Hannah Claydon, Ariel Anderssen and Janey – The Island of Dr. Destructo (Restrained Elegance)

Hannah awakes again in the strange room, the same as the day before, and the day before. Even waking up seems like it is just the start of the dream. She discovers anew that she is locked in metal cuffs and collar, chained to the bed, a surprise discovery this morning like every morning. Then the strangely-robotic slave girls come in to take her for breakfast, which passes in a haze. There is something she knows she must remember, about a mission, a dossier slid across the table to her marked Top Secret, a man’s voice telling her to “Be Careful Agent H”. She remembers this in a languid daze as the slave girls bathe her.
Today she breaks the programming sooner. The slave girls have to restrain her with ropes. She is fighting the conditioning, but it doesn’t matter, because today he is coming. Coming to the island, coming to do whatever it is that she was trying to prevent. Coming to do it to her. She struggles bound and gagged, hogtied on the bed and bit-gagged. She knows she must escape but she hears the sound of the helicopter rotors as he comes into land and it may already be too late….
Hywel’s note: we shot this years ago, and I got part-way through the edit before abandoning it because the footage we ended up shooting didn’t quite cover the story as I’d scripted it. I kept thinking maybe I’d shoot some pick-ups with Hannah next time she was here, and never quite getting around to it. So instead I went back to it with an editor’s eye, rather than a director’s or screenwriter’s. What footage DID we have? Maybe if I swapped the order of the scenes around and used some of the shots are foreshadowing? It all started to come together in a way I couldn’t have done right after we shot it. I’m very pleased with the way it has turned out now, but I needed the distance to see what film was in there waiting to be made rather than fighting the footage to tell a story it didn’t support.