Straight Home

For my short film, I am going to show an autistic boy who has a hard time making decisions. After school when he finds his train has been cancelled, he has to find another way to get home. The intention is to alter the emotions and give audiences a tension frenzy. I want the audience to highly respond emotionally to Maxwell’s situation. I will give audiences an understanding of how overwhelming it is for something little to happen with autistic people. I want to experience making a short film for the first time and I am educating society about autism.

The purpose of this production is to show how the changes of an autistic person's routine can have an overwhelming and negative consequences on their mindset, because they are used to their usual routines and don’t like change. I have gotten stressed about some changes in life and I would like to portray some similar autism traits in film production. I was impressed on how the use of special effects and sound effects are used to show autism traits in similar films and I would like to explore how I can use those special effects in my video editing program. The story I want to tell is that some unexpected changes can happen in life and regardless if it has consequences on people, they sometimes need to find a way to deal and adapt to those changes.

I want to create something suspenseful and dramatic. I want the audience to feel surprised and curious on how and why this is happening in the first place. I want them to question the insight of autistic people. I want them to experience what it’s like for an autistic person to go through those unexpected changes and to give the audience an emotional response. I will create this effect through the use of close up camera shots of Maxwell’s fingers and ripple, blur and brightness effects and white noise sound effects to emphasise how overwhelming the situation and environment is for him.

I want the story and production to be presented as a short, low budget independent film. With the use of the ripple, blur and brightness effects, it will emphasise the loudness of noises, and with the use of sound effects, it will show that multiple noises for autistic people can become one big and distorted noise which is unsettling and stressful for them. Ultimately I want this production to be educational and entertaining for the audience. I want them to be excited and curious about what Maxwell does after his daily routine of riding the train home is interrupted, but mainly I want them to be left with a better understanding about life as an autistic person.