I Have Been Bitten By A Zombie, Where Is My Wife?

If you put zombies together with Cornwall, Devon, flashbacks, eccentric yokels and an extremely talented screenwriter you get...Rabbit In Your Headlights the new film I have written ;P. This is possibly one of the most exciting times of my life as potentially, a film, I have created and spent time crafting could actually come to fruition. Following the journey of the infected Ryan as he travels across Devon and Cornwall to reach his family so he can say goodbye amidst the ensuing end of the human race due to a zombie invasion. With a strong producing team including Jess Pugh, Sophie Long, Tom Butterworth and myself I feel we can actually make it happen. Working with some talented people has been amazeballs to say the least and I can wait to get on set and work with even more cool people. Writing the screenplay, I tried to make the characters seem as normal as possible so the main character, Ryan, works for a small claims firm in Barnstaple, much like the ones in those shitty ads where the men and women in suits walk around looking all stern and talk bullshit about compensation. Another character, Kevin, is a geek studying at University College Falmouth. The reason for this was to make the circumstances of the invasion and the reactions all the more human among an inhuman world. I decided to put lots of comedy in it because lets face it, having a zombie film where it is all serious is a bit shit really. There is a discussion involving George Clooney and his sexuality, a dance scene (which is becoming a trade mark of my screenplays) and Kevin provides much comic relief. There will be some Terrence Malick style narration just because I enjoy that style and want the film to have some style behind it. The location will be so important as some of the nicest parts of England are in Devon and Cornwall so will highlight Ryan's love for home regardless of his wish to move to London. There will be an emotional ending so people, prepare to get your tissues at the ready as tears will be over flowing down your faces. On another note, I am writing a TV series called From Mumbai to Morden, which follows a young boy named Abhijat, who is adopted by an English family after being abandoned by his mother. It shows his struggles as he and the family try to adapt to each others culture. Lots of Bollywood dance dreams involved. If anyone wants to be involved in the production of Rabbit In Your Headlights or be a zombie or wants to read the screenplay, email me at: igilani89@hotmail.co.uk or Facebook me or tweet at me. My user name is: ibbygilani. I will be doing weekly updates on the film as it gets going as I think film production is hugely interesting to the masses all 6 of you HA! Peace and love. Ib

Bristol, Short Films and the BFI

It has been a long time between posts but I have been an extremely busy man lately. I have been sorting out a move to a big city, developing short film ideas and organising a bid for funding from the BFI.
Chaotic at the best of times. I have a house in Bristol and will move there in October, am looking forward to being able to go anywhere by bus and will probably not get bored. The opportunity to have some decent live acts performing practically on your doorstep is going to be amazing and the amount of media in Bristol will hopefully allow me to fulfill my potential. I am looking forward to it a lot and can't wait to experience something new. Don't get me wrong Falmouth has been a great place to live and I have enjoyed it so much in the three years that I have lived here and I have made some of the best friends I have had here but in order to forward my career, I need to move to a city with a vibrant media scene.
My short film Heavy Water is moving along nicely but at a slower pace than I would have liked. I have now got most of the storyboards developed for it and now need to move onto creating a filming schedule and then hire actors. There are a few theatre companies in Cornwall so it shouldn't prove too difficult to get actors for the main roles. This is a good opportunity to develop my style and my directing voice, which is quite weak at the moment.
I have found a producer to help me develop a bid for funding from the BFI. Jess Pugh has come on board and this will allow me to focus on the creative side of things while having a small hand in actually organising the whole process of bidding. We are aiming to find people interested in the project so if you feel like you want to be a part of something awesome that will change your life forever then contact me. I know I sound like a dodgy quick money making scheme but I want people to get behind this and more importantly add their flair to a neat film.
I have also started to push forward on a film idea called The Life and Times of a Gin Lover. It follows a university student who gets told his Dad is in town and that he should finally meet him. When he does he discovers that he is a gin loving rock star who has no money. The protagonist decides to make a film about his newly found Dad for his final film major. This leads to a tumultuous relationship and a growing relationship with the object of his desire. It is sounding good at the moment and is moving more towards the comedy genre than anything I have ever done before. Exciting times ahead for me and I can't wait to visit the Watershed regularly in Bristol and enjoying everything they put on.

Ib

It's Dark In This Place

It has been a while since I last blogged. Truth is I have been away in various places over the last few weeks and in the meantime have been working heavily on some short film ideas. The best of them is a horror idea, which I ACTUALLY plan to shoot within the next month. It is called Heavy Water and follows a man named Tom, who is a heavy drinker. One day after a meeting with his ex girlfriend he goes on a particularly heavy binge before heading back home to find more booze. He falls asleep and then wakes up in a horrific, dark hallway where there are loud whispers, babies crying, vicious creatures and most importantly darkness. After this dream, Tom sees that he needs to deal with an issue that has plagued him for years. This is possibly the most sinister idea I have ever had, which I think stems from more exposure to a plethora of horror films in recent months. It is usually a genre I don't have much time for but it has started to grow on me and I find the idea of scaring people within the space of ten minutes in film quite a cool challenge. There is a synopsis/step outline written, so please read it and give me feedback. Also if you are interested in working on the project give me a shout at igilani89@hotmail.co.uk

I have a screenplay written from about 9 months ago called Reading My Dreams and I decided to revisit it recently. I still think it is quite a strong idea and a funny screenplay but it definitely needs work. I would quite like to shoot this in a few months as well as it would involve a lot of fun scenes. For example a man dressed as Lady Gaga, someone running away from a tiny boulder Indiana Jones style, cardboard Transformers and Batman versus The Joker on a rooftop. Again if you email me I will send you a copy of the screenplay and please give feedback, it would be greatly appreciated.

Until next time.

Ib

Homogenic

Now that I have finished uni life has become a lot slower and I have become extremely relaxed. This has been reflected in the music I have been listening to. Bjork's masterpiece 'Homogenic' has been on a constant loop through my speakers. I then found myself dreaming of being alone in an icy landscape with the stars beaming down on me and my breathe clearly visible. I hear something scuttling in the distance. I walk towards the sound and the song 'All is Full if Love' starts to play. As I walk further on, I notice a small light in the distance so I run towards it. The closer I get, the brighter and larger the light gets, the song plays louder. I run faster and faster as the sun starts to rise. I get to the edge of a cliff and realise that I have been following the sun rise. The music stops and I turn to my right and see a doorway standing in the middle of the ice. I slowly move towards it and open the door to a pathway, which has hedges placed either side of it. At the end of the pathway there is an impressive looking spiderweb, which is coated in icicles, making it look like a large snowflake. I break a part of the web and climb to the otherside to another doorway. The door opens for me and the song starts again. I end up on the ice again and lying in front of me is a bed of roses fully blossomed despite the cold.

This image overwhelmed me massively and got me thinking about the relationship between music and images. This lead me to coming up with the idea of making an audio visual film utilising Bjork's 'Homogenic'. The film will follow a young girl named Joga, who is abandoned by her parents in the snow of Iceland. She makes artificial flowers as a way of making money and surviving. Eventually she is taken into an orphanage where she meets a young boy. They become fascinated with each other and eventually developna relationship with each other but the boy is taken away to be housed with a family. Joga makes it her mission to find the boy and travels across Iceland to find the boy.

This will be one of the most rewarding and challenging screenplays to write but I am looking forward to it.

The Chain

Yes this post has something to do with the awesome Fleetwood Mac song but more on that later. First of all, Otis is finished! It feels like such an achievement to have written a feature screenplay and one that I actually feel is reasonably good. I'm going to miss writing about all of the characters, especially Laurence, but now is time to move onto...more screenplays. First on my list is to complete the trilogy, yes Otis is part of a trilogy. The trilogy is more about theme than actual sequential story lines. It is called the Road trilogy, where the main characters go on a journey in relation to losing the most important woman in their lives. The other two films that complete the trilogy are Rabbit In Your Headlights and Eye For An Eye.

Rabbit In Your Headlights is the next tick box on my screenplay list. I'm looking forward to setting my own deadlines for that film and having the time to give my work to people with them not being rushed for feedback. Devon and Cornwall won't know what hits it when zombies arrive and bring carnage to the sleepy west country. I want to avoid having comedy involved in this film and it be really emotionally involving for the audience.

Eye For An Eye, the Western I spoke about in an earlier post, has it's opening scene. I'm so excited by this because it just sounds awesome to me. Here it goes: The saloon is completely rammed and the local drunks are shouting abuse, singing songs and smashing glasses. The anti-hero steps into the saloon and The Chain starts to play but it's only instrumental. He asks for a drink but the barman has to have a look for it when one of the drunkards starts on him. The protagonist tells him that he shouldn't have done that. The drunkard smashes a glass on the table and says that he wants a fight. The protagonist turns his head sharply and everything goes slow motion. The bass kicks in and he starts to tear apart the bar, beating up and killing everyone in the saloon before leaving. The barman returns with everyone unconscious. We see the protagonist riding off in the plains. This is going to be a sprawling epic and highly stylised. Going to have to watch a lot of zombie films and Westerns for research in the coming months. Not such a bad thing.

Woooo. I Tell Ya Boy, I'm Never Gonna Be Too Old to Boogie

SECOND DRAFT - Otis needs a lot of work to bring it up to a level, which I will be happy with although I fear I will never be 100% happy with the end product but at some point I'm just going to have to leave it be. Reading over the dialogue again showed me that is an area that I vastly needed to improve on. There was no back and forth between the characters resulting in monologues each time people speak. The description is too minimalistic and doesn't set the scene well enough therefore then screenplay loses a lot of it's value. The pacing was uneven, which is something I knew was wrong as soon as I finished Otis the first time around. Jordan needed to be changed, his character was all wrong and became somewhat schizophrenic. I want him to come across as a bad father but not a bad person. In order to do this I need to make sure his work ethic is made clear because work is his only escape from thinking about his wife or eventually Otis running away. I am going to place more emphasis on the Wizard of Oz because it sort of appears and then whimpers away by the end of the screenplay. These things are to be expected from a first draft and I am learning every day that I work on Otis. I am also learning a lot from watching a lot of films. Understanding dialogue and what makes good dialogue is what is going to take me to the next level. One thing that I am pleased with is Laurence. I enjoy his character so much and feel he came across well. I am adding another layer to his character, which is to show him as what he is and not necessarily what he wants to be seen as. What I am talking about his him being an old man, who is feeble and vulnerable. I drew from what my granddad who says that he can still do a lot at the age of 75 but when push comes to shove, he needs a lot of help with certain tasks now. His pride gets in the way of letting someone help him out.

The second draft of Otis should be done by Tuesday, so if anyone could read it and give me feedback that would be awesome. I will pay you in kind, probably a drink or two.

I am have also developed an interest in making music videos as well. I always watched them on The Box, Smash Hits or more prominently MTV 2. A good music video usually makes me like songs more when really it should have no effect on it whatsoever. I have gone as far as emailing a band a synopsis for a music video idea I had a few weeks ago, no harm in trying. This is my favourite music video at the moment:
TV On The Radio - You by doyukno

Enjoy

IG

Do You Feel Lucky?....Punk! Yes I Do Actually, Thanks For Asking

OTIS HAS BEEN FINISHED!!!! Well, the first draft has anyway. It took a good 5 or 6 weeks to get the whole 92 pages down but it was a wholly enjoyable experience and just further affirmed my aspirations to do screenwriting as a profession. Eventually I want to build on that by becoming a writer/director. Making a story come to life was a really rewarding feeling and linking everything throughout the screenplay made me feel good about Otis. The first draft will probably be awful but that is why it is the first draft. I am hoping that by the fourth or fifth draft, Otis will be fully functioning and appealing to those who read it, which is the most important thing. I will enter it into the Nicholls Fellowship competition on the 2nd of May, which will only be a second draft but there is no point holding back, I want to get my name out there and I will have nothing to lose apart from the competition fee ;)
Now I move onto my ZOMBIE film, which will be my next writing project. I have been anticipating doing this screenplay whilst writing Otis. Coming up with ideas for it has been refreshing and I have a feeling I am going to have even more fun writing it than Otis. I hope Rabbit In Your Headlights will be a whole hearted zombie romp with reasonable amounts of gore but more importantly a proper story. I hope to have it finished by the end of July, so not long for those of you waiting with bated breath (I know you are out there some bated breath).
I have done an unimaginable thing. I HAVE COME UP WITH A WESTERN!!! I despise Westerns apart from a couple but those are masterpieces. It will be about a lone cowboy who is going around towns killing sheriffs in revenge for a sheriff raping and killing his wife. A sheriff from far out follows his trail and tries to catch the mysterious killer but comes to respect him and defend him. All happy stuff!
IG

Strange Sci-Fi and Many Competitions

Since finishing my dissertation, I have plenty of time to focus on what I really want to do, which is write screenplays. Over the last few weeks I have been tinkering with the first 20 pages of Otis, which I feel flows a lot better now but still needs a lot of work. I am struggling with structuring my arguments and mostly not making them monologues that just go back and forth between characters. I also need to work on my descriptions of location but I feel as though the more I write, the more confident I will become with how I describe the surroundings and atmosphere created from those places.

I recently stumbled across a couple of screenwriting competitions that look very appealing. One of them is the Gee Nicholl Fellowship run by the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences. The deadline is the 2nd of May and the prize sounds extremely rewarding. I think I will be entering Otis into a few competitions and just see what happens. There will be no harm in trying, that is the way I look at it.

Now onto my sci-fi idea, Stranger. It has changed a lot since I last mentioned it. It is now developing into an environmental, three-dimensional, thriller. I have had a large amount of scenes come into my head in the last week and now it is just a case of putting them together to form some semblance of a working idea. I have the beginning of all three realities, the end of two realities and a working flashback. I just need to find a connection between all of them and work out all the details.

Here are a few scenes that I have come up with:

1) The stranger wakes up in a space station and gets his clothes on. He goes searching around for his crew mates but he can't see anyone. He looks outside to see a colleague in his spacesuit, hanging from a wire attached to the space station. He gets his spacesuit on and goes out to find that no one is actually there. He runs inside and can't find anyone. He goes to push the emergency button when a hand grabs his arm. When he turns around he sees that it is his best friend.

2) The stranger is working in an office just doing his paperwork when he looks outside the window to see a massive wave hitting London. A panic hits him and he asks his colleagues to look outside but when they do, nothing is there.

3) The Stranger is walking down a long and winding road with trees running parallel to it. He sees a light coming from the end of the alley and he eventually reaches it to see a pale looking woman standing there. He approaches but as soon as he does blood starts to pour from her clothes and she lets a massive scream. This then moves onto a horizontal vertigo shot.

I am enjoying the process of putting scenes together and making the idea work. It is fun times.

IG

Otis And The Yellow Brick Road

Otis has begun his long journey to becoming a man...well at least on paper he has. I am moving steadily towards having the first act completed by tomorrow. Working on my dissertation has taken my head away from the world of Otis and I somehow fell out of love with the idea for a little while.

I went searching for a lot of inspiration in my head and found nothing. Left with nothing else to do to avert my crisis in confidence in the idea I decided to watch clips from a related film The Wizard of Oz. This inspired me to think of the way in which I was going to write Otis.

So far the writing process has been extremely fun and rewarding. The best part about it has been seeing my idea unravel as the pages go on and all the characters/surroundings come alive.

The only issue I've had with it so far is trying not to be too wordy as the limit is 80-90 pages. It is definitely going to be hard to restrain myself from getting carried away.

If anyone wants to read the first 8 pages then please let me know and I will send you a copy or you could wait until the first 20 pages are done.

IG

Power

"No one man should have all that power." So far in 2011 no film has affected me more than Black Swan, directed by Darren Aronofsky. With themes of perfection and fighting to be the best at something you spend most of your time doing, the film really strikes you emotively and haunts you with it's combination of beauty and ugliness. This made me think about other industries where people strive for perfection and the result is beautiful yet what got them there was quite ugly. There were two industries that I could think of: Acting and Art. So when I saw the film Paranormal Activity and instantly the idea of murdering to get to perfection came to the forefront of my mind. Even though this is an idea, which is played out in Black Swan, I wanted to develop it and make it the main theme of a film. So out of this came two ideas, one being called Power, which features an artist who has been struggling for a number of years to make an impression in London. When he is walking through Hyde Park, someone attempts to mug him but in the struggle the artist murders the attacker. When he steps back from the aftermath the artist sees beauty in the murder scene and feels the urge to paint it. This painting becomes massively successful and he then feels pressure to gain perfection in his paintings so he has to keep on murdering people to create the perfect painting. As he gets more and more obsessed, colour starts to fade from his vision before culminating in him ending his life in front of the woman he has been pining over.

The other idea is about an young college student, who by chance becomes a megastar when he acts in a successful film. He gets all of the perks that come with being famous but he can't get enough of it. So this drives him to insanity before he loses it all. There is a lot more to this idea but it all needs to be worked out before I lay it all down on here.

Stranger is slowly coming together and now emerging as one of my stronger ideas but is still a long way from being finished. Exciting times ahead.

Rabbit In Your Headlights

It's been a little while since I have posted anything on here due to the fact that I have purposefully tried to narrow down the amount of ideas I am working on at any one time. This last week though I have seen myself get drawn into an idea, which involves zombies. I am not a massive fan of zombie films in general but as always I always like to feel I can contribute something different to a specific genre. With this film I have decided to look at the zombie world from the perspective of someone with a young family who has a decent job and loves life getting infected. The film will deal with the gradual process of coming to terms with the impending nature of his plight and reflect on enjoying life while you have it. The idea took inspiration from non-zombie films such as: Diving Bell and the Butterfly (Schnabel 2007) and Room in Rome (Medem 2010). Both these films deal with reflection on what you have lost and gaining something positive from your losses, which is what Rabbit Caught in the Headlights is also about. This film has potential to be shot fairly soon as it is set in the UK and won't rely too heavily on a massive budget as story is the focus. I feel as though I am getting more and more inclined to write stuff about England as I grow as a screenwriter and develop. Here is a short synopsis, hope people like it:

Ryan lives in Devon with his wife Arlandria and three children. Ryan works as an estate agent but has always had ambitions to be an actor. Ryan and Arlandria have a massive fight and Ryan drives away in his car for a couple of hours when he runs over a man in the country rain. He gets out of his car to check on the man only to be bitten by the man, who has no skin on his face. Ryan goes back to his house and reconciles with his wife but decides not to tell her about himself getting bitten. The next day Ryan goes to work where he meets a new girl called Natalie. Zombies break into the office and make their way through the people as Ryan and Natalie escape into Ryan's car. They travel across the county as Ryan reflects on opportunities lost, memories in his life and sees future visions of himself killing people. Ryan and Alice reach Arlandria and the children amongst a swarm of zombies. Natalie tells Ryan that it's time that she goes now and sacrifices herself so that Ryan can say goodbye to his wife before he turns into a fully fledged zombie.

OTIS is well on it's way with an improved step outline and with script writing about to commence. I am extremely excited about the way it has moved forward. If anyone wants to read the improved step outline for Otis or the full synopsis for Rabbit in your Headlights then drop me a line.

Ib

Beach Chair

A new film idea came to me a few weeks ago and it was unusual in the sense that when it came to me, I got emotional about it myself. The idea involves reminiscing over the good times of your youth and looking over things with regret. This is something that I no I will probably not be able to avoid in my own life, but if I go for the world and come back with dirt I know I will have at least tried.

The film starts off with an elderly man, who is dressed in a bathing suit, arriving on the beach and setting up his favourite beach chair. A young boy comes over to the man and sits right next to him. He asks the man what he is looking at and the man tells him he is looking at what could have been...cue the entire film in flashback involving the man in his childhood, at school with the girl of his dreams and we follow him throughout his life as he deals with all that life throws at him, including missed opportunities but also the successes of his life. The film will end with the old man achieving his dream of sitting on a beach chair while crying as the young boy fades away.

This idea is possibly one of the more artistic ideas I have had. A few kinks need to be worked out but all in all it is shaping up nicely. I want to focus on the way the elderly look back on their past and create an effective film out of it. Up was a film that did this well but did not go deep enough into key stages of the protagonist's life, probably because it was a kids film. You may be thinking why a Beach Chair but I heard the reference in the Jay-Z song of the same name and it sort of stuck with me. I like the idealism of a beach chair, in that you can relax in front of the ocean and underneath the sun with the world at it's most peaceful.

Otis is finished in the planning stages, I have reworked the step outline and now I feel like I am ready to write it, I just need to be signed off by my tutor and away I will go.

One last thing to mention is that I was considered for a TV programme development internship at NBC/Universal. I didn't even apply for that job but apparently they thought that my CV looked good enough to be considered and that I made it to the last 5. Pretty chuffed that they thought I might even be close to be good enough for that position. Hopefully I will get a similar position one day.

Keep On Running

Another week has passed and a lot less sleep has occured than it did in previous weeks, mainly because I had a dissertation draft to hand-in. I had a tutorial at uni for which I had to produce a step-outline, a detailed scene-by-scene list. I had this written out on my bedroom door for a long time, with colour coded cards for each act of the film. This helped me to have fresh eyes look at it every morning and move scenes around or take scenes out if they didn't make sense. When I went into the meeting I felt quite nervous that the outline was going to be lambasted by my tutor but the reaction was totally the opposite. I was told that it was a quite brilliant piece of work and my tutor even admitted to getting emotional towards the end of reading it. I gained a great deal of confidence from this, for once, I had a film idea, which has garnered universal appeal from all that have read about it and discussed it with me. Confidence in my work, is something I have never really had and is something I have been told I will need to have in order to build my way up the ladder. With me giving my work to people to read more often, it has enabled me to be able to talk about my ideas openly and listen to their reactions. With this in mind I have been able to mold my ideas into far better pieces of work and Otis has become first of, hopefully, many fruits of labour.

If anyone would like to read my step-outline just drop me a line and I will send you a copy.

Next week I shall be posting another new synopsis, which has seen me deviate from my usual style and is a bit of an experiment.

IG

Stranger

An idea that I have been toying with for a long time now is inspired by films such as: Blade Runner, Inception and Mr. Nobody. This is going to be my labour of love for years to come while I write other screenplays purely because it will be a complicated piece involving different realities that I would want to get just right before having any chance of even trying to make it.
The film will involve a man not knowing who he is or where he is and arriving in the future where society is in ruins. He fleets between different realities without knowing why and has a recurring memory of himself waking up in a room with his dead wife and son on the floor.
The soundtrack will have elements of Vangelis' score for Blade Runner and I want it to be quite a philosophical film, which will encourage people to think about the film afterwards.
I don't want to give too much away about it purely because I want to develop it more before getting feedback on the idea.

As for Otis, it is coming along nicely and I have now sorted out the ending for the father, which I'm hoping will keep the film's quirky style while completing an emotional journey perfectly. Trying to stay clear of comparisons to Forrest Gump has been difficult but I think that film relied too heavily on sentiment and therefore ended up feeling like you were being hit in the face with a wet fish. Otis will be more reliant on creative means to draw the audience in rather than sappy storyline and hopefully it will turn out to be a lovenote to all things creative and achieving within your means. I'm definitely looking forward to the writing process of the film but in the meantime planning is the name of the game.

IG

Otis

I'm in the process of setting up a screenplay for my final year practical project at uni and the idea that the tutors and I chose was Otis. It's an idea that came to me when I was sitting on the bus on the way to uni and I saw a black kid sitting there who looked lost in life. Straight away a fully formed idea spouted from that one instance and I had to take it to my tutors. When I pitched the idea to my course leader and a film maker the response was instant and extremely positive. I got a green light, a huge boost in confidence and for the first time a feeling that I belong in the world of screenwriting.

Now onto the important bit, the idea itself:

Otis is a film about soul, which incidentally, is one of my favourite types of music. Artists such as; Otis Redding, Bill Withers, Marvin Gaye, Dinah Washington, Etta James, Sam Cooke and Jackie Wilson fill my day regularly and play a big part in the story of Otis. I want to encapsulate the feel of the music into the screenplay and enrich the vision I am creating. The screenplay will develop into a struggle between father and son and the journey they both go on whilst taking a similar route. I am posting the synopsis, please let me know what you think of it. I will be updating people on my progress and posting pages of my screenplay along with a whole host of ideas on here as the months go on.


Ibby


Otis
The protagonist of the film is Otis, a chubby African American 15 year old, who lives with his dad and his two sisters, who are younger than him. He goes to school and every day has his school lunch is stolen, despite it being mainly turkey mayonnaise sandwiches. He is always told by his teachers that he is too dumb and that he is going to get a dead-end job and is never going to be successful. He hangs around with his one and only friend Trevor, who is an avid comic book reader that barely speaks. The inciting incident in the film is when Otis gets home from school one day and is lambasted yet again by his dad for being stupid, but this time he mentions that it was his “stupid mother's fault", who died when Otis was 5. By this point, Otis has had enough of everyone telling him that he is too dumb to do anything, so he leaves home. He starts his adventure to Kansas, inspired by his love for The Wizard of Oz, and walks with his CD player in hand and his two favourite CDs; Marvin Gaye’s What’s Going On and Cold War Kids’ Robbers and Cowards. He moves from town to town writing poetry in his notebook.
He first meets an elderly man, named Laurence, who invites Otis to his house and talks to him about old Motown records. Laurence comments on his name being the same as Otis Redding but Otis does not know who he is, so decides to give him a go. Laurence tells Otis to listen to some records and that he will appreciate music more when he listens to it on vinyl. Otis spends the day with him just listening to old records before Laurence gives him one of the few CDs he owns - Otis Redding’s Greatest Hits - to go away with. Laurence notices Otis has affinity for writing poetry and he decides to read it. Laurence has tears running down his face and tells Otis to see his friend in the publishing industry but Otis decides not to take it and moves onto the next town.
Here he meets a group of young guys, who are up to no good but take a liking to him. They hang with him but he barely says anything as they wolf whistle at girls, drink alcohol and shoot birds with their pellet gun. When night arrives the guys give him some money and to meet one of their friends in an alley way to pick up a bag of sugar. Otis doesn't question it and goes along to do the deal. They next ask him to enter a building when it is shut. Otis arrives at the building where there are lots of security guys, but gets scared so decides to run away with the gang chasing him.
He moves onto the next town where he meets a girl his age that is playing on the swings. She smiles at him when she first sees him, which makes Otis feel warm inside. The two spend the day having fun in the park and they are holding hands by the time the night arrives. The girl’s white father arrives and threatens Otis to leave his daughter alone because he doesn’t like his kind of person. This forces Otis to run as fast as he can but he gets out of breath and just sits to write poetry before falling asleep.
The next morning a young man wakes Otis up and asks him what he is doing there and Otis says that he is just chilling out. The man asks if he is homeless and Otis just goes with it and says yes. The man takes Otis in his car to a centre for young people who are homeless. The second turning point is when Otis meets so many people like him in the home. He enjoys his stay there and feels like he is achieving something by helping people, but tells the man that he hasn't reached Kansas yet so he walks away from the place.
The climax of the film approaches as Otis reaches Kansas and his dad arrives at the same time. Otis see an elderly lady crossing the road just as his dad is about to reach him. There is a fast car approaching the elderly lady, Otis decides to help the lady but doesn’t move fast enough so his last resort is to push her out of the road and take the hit himself.

Otis wakes up in the hospital to see the man that took him in, standing in front of him. He gives him the newspaper to see that Otis is on the front page and is described as a hero. He starts to cry because he has finally achieved something. There is a knock on the room door and it is a publicist from the literature company, who have decided to publish some of his poetry but Otis declines because he just wants to hang with his friends and write poetry for people that care and listen to old Motown records on vinyl. Otis's Dad comes to the hospital but doesn't tell Otis that he is there and instead leaves him a note saying that he would have made his Mum proud.

The film ends with Otis saying that from now on he is just going to sit on the dock of the bay.