Hello everyone,

just wondering if what follows can be considered a synopsis for a short film, and what you think of it in general?



The weight of a feather

A little hand opens a mailbox. There is a letter inside. The hand takes out the letter and
puts it in a pocket of a nightgown.
The little hand moves again. Tapestry is on all the walls, it fills the room, small parts of blue and brown and green colours make patterns and lines across the walls; all together it is like one big image, almost like a map of a world with the bluish parts looking like water or sky, and the brown and green colours forming hills and valleys and islands here and there. The little hand is touching the wall, twirling small fingers along the lines and different colours, dancing on the map, up and down and around continuing on upwards and suddenly stopping at a photograph hanging on the wall. It is a photograph of a man wearing a leather jacket and pilot glasses.
The hand belongs to a little girl, who looks at the photograph. She stands on her bed in her
nightgown and looks into the eyes of the man. She gets down from the bed and walks out
of the room and into a dimly lit kitchen. The pots and pans and vases and knives form a
silhouette shadow of a city on the kitchen table. The little girl looks out through the small
window above the kitchen sink, out onto the real city outside. It is almost dark outside.
Suddenly the door from outside opens and a shadow is in the doorway. A bright light is turned on and everything in the kitchen looks differently. A woman is checking a mailbox hanging just outside the door, it is empty. She looks inside it with distress and lowers her head. She then walks trough the kitchen and towards the little girl and places several big shopping bags right where the girl is standing. The woman is wearing a tight red dress and a big white fur coat with long bird feathers. She opens the refrigerator. Cold air is coming out of the open refrigerator, the little girl shivers from it, but the woman does not really notice her, she literally has her head down in one of the shopping bags and puts things into the refrigerator. The little girl takes a letter out of her pocket and holds it in her hand. The woman does not see it with her head still in the bag. She picks up an apple and holds it in the direction of the girl. The little girl hesitates. The woman drops the apple on the floor, and reaches down and continues putting things in the refrigerator; still with her head in the bag. The little girl puts the letter back in her pocket. She goes out of the backdoor up a staircase.
The little girl is on the roof outside, still in her nightgown, her head bent down and her hand in her pocket with the letter. After a while she looks up and around. The roof is surrounded by other roofs, and chimneys and pipes are everywhere, creating a landscape of varied form, a scenery of different shapes in different sizes. It is quite dark, but a subtle shimmering light is slowly emerging all over.
A feather flows down close to the girl, she tries to reach it, but it disappears behind a chimney. Another one falls down behind her. A third one appears just off the edge of the roof, she leans forward and tries to catch it, but looses her balance and sways back and forth until she falls over the edge.
A wing is in the air, a wing of a feathered bird, it catches the little girl when she falls.
She lies between the wings of the bird, they stay like this in the air, the bird and the girl, her cheek leaned against the long white feathers. One feather falls off the bird and slowly flows through the air, up and around and down again. It falls through a chimney and appears in the kitchen where the woman in the feather coat sees it. She grabs it eagerly from the air standing with her back to the window. The bird and the little girl is outside, they look like a picture behind the window frame. The woman does not see it, instead she is looking at herself in a mirror and she takes the feather and places it in her hair. She looks at her own face from different angles to see if the feather becomes her. She changes the position of the feather. Happy with the way she looks, she sits down in a chair in front of the window, still with her back to the world outside. The bird and the girl are moving upwards outside, they slowly disappear out of the window frame.
The bird takes the little girl up through the air slowly higher and slowly faster. She holds on to the feathers as she looks around, she still has the letter in her pocket. She takes it with her.

That’s more like a screenplay then a synopsis.

From Collins English Dictionary:

"Synopsis:
A condensation or brief review of a subject; summary”

So a synopsis would be something you put on the back of a DVD cover or a YouTube description.

Bedides that it sounds like it will need a high budget, but still interesting..

I agree with you, that is one way of defining a synopsis, but I´m wondering if there is another one? I´m writing this as an assignment for my portfolio for Tisch and they ask for this:

A story synopsis for a four-minute silent film. Only exterior settings should be used, without description of camera angles. There should be a visual story line and characters, but no voice-over, dialogue, or music (typed, double-spaced, in paragraph form up to four pages).



( I used other than exterior settings - because they are essential for the film)

I´m also planning to make it as an actual film, but as a stopmotion production, I am an architect so I will probably build and/or draw the set myself - with a little help from my friends... That should keep the budget at an affordable level, I think.. I hope!

Thanks for reading it, means a lot...