Festival & grant deck

Sonder City

An intimate psychological drama — pitched here on artistic merit, for juries, labs, and grant panels.

This audience judges craft and vision, not ROI. Lead with the director's voice and the image, not the budget. Cut anything that reads like a business plan.
02Logline

The film in one sentence

Your logline

[Protagonist] must [want], but [obstacle] — in a story about [theme], set in [world].

03Director's statement

Why this story, why this way

Statement of intent

What personal or artistic question the film is actually asking. Why memory, why this character, why now. This is the slide a grant panel reads most closely — write it in your own voice, not marketing copy.

04Themes

What the film is about, underneath the plot

Two or three thematic threads — memory, trauma, hope, identity, the self as unreliable narrator — and one sentence each on how the story dramatizes them rather than states them.

05Visual style

How memory is made to look like memory

The film's central formal device: the past does not appear as a cutaway or a flashback scene. It surfaces on the character's own face, in the same frame, in real time.

Super 8 / Memory

Warm halation, soft diffusion, gate weave and flicker, gentle lens breathing — memory as something tender and degraded, home-movie warmth.

Nostalgic register

Trauma

No warmth, no softness — heavier vignette, desaturation pulled toward grey, chromatic aberration fracturing the edges. Memory as intrusion, not comfort.

Fractured register

Hope

Minimal distortion, slow breathing, near-zero aberration — the same technique, tuned until it barely disturbs the present frame at all.

Gentle register
Real, working presets from the production pipeline — not a mood-board aspiration. Reference: Bergman's Persona for the base color grade (Kodak 2383 / Fuji 3513DI print-stock LUTs, editorial-glamour CDL blend).
06Mood board

Stills

Still 1
Still 2
Still 3
Still 4
Use real rendered frames from the memory-reveal pipeline test clips if available — a jury responds far more to an actual frame than a reference-image collage.
07Team

Who's making it

Director

Bio, prior work, why this story is theirs to tell.

Producer / key collaborators

Bio, prior work.

08Production status

Where the project stands today

Already built

The face-tracked double-exposure pipeline (2D and 3D topology-aware modes) is complete and rendering real test sequences. Color-grading language established across multiple film-stock LUT directions on real footage.

Still needed

Script stage, casting, financing status — fill in honestly. Panels value a clear-eyed account of what stage the project is actually at.

09Festival strategy

Where this film wants to premiere

Festival / LabWhy it fits
[Target festival 1][tone / track record with similar films]
[Target festival 2][…]
[Development lab, if applicable][…]
10The ask

What this grant/lab funds

$[ ]Amount requested
[ ]Funds this stage of production
Contact

Let's talk

Contact[ Name ]
Email[ email ]
CompanyAural Vision