The Squirrel

The Squirrel

Initial Idea

The idea of having the protagonist hunting killing eating an animal whilst in the forest has been an idea that I wanted to develop into the plot from the beginning due to believing that there would be a sense of ‘dark’ humour about it which is the tone I wanted to set for the entire short film. The idea came from the fact that the woods where it will be filmed is known to have squirrels living there. I found some inspiration from the novel ‘Lord Of The Flies’ by William Golding. This was taken from the idea behind having a pigs head stuck on a pole as a sacrifice for what the boys on the island believe to be a ‘beast.’ Of course instead of having a pigs head it would simply be a small paper mache’ squirrels skull acting as an homage to Golding’s book. This would come into play once the protagonist (Jack) started to go insane and start ‘killing’ squirrels for fun. However this idea was changed due to time limitations.

Second Idea

The second idea involved not calling attention to the squirrel at all and just having a more subtle homage to ‘Lord Of The Flies’ with the squirrels paper mache’ skull placed on a twig in the background which was suggested to me could be coupled with the use of having Jack take a ‘conch shell’ with him or  perhaps he should trip over one and have it flash up on the camera if even for a moment. (The conch shell also featuring as a powerful symbol in Lord Of The Flies.)

However this idea was discontinued as I wanted the protagonist to focus more on the aspect of having to fend for himself and actually catch a squirrel and demonstrate how incapable he is at finding anything worth eating.

Final Idea

As now I had a clear indication of what I wanted to achieve with the squirrel all that was left was finding out how to make it. Fortunately I had access to clay at the time and so decided to fashion a squirrel prop out of clay. this resulted in a full size squirrel moulded onto a stick so that the protagonist could slowly and ineffectively turn the squirrel over a fire. The fur is made out of a fake material from a nearby scrap store that looks a lot like real animal fur. I was able to glue the fake animal fur onto the clay squirrel to make it look more realistic. I also decided to singe the fur beforehand so that it appears that the protagonist has been attempting to cook the squirrel for a while.

I think that the audience will find some form of humour through the concept of this prop and the way in which the protagonist ineffectively attempting to cook and eat it.