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The 8 Yr Olds
The 8 Year Olds - is a horror / mystery / detective movie project. The story is about a police case of a serial killer who kills only 8 year olds. And the movie is about finding who he is and stopping him.
I have a draft of the screenplay that I can let you read. It's uploaded to LBRY. Here it is:
lbry://@BlenderDumbassImagesHostingForTextArticels:c/the-8-yr-old-script-d-4-p-6:8
History of the project so far
The project started as a short film idea what I was 15 or so. It should have been roughly 2012 - 2013. I remember being hired by a kid who I believe was a part of some gang ( one of his friends asked me if I wanted to try cannabis ). This kid hired me to draw on his wall. I remember being fascinated with film by that point. And I was already working for some time on Sinking In The Fire. When I was in their house I talked to them about films and that I want to make a film. They were not the kind of kids that could fit the roles of a little girl and an alien. But I could design something to shoot with them.
So I thought about a slasher monster horror film involving a bunch of teens. The movie would be about a group of teens who are killed by a monster one by one, untill everyone is dead. And in the end the monster should break the ground, rise to unbelievable height and then eat the two remaining characters, while they are confessing to each other that they love each other. As you can tell I was still very much influenced by Steven Spielberg's War Of The Worlds.
Later ( I think some time during Wrong Hate ) I was thinking about extending the story a little bit. I was thinking about using the trope of a detective in a horror film ( like the ones in the Saw franchise ) and make somebody discover the teens and their bodies. And later the monster itself. I thought that it could be done much more realistically than something like Wrong Hate.
"Realistically" meant that at some point I ditched the idea of a monster entirely. I thought about a film that could be shot without the involvement of computers. So I wanted to use practical effects. And therefor the killer should be human or humans.
At school I written a draft scene for the beginning of the film that went something like this: A little 8 year old girl comes back from school, happy. She just turned 8 and her dad made a birthday party. They were waiting for the other kids to come. The father gives her a hug. She lovingly gives him hug back, but suddenly her gaze chances. And we see that the father just inserted a knife into her back killing both her and himself in the process. They fall dead and a puddle of blood spreads beneath them.
I showed the part to an 18 year old teacher lady in our school ( she was a helper that was coming to help teens understand the lessons, or something ). Anyway she could read English very well, so I shower her the draft of the scene. She read it, closed her eyes, started crying, screamed from terror and told me that I was evil. I knew I had something good.
Then I written two drafts of the film that were about a police investigation into deaths of 8 year olds. I remember another 18 year old helper guy. Or perhaps he was 20 or something. He told me that it would be better if the kids that die would be 18 years old. I thought that it would not be better. Because nobody cares if an 18 year old dies gruesomely. Every single slasher film does that. I wanted people to feel so much terror and so much hopelessness that they would never want to see a movie ever again. I was not familiar with work of Lars Von Trier at the time. So I foolishly assumed that I would make the most intense horror film ever.
At that time I thought to explain the murders with a Satanic parents cult, which has a rule that everyone has to kill their own 8 year olds. I thought that it made a lot of sense at first. But then doubted that a mere cult ritual would be a good enough reason for somebody to go that far. So I thought that perhaps the cult leaders could supply everybody with strong drugs that alter their brains in a significant enough way that they become rather unable to clearly think anymore. And that those half zombies would be easy to persuade to kill their own 8 year olds. At that point I didn't ask myself of a motif. I thought that a mere satanism itself was a motif strong enough.
Some years later, during one of the procrastination fazes in the production of I'm Not Even Human, I rewritten the script again. This time with a much more clear motif for the main killer. He had accidentally killed his daughter who was 8 years old. And it shocked him so much that he developed a defense mechanism to think that it has to be done. Therefor he does it. That script was a lot better than the previous few, but it had a lot of plot holes. So I thought I needed something much better.
I was fascinated with films of Christopher Nolan at that time. Specifically with his time manipulations and non-linear editing. I thought that I could perhaps do the film either entirely non-linearly or slightly non-linearly. By slightly I mean I would jump back and forth in time a little bit. And those would not be flashbacks. But the audience, knowing the whole movie, could ( with time ) figure out what goes when. And it would warrant multiple viewings. Of course I would make the film such that a few scenes happen from multiple perspectives sometimes. So people would have strong clues as to when particular parts fit in.
I knew that all of this would require some extreme planning of everything. I couldn't just open Libre Office or Emacs and start typing the movie. It would have too many plot holes. I remember the main issue I had while writing that other draft was that I had to constantly scroll back and forth through the script in order to find bits of information that were returning or referencing each other. It was nightmarish. I wanted a card based ( easily searchable ) system. Where I also could read the movie as a whole if I wanted to.
On I'm Not Even Human I developed a program that helped me with organizing the project.
It had a rather bad UI design, but it was powerful enough for that project. But if you look at what the scenes inside this organizer look like. You can see that it's nowhere near useful at all.
For most people this kind of simple shot-list would be useful. I mean, Blender Animation Studio developed a browser based one called Attract that only supports the most rudimentary shot list too. So I don't blame myself. But the way I wanted to write The 8 Years Olds would require a drastic redesign of the organizer.
If you look into the github repository of the organizer, I started the drastic redesign in July 2018. Roughly just about after the release of I'm Not Even Human. The Package, The Car & The Time Is Running Out was in the middle of the pre-production if I remember correctly. ( Though some stuff could be already shot by that time ).
This is a screenshot from the beginning of 2020 with a bit more polished look of the program. But technically speaking something similar to this was already possible back in 2018. I just cannot find a good screenshot of what it looked like.
Basically I designed for myself a node based story editor. Each node would represent a scene. And you could connect multiple scenes together with lines. So when you want to read the script as it would appear to the audience you could. I thought of the left to right dimension as a time in the world of the film. And vertical would be layers of story happening simultaneously. But of course later I realized that I could do anything I'd like with a node based system.
Technically speaking in the very first implementation of the system there was another concept of an event. An event would be a rectangle on the screen. And you could have multiple scenes within an event. So let say you have a scene where somebody remembers a thing in the past. So you pause that scene and you cut to a flashback. And then you return to that scene. The two scenes in the present would be inside one event. And the flashback scene would be positioned way to the left in a separate event. But later I realized that I rarely used it, so I scrapped the whole idea of events all together.
Using this story editor I was able to construct the movie script that I linked in the beginning of this article. And it seems like the effort of building this software paid off very well. The script is rather amazing.
In December of 2018 in Jerusalem's Cinemateque Cinema they made a single screening of the new film by a Danish director Lars Von Trier ( about which I told you a bit earlier in this article ). By this point I not only knew about him. I was kind of a big fan. I was in the middle of rewriting the script for The 8 Year Olds and was thinking about how should I show the murders so they would be painful. Of course I needed to pause my work, since there was an only screening of Lars Von Trier's movie. And I needed to experience it in the cinema.
The film was called The House That Jack Built and I already heard stories of it's premier at Canes when people came out of the cinema in the protest to the movie. I thought it was something to do with how extremely intense the film is. But later I realized that it was something to do with main character's political views. Which is kind of telling something about today's people.
From the trailer I knew that the main character is a serial killer. And that the movie will be Lars's weird attempt at justifying serial killers. Or something. I mean it's Lars Von Trier, what do you want... Also from the trailer I knew that the movie would include a scene where the main character is shooting kids with a sniper rifle. For some reasons this didn't stop me. I was kind of writing a similar movie. But already from the trailer I felt very uncomfortable. Because in my film deaths of children are obviously bad. And the police is trying to stop the murders. While Lars's film is trying to justify the murders. Therefor it tries to justify murdering children. And this was very fucking uncomfortable. Any who I went into the cinema.
I thought I would be the first film maker to completely loose the sense of discretion to this matter. If you look at any melodramatic movie where children die, it's always less painful and less violent than any other character. And often it's not even shown properly. Because the directors knows how uncomfortable this kind of image could be to the viewer. I thought I could be the one who doesn't give a fuck.
For some stupid reason I expected from Lars Von Trier to censor himself in the similar matter as other directors do. I completely forgot that his previous film was a straight 4 hours long hardcore pornography. Because it dealt with the theme of sex addiction. I was not really surprised, but rather emotionally shocked by the depiction of the violence against the two kids characters in The House That Jack Built. There was nothing hidden. It was visceral and painful and ugly and it went on and on. It was like if Lars tried to screw me personally. I was so utterly shocked, scared and emotionally devastated sitting there that I could not believe that it was even legal to shoot. I would watch a thousand naked kids over this one scene of murdered kids.
What was even more shocking for me was that the audience in the cinema were laughing. Lars would show a mutilated, frozen corpse of an 8 year old boy. And people would laugh. I remember looking around myself. Trying to peer at those idiots with my angry eyes. Trying to make them realize how utterly fucked up they all were. But it didn't help. The movie for them was a comedy. I remember coming back home and seeing that people were utterly offended by the political things the main character said in one scene. And by the "utter brutality" that the main character had to a duck! To a duck? Are you kidding me? Have you completely skipped the scene where two innocent boys were brutally murdered?
This movie sent me into a perpetual depression for at least 6 months. I had to look up the boys that acted in the film to calm down that it was just pretend play. I found a picture of the two boys standing in front of a poster of the movie all proud of themselves. I think they had probably a great fun working on this film. I mean of course they had. But I was so emotionally devastated that I couldn't see any of that shit again.
This changed my movie quite a lot. I self censored myself so much that it was no longer a movie that I had in mind when I was 15. I remembered what Christopher Nolan had to say about Dunkirk and the criticism that the movie wasn't R Rated. He argued that it was way tenser to make a movie like this. The horrible things are still happening. But they are never shown in too much details. This does two things. One: it opens the mind to invent things. And the mind is very good at scaring you. And two: it never gives you a moment where you close your eyes, or look away. And therefor you see more of what's going on. And therefor you are tenser, because what's going on is an utter catastrophe.
I figured that perhaps a lot of people would not watch, so to speak, my film if I would try to beat Lars Von Trier. And I didn't want to beat Lars because I knew how horrible it could be. I wouldn't be able to see my own film. What good is this. So I instead used the Nolan technique. ( And quite frankly I was listening to Dunkirk soundtrack while writing that script ). And I believe I made a very good script. You can still scroll up to the top of the article to read it yourself.
In the script there are two British kids. At some point each of them reference the children scene from The House That Jack Built. I foolishly written that scene for the same two boys that played in The House That Jack Built. Because, well, they are Jewish and I don't think it would be a stretch to call for them into an Israeli production. And because I foolishly thought that I would do that movie as a normal Israeli cinema production. And therefor I could ask for them to be in it. Quite frankly even if I could get them now, they are already too old for the part. So yeah...
Speaking of an Israeli production. The movie was written to be shot in Hebrew ( even thought I wrote in English ). So I had to translate it to Hebrew. And because I wasn't born here, I'm kind of terrible at Hebrew grammar. I called for help to a friend of mine named Mushki, about which you can read here. She, her brother and I finished translation of the script and I was ready to present it proudly to an Israeli film company.
The Package, The Car & The Time Is Running Out was already shot, so I knew that if they ask about the chase scene toward the end of the script I could just show them this and calm them down. So I called one studio. A lovely lady answered me and we talked about me ( not about the movie ) for some time. She didn't even want to see me because my previous film didn't make a million views. I tried a few other companies. I could not reach nobody. Or there was only email available. I sent some emails, nobody ever read them. I was kind of stubborn. I thought all I needed to do was to get I'm Not Even Human to a million views somehow. I tried even buying advertisement for it. But it gave me maybe 10 views. So I wasn't getting anywhere.
Then Mushki called me one day with an idea. ( It was the beginning of 2020. And the beginning of the COVID. ) An idea that grew into Moria's Race. But that's already a story for another article.
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