A boy fantasizes about a relationship with a stranger in the library, but his fantasies are subverted when the perspective shifts to reveal the girl's true intentions of murdering him. Visually, the film contrasts the brown tones of the library with bright pastels in dream sequences. It explores the disparity between the characters' goals through voiceovers and shifting perspectives halfway through the narrative.

1. Dreamer

2. Synopsis & Logline
Logline: A boy fantasizes about a relationship with a stranger in a university
library, but the girl has other intentions.
Synopsis: Oliver is distracted from his romance novels when a stranger, Alice, sits
down across the library. He begins to fantasize about a relationship with her like
he’s read in his books. When she prepares to leave, he gets up to talk to her. We
then rediscover the day from Alice’s perspective, whose staring back at Oliver has
been the result of an elaborate plan to murder him concocted throughout the day.
She is taken aback by Oliver’s forwardness towards her as her plan to get close to
him is both hindered and made far more simple.

3. Treatment
Dreamer presents the disparity between the two characters’ goals as the central conflict of the film. This is
realised halfway through the narrative when the perspective shifts. The romance genre that had been
motioned to during the first half is subverted as the audience comes to understand the mismatch between
the characters’ thoughts.
Visually, this film will be composed of two distinct colour palettes: the brown tones of the traditional library
setting, balanced out by the natural sunlight moving past the window as the day progresses, and the bright
pastels of the dream sequences. Right before both get up to leave in reality, the sun no longer directly
lights the window and the yellow tones dull to a muted grey/blue to represent Oliver’s notion towards
realising his dream world.
After the initial establishing shots to show the location and distance between them, I intend to create a
somewhat suffocating atmosphere through various close up shots to show the characters’ feelings of
being the only people in the room that matter. Particularly important shots include the transitions from
reality to dream - I’d like to make these smooth with both match cuts and matching the movement of the
camera while passing past an object in the foreground. The transitions back to reality will be harsh cuts as
Oliver is unwillingly snapped back by sounds in the library.
The voice overs are a major component of the film, and Oliver’s will be spoken with an almost dreamlike
whisper so as to accentuate his affinity for romance tropes. By contrast, Alice’s will be harsher to present
her character as such.

4. Moodboard

5. Characters
OLIVER (19) is a naive new student whose only experience with romance has
been in the pages of his books. He’s more content to spend time snuggled in front
of the TV than to speak to groups of people, but he has little trouble in
approaching people he believes are similar to himself.
ALICE (20) is a criminology student with a paranoid way of thinking. If she detects
a threat, no matter how insignificant it may be, she begins to engineer a
convoluted way of opposing it. She can be stubborn with her friends, but is
ultimately always open to new challenges.

6. Colour Palette
We wanted a more colourful palette for this short film, which reflects the Oliver’s colourful
imagination and his fantastical ideas. This references fairytale colour palettes, that of Disney
princess films for example.

7. Sound
The Dreamer will make us of a sound design mirroring the intention and inner life of the
characters using a juxtaposition of dry and rich, dense and ‘airy’. This separation will be
carried out in the foley, atmospheric sounds, and the V.O. During the moments in Oliver’s
perspective the sound will feel lighter and more open, even inserting non-diegetic atmospheric
sounds of a distant forest far away in the mix, barely noticeable. His voice will feel near but
still floaty whereas Alice’s voice will be without much reverb at all – seeming almost lifeless.
The foley will centred on the sound of the books and its pages, almost creating a third
character (or voice) out of these sounds.
Also, the separation of dream and reality will be expressed through a shift of atmospheric
sounds as the actual and fictional library ebbs and flows – the real will be more realistic in the
sense that other people will be heard faintly, chairs being moved, fans blowing, cars passing
outside, etc. – the dream sequences will remove these sounds and replace them with serene
silence and the very distant sounds of a babbling brook and winds in the leaves.

8. Post-Production
Much like the sound design the emphasis of the post-production process will be to
emphasises the separation of mood and character. In achieving this grading will
be most important. We will focus on the ‘duller’, more natural colour tones of
reality throughout the shots of the library. Whenever the dream appear the colours
gets boosted gradually into a pastel colour palette. As the narrative unfolds and
the sinister ambition of Alice gets revealed a colder more desaturated and
completely unromantic colour tone slowly displaces the previous natural (and
pastel) ones.

9. ROLES
Heather - Writer/Director
Katie - Cinematographer/Post-Production
Samuel - Post-Production/Sound
Jack - Production Design/Producer