struggles with mental health that the main character goes through.
We have chosen this age because we want to adhere to the genre of black comedy in the strictest sense, so we will make light of themes that are generally considered serious or taboo, such as: depression, suicide, revenge and office work. Our film is aimed at both male and females who enjoy the genre. However, as of yet we haven't got a prominent female role in the film so we may alleviate that problem in order to attract a larger female audience through girls/women having a character they can relate to. Moreover, the target audience will enjoy dark humour and making light of serious situations in order to ease their way through life. We expect our audience to be independent, free thinking and quirky people.

Our target audience is primarily someone who is disillusioned and/or has endured a break up and needs a comedic release from it – to be able to view it in another way than just with sadness. Therefore, as well as giving the audience something for their entertainment we hope that the audience attracted are for educational reasons too. It could be argued, to an extent, we are attempting to attract an audience based on Richard Dyer’s Utopian Theory.

Certificate: 15. Contains references to suicide, strong language and moderate violence.

Distributor: Our distributor is Warp Films as they are an independent production and distribution company fairly locally based. We appreciate the quirky nature of many of their films but even more so the social realism aspect. We therefore feel our project could be an opportunity for them to further widen their arsenal of genres, specifically focusing on a black comedy, which Film4 Productions, a production company Warp often collaborates with, successfully did with the British black comedy/horror 'Sightseers'. Moreover, Warp Films have won a whole host of independent film awards and we acknowledge and appreciate the creative license given to the film makers in order to accomplish this, specifically screenplay, of which a favourite film of mine ‘Submarine’ won an award for and we feel it will be of utmost in importance to our project. 

Synopsis: Ross works in a job that he hates, with people he hates. One morning, his girlfriend (the one thing in his life that he actually likes) informs him over text that she has been sleeping with his boss. He concludes that he will commit suicide. After several failed attempts, he prepares to jump off a building when a man sees him and then runs to the roof to prevent the jump. He intoduces himself as Dr Walter Parkes - a local psychiatrist, who offers him his help, to which Ross accepts. Dr Parkes, after learning of his situation, decides to scrap therapy and help Ross gain revenge over his boss, as his wife left for a more successful psychiatrist. Ross goes into his bosses office and deliberately provokes him until he is punched, which is witnessed by a co-worker, and his boss is fired. After the credits, Ross is shown to have replaced his boss, adopting his mannerisms and wearing the same clothes.

Suggested elements: We have a piece of original music in our film as a friend is recording an upbeat version of 'Raindrops keep falling on my head' that we are going to use contrapuntally when Ross is debating whether or not to commit suicide on the rooftop. Another key element in our film is the use of black comedy; that is we intend to make light of serious situations whilst retaining their seriousness, we therefore intend to leave the viewer with a sense of discomfort and humour, sometimes simultaneously. Another noticeable feature of our film is the subtle and not so subtle homages to various other films and directors that we all enjoy; these include: Fargo, Kill Bill and by extension Sergio Leone, Monty Python,  Fight Club and Edgar Wright ('The Cornetto trilogy').