2.Main Content
Digi Shorts
Jonathan Balgrove
Jonathan has been selected by Screen East with the project Jerome’s Weakness
Shot as a documentary, we follow a team of scientists who have captured a ghost boy.
The film will take the form of a documentary account of an imagined event. It will be filmed entirely at one location, a large, enclosed interior that functions as a makeshift laboratory, within which a second interior is constructed, a replica of a boy’s bedroom. Like a documentary, the piece will be edited together from several main sequences:
* An interview with the scientist Simeon Jerome;
* An interview with the parents of the deceased child;
* CCTV footage of the interior of the child‘s bedroom;
* Digitally processed footage “revealing” the presence of the ghost;
* Documentary footage of the scientists and their experiment.
Storytelling craft will work to sell the documentary conceit. From the audience‘s point of view, it will seem at first as if the boy is desperately sick. The exact nature of his “illness” remains mysterious. Working from the central premise “What if ghosts were real?” each point of view reveals a different aspect of the story: the arrogance and vanity of the scientist; the desperate hope of the parents; the sadness and fear of the child. Digital manipulation will be used to visualise the presence of a ghost as a “scientific” reality, while a hand-held “documentary” camera will capture the pressure-cooker atmosphere of the lab.
As Dr Jerome’s team fire up their machines in preparation for a sinister “transplant” procedure, the question is posed: how far would you go to save the one you love?