Short Film Plot Outline - 1st Draft

ACT 1:

In an award-winning tourist town of unique houses, a jealous inventor sits on a quiet solitary hill. He can’t stand the lack of attention on him and his own award-worthy inventions. He decides that the best way to get this attention is to have his own beautiful unique house; however, he’s not good at designing architecture!

In the middle of brainstorming, H3LPR, an early robot model the Inventor created to be an assistant, grabs his attention to fix yet another malfunction. While watching H3LPR bustle about, the Inventor is struck by a brilliant idea; why not use his mechanical knowledge to build a machine to construct a house for him!


With the assistance of H3LPR, the two of them create this new machine in the workshop. Once it has woken, The Inventor just gives it one simple prompt: “build me a house better than the others in town”. While the Inventor relaxes, The Machine wanders into town


While in town, The Machine has to start tackling this task. Step 1: analyse what makes each house “the best”, by observing tourist’s behaviours. Step 2: how could these pieces be combined into something “better”?

Cut to a small montage of The Machine building onto the original home. It is currently unclear where exactly the building materials are coming from, but the components look oddly familiar…



ACT 2: 

H3LPR, being such an old model, has malfunctioned once again. However, the Inventor is so relaxed that he simply doesn’t want to do anything, and waves it off.

It journeys down to the workshop to find some oil to repair itself again. Instead, it discovers that The Machine has evolved, connected with many wires to the rest of the building while the workshop has been transformed. This is no longer simply a house, this is now a larger entity controlling things from the inside.

Before H3LPR can sneak away to warn The Inventor, it accidentally knocks over the oil can and alerts The Machine. It tries to run but is cornered. The Machine scans H3LPR for components, and finds pieces it likes…


Back outside, The House is now a HUGE structure, a mishmash of every building in the town, with mechanical arms reaching out to continue building. It is revealed that instead of just taking the design, The Machine has been taking the physical pieces of the buildings. The environment is damaged, the river has run dry trying to power this structure. The tourists are now enamoured by this new structure while the town architects looks on in disbelief in the wreckage. The tourists just see a shiny interesting new house; they don’t care where or who it took the pieces from. 



ACT 3:

The Inventor remains oblivious. Unbeknownst to him, The Machine had secretly also hooked him up to wires to be part of The House; he no longer even needs to think for himself, now that The Machine is here to do everything for him. During the rumbling of the new house, a bit of rubble falls down and cuts one of the wires. This is enough to jolt The Inventor back into awareness, finally taking in everything that has happened to him, his home and his creations. He scrambles to find a nearby tool to sever the rest of the wires. In severing himself, this alerts The Machine/The House


The Machine walks past the doorway, still connected by wires. It pauses, and turns its head to look at The Inventor; it now has pieces of H3LPR built onto it. This is the final straw: this has to end now. Sensing The inventor’s intent to shut it down, The Machine moves to immobilise/reconnect him to The House. The Inventor has to do a mad dash down to the workshop and find a way to shut down the machine, using his own thinking and ingenuity to evade being caught (this climactic scene still needs a bit of workshopping)


The Machine has been fully shut down, and The House starts to crumble apart and burst into flames. The Inventor survives and emerges from the rubble. He discovers more of H3LPR’s parts and get nostalgic thinking of when he first made it and the joy he used to get from creating something himself, before becoming too reliant on machines. With scraps and the original blueprints he is able to salvage, he’s able to rebuild H3LPR, and the two of them (alongside some new low-risk task machines) assist in rebuilding the town

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