Pandemic

Pandemic initial ideas:

One of our thriller film ideas was the concept of a ‘pandemic’. The basic outline of this is the idea of the world, or most of the world and its population being contaminated by some sort of virus, changing all living matter into something of a mutation

The idea was to have a film similar to a ‘zombie outbreak’ film yet the team decided that the concept of zombies was too cliché and common, therefore we agreed upon the idea of ‘spirits’ and ‘human vessels’. This idea, we though, has been less explored and would give us the opportunity to play around with characters and especially their motives and aims more.

The film would represent our current time, possibly some years into the future and base around new discovered science turning for the worse. With science and technology continuously developing and changing, new bacteria and viruses are being created, whether as a side effect of the creation of a cure or purposely. This film would be based upon one of these viruses getting out and altering all but very few of humanity.

The film opening would be showing the creation of the virus in a laboratory, later skipping a time period showing what the virus/infection has done. To show full impact of this virus, the film would be set in a town or city, a busy environment where even one person being affected by this virus would result in the rest of the population being effected rather quickly. As well as showing the rapid spread of the infection, this setting would also help in creating a sense of importance of this virus; if the virus was being intentionally created, especially so close to such a large population, one can only assume that the virus was not thought to have had so much power and effect, showing just how dangerous this virus is/can be.

We found the idea of spirits and human ‘body’ vessels an interesting twist on the classical outbreak pandemic film. The basics of this is the idea that once the virus has gotten out and effected the population, these effected people would become something of a spirit, a ghost in search of a body in order to become ‘whole’ again. With most of the population becoming these spirits, the number of humans dwindles, resulting in the spirits becoming more desperate to get to these ‘vessels’, putting the uncontaminated humans in greater danger and less of a chance of survival. 

We wanted to show a hierarchy system for both the good and the bad, resulting in the creation of opposing forces and their ‘leaders’. The leader of the spirits would have been the first ever effected as a human, with the leader of the humans being someone who their population decided would be the strongest and most capable of leading.