· A short film

· Working title: Mighty Antlers

· Blog: http://mightyantlers.blogspot.com/

· Genre: Magical realism, satire, hyper violence

· Style: Animated graphic novel

· Themes:

- Aggressive depression

- Nihilism - values do not exist.

- Unexpected challenges – “getting struck by lightning”.

· Initial Inspiration/influences:

- Duel (1971 Spielberg film)

- North by Northwest (1959 Alfred Hitchcock film (crop-duster standoff-scenario)

- The Twilight Zone (American anthology series from 1959 – notably episode: The Hitch Hiker)

- Guy Ritchie (director – editing and style during fight scenes – ‘hyper violence’/caricatured violence)

- Fightclub (themes and views on anarchy in a mind beyond desperation)

The story

• Location: On a broken solitary highway
• Time period: Contemporary
• Hook: A man self-proclaiming to be careless learns a poetic lesson when he drives his car into a deer, which manifests as a human with antlers, intending to destroy the driver and his car.
• Synopsis: A careless, destructive man drives his car furiously down a narrow road, surrounded by a vast forest. The man is in a rather careless and violent state of mind. He encounters a deer in the middle of the road and makes an effort to hit it with his car, for nihilistic and destructive reasons - however he fails in doing so. His failure to hit the deer puzzles and irritates him at first, but he soon begins smiling – as he notice another man with antlers coming out of his head has suddenly appeared on the backseat. After exchanging smiles, the two of them break into a crazed fight on the road. In the beginning the driver is simply smiling in response to the ordeal. His smile emphasises his indifference towards it, but also serves as his initial reaction to the bizarre situation. As the severity of the fight grows, the driver starts fighting back stoutly. However the ‘Antlerman’ eventually defeats the driver, leaving him by the ditch. Then he proceeds to butt the car with his antlers – distorting and utterly destroying it, while the driver is left awestruck, yet alive in the ditch.

Character (the Driver)

- A male in the mid forties

- Heavy set/butch

- Looks tired and warn out. This manifests as a rather aggressive demeanour on his part.

- He is a former travelling tradesman – working on many different construction sites throughout the local geography. He worked his way to a more prestigious, but still more or less middle waged position.

- Now he is an entrepreneur – travelling a lot, to oversee the company’s different business ventures.

- He wears safety shoes and is always accompanied by a safety helmet, as many sites of business projects are hazardous environments.

- His pursued of a profiting career more or less stopped over a decade ago. He has been stuck in the same administrative job longer than he wanted, and has missed out on further promotion and power gain.

- He is living a dragged out existence – spending more time driving between places of business than actual business.

- He feels he is living a bureaucracy farce.

- He is no longer a desperate maintainer of façade. He has gradually slipped into a more careless opinion of ‘community representation’. Around him are dusty remnants of past consideration towards ‘status appearance’.

• Description: The driver is used to driving long distances. It is a part of his job – the car is his office. In his original perceptions, he trusts in human ingenuity and supremacy, and is used to relying on his company car getting him to where he wants to be. Above all, he is motivated by ambitions of power. However his ideals have crumbled lately and his thoughts have lost the simple aims and goals they used to have. What brought him into this disenchanted state of mind might be because of his inability to achieve his desired ambitions, probably because of questionable methods. He is basically in denial when we meet him – a business man, now to old for a fresh start, cheated from reaching his desired prime. He is a man of lost ambitions and motivation. Middle-aged, middle-waged, and not going anywhere. He is exaggerating in his body language and uses his smile to show his indifference towards everything around him – even if it is supernatural. This is a display of his denial, and also his desire to challenge his surroundings. He wants the world to know he doesn’t care. This creates a paradox, as he thereby admits that he cares. He is in fact a self-pitying cynic – sort of a nihilist. He wants his actions to attract attention to himself, and at the same time, he wants to seem indifferent. This places him in a sling of circular logic, which makes his behavior slightly erratic and aggressive when provoked. He makes a virtue out of expressing his indifference towards himself and his surroundings. He comes across as a newly converted anarchist.

Beats