All the Seconds Are Wrong
A retired watchmaker's quiet morning coffee is disrupted by flickering realities and a newspaper from tomorrow, forcing him to question the very fabric of time in his favourite café.
# All the Seconds Are Wrong
**Format:** Short Film / Anthology Episode | **Est. Length:** 10-12 minutes
## Logline
A meticulous, aging watchmaker, grounded in the precise mechanics of time, discovers that the local coffee shop is a pocket of temporal instability, forcing him to confront a terrifying reality where the past and future bleed into the present.
## Themes
* **Order vs. Chaos:** The conflict between a man who has dedicated his life to the precise, predictable measurement of time and a universe that is proving to be chaotic, fluid, and unknowable.
* **The Fragility of Perception:** An exploration of how our senses and rational minds construct reality, and how easily that construction can be shattered by experiences that defy logical explanation.
* **Acceptance of the Unknown:** The contrast between characters who dismiss the inexplicable (Terry), those who calmly accept it (Linda), and those who are forced to confront it head-on (John).
## Stakes
At stake is John's sanity and his fundamental understanding of reality, as the escalating temporal anomalies threaten to unravel not just his world, but his very sense of self.
## Synopsis
JOHN, a retired watchmaker in his 70s, sits in his usual coffee shop, troubled by the erratic behavior of a cheap quartz wall clock. To his expert eye, it's malfunctioning in a way that defies its simple mechanics, suggesting the problem isn't the clock, but the place itself. LINDA, the enigmatic and ageless proprietor, seems to understand his unspoken concern, sharing a look of quiet acknowledgement.
Suddenly, John experiences a "flicker"—a momentary, seamless vision of a 1950s tram and a man in a trilby outside the window, which vanishes as quickly as it appeared. He tries to dismiss it, but the sensory details were too real. His cynical friend, TERRY, arrives and scoffs at John's story, attributing it to a "senior moment."
The true disturbance arrives with Terry's newspaper. As he unfolds it, he notes with mild amusement that it's for Wednesday, the following day. It contains headlines about a future power outage and the results of a horse race. While Terry dismisses it as a simple printing error, John is deeply unnerved. The paper, combined with the vision of the tram, points to something terribly wrong.
As the men debate, Linda calmly remarks that time isn't a straight line, but more like a series of confusing backstreets. Her cryptic comment confirms she is aware of the shop's nature. The conversation is cut short as the bell on the door chimes. A young man in an ill-fitting post-war demob suit enters, looking utterly bewildered by the modern world around him. He approaches their table, his face pale with shock, and asks John a simple, terrifying question: "Could you tell me the year?" In that moment, John's rational world collapses, replaced by the certainty that time itself is broken.
## Character Breakdown
* **JOHN (70s):** A master watchmaker. Meticulous, precise, and a man who finds comfort and meaning in the logical, predictable mechanics of his craft. His entire worldview is built on the principle that time is a constant, measurable force.
* **Psychological Arc:** John begins as a man confident in his empirical understanding of the world, viewing time through the lens of a perfectly calibrated machine. When confronted with inexplicable temporal slips, his certainty shatters, leading to fear and intellectual crisis. By the end, with the arrival of the man from the past, he is forced to abandon his rigid worldview and accept a terrifying, chaotic new reality, transitioning from a master of time to its bewildered subject.
* **LINDA (Ageless, 60s):** The coffee shop proprietor. Calm, observant, and enigmatic. She is the anchor or gatekeeper of this temporal anomaly, treating the extraordinary as mundane. Her presence suggests a deep, unspoken understanding of the forces at play.
* **TERRY (70s):** A retired journalist and John's friend. A pragmatist whose cynicism serves as a shield against a world that has disappointed him. He actively dismisses anything that doesn't fit his rational worldview as a mistake or a delusion.
* **THE YOUNG MAN (20s):** A man displaced from the post-war 1940s/50s. He is a living embodiment of the temporal chaos, his raw confusion and fear serving as the final, undeniable proof that validates John's terrifying discovery.
## Scene Beats
1. **THE WRONG MECHANISM:** In a quiet coffee shop, JOHN, a watchmaker, is fixated on a cheap wall clock that is stuttering. He knows its quartz movement shouldn't fail this way. He senses the wrongness of the place.
2. **A GLIMPSE OF YESTERDAY:** John experiences a momentary, vivid hallucination: the modern street outside is replaced by a 1950s scene, complete with an old-fashioned tram. It's gone in a flash, leaving him questioning his senses.
3. **THE VOICE OF CYNICISM:** John's friend TERRY arrives, brushing off John's concerns about the "old" tram as a sign of aging. He is the voice of rational, mundane reality.
4. **THE PAPER FROM TOMORROW:** Terry casually reveals his newspaper is dated for the next day, complete with future headlines. He finds it amusing; John is horrified, seeing it as another piece of a disturbing puzzle.
5. **THE KEEPER'S RIDDLE:** LINDA, the owner, makes a cryptic comment about time being like "backstreets," confirming she knows more than she lets on and that the shop is the nexus of the strangeness.
6. **THE GHOST AT THE TABLE:** A young man in a 1940s demob suit enters, completely lost and overwhelmed. He approaches John, the one person who seems to grasp the situation, and asks for the year, confirming John's worst fears are real.
## Visual Style & Tone
The visual style will be grounded realism, creating a stark contrast with the surreal events. The coffee shop is warm and mundane—worn wooden tables, soft ambient light, the gentle hiss of an espresso machine. This normalcy makes the temporal glitches more jarring. The "flickers" of the past will be depicted with subtle shifts: a brief change in color grading to a more desaturated, sepia-toned palette, a faint film grain, and muffled, era-specific ambient sounds that bleed through for a moment. Close-ups will be used to emphasize detail: the intricate gears of John's personal watch versus the simple, malfunctioning face of the wall clock; the texture of the modern newspaper versus the phantom image of an old broadsheet.
The tone is one of quiet, creeping dread and psychological unease, starting with subtle mystery and building to a climax of existential horror. It aligns with the high-concept, character-driven suspense of *The Twilight Zone* and *Black Mirror*, focusing on the human reaction to a reality that is fundamentally breaking down. The atmosphere is deliberately understated to make the surreal elements feel more impactful and terrifying when they occur.
**Format:** Short Film / Anthology Episode | **Est. Length:** 10-12 minutes
## Logline
A meticulous, aging watchmaker, grounded in the precise mechanics of time, discovers that the local coffee shop is a pocket of temporal instability, forcing him to confront a terrifying reality where the past and future bleed into the present.
## Themes
* **Order vs. Chaos:** The conflict between a man who has dedicated his life to the precise, predictable measurement of time and a universe that is proving to be chaotic, fluid, and unknowable.
* **The Fragility of Perception:** An exploration of how our senses and rational minds construct reality, and how easily that construction can be shattered by experiences that defy logical explanation.
* **Acceptance of the Unknown:** The contrast between characters who dismiss the inexplicable (Terry), those who calmly accept it (Linda), and those who are forced to confront it head-on (John).
## Stakes
At stake is John's sanity and his fundamental understanding of reality, as the escalating temporal anomalies threaten to unravel not just his world, but his very sense of self.
## Synopsis
JOHN, a retired watchmaker in his 70s, sits in his usual coffee shop, troubled by the erratic behavior of a cheap quartz wall clock. To his expert eye, it's malfunctioning in a way that defies its simple mechanics, suggesting the problem isn't the clock, but the place itself. LINDA, the enigmatic and ageless proprietor, seems to understand his unspoken concern, sharing a look of quiet acknowledgement.
Suddenly, John experiences a "flicker"—a momentary, seamless vision of a 1950s tram and a man in a trilby outside the window, which vanishes as quickly as it appeared. He tries to dismiss it, but the sensory details were too real. His cynical friend, TERRY, arrives and scoffs at John's story, attributing it to a "senior moment."
The true disturbance arrives with Terry's newspaper. As he unfolds it, he notes with mild amusement that it's for Wednesday, the following day. It contains headlines about a future power outage and the results of a horse race. While Terry dismisses it as a simple printing error, John is deeply unnerved. The paper, combined with the vision of the tram, points to something terribly wrong.
As the men debate, Linda calmly remarks that time isn't a straight line, but more like a series of confusing backstreets. Her cryptic comment confirms she is aware of the shop's nature. The conversation is cut short as the bell on the door chimes. A young man in an ill-fitting post-war demob suit enters, looking utterly bewildered by the modern world around him. He approaches their table, his face pale with shock, and asks John a simple, terrifying question: "Could you tell me the year?" In that moment, John's rational world collapses, replaced by the certainty that time itself is broken.
## Character Breakdown
* **JOHN (70s):** A master watchmaker. Meticulous, precise, and a man who finds comfort and meaning in the logical, predictable mechanics of his craft. His entire worldview is built on the principle that time is a constant, measurable force.
* **Psychological Arc:** John begins as a man confident in his empirical understanding of the world, viewing time through the lens of a perfectly calibrated machine. When confronted with inexplicable temporal slips, his certainty shatters, leading to fear and intellectual crisis. By the end, with the arrival of the man from the past, he is forced to abandon his rigid worldview and accept a terrifying, chaotic new reality, transitioning from a master of time to its bewildered subject.
* **LINDA (Ageless, 60s):** The coffee shop proprietor. Calm, observant, and enigmatic. She is the anchor or gatekeeper of this temporal anomaly, treating the extraordinary as mundane. Her presence suggests a deep, unspoken understanding of the forces at play.
* **TERRY (70s):** A retired journalist and John's friend. A pragmatist whose cynicism serves as a shield against a world that has disappointed him. He actively dismisses anything that doesn't fit his rational worldview as a mistake or a delusion.
* **THE YOUNG MAN (20s):** A man displaced from the post-war 1940s/50s. He is a living embodiment of the temporal chaos, his raw confusion and fear serving as the final, undeniable proof that validates John's terrifying discovery.
## Scene Beats
1. **THE WRONG MECHANISM:** In a quiet coffee shop, JOHN, a watchmaker, is fixated on a cheap wall clock that is stuttering. He knows its quartz movement shouldn't fail this way. He senses the wrongness of the place.
2. **A GLIMPSE OF YESTERDAY:** John experiences a momentary, vivid hallucination: the modern street outside is replaced by a 1950s scene, complete with an old-fashioned tram. It's gone in a flash, leaving him questioning his senses.
3. **THE VOICE OF CYNICISM:** John's friend TERRY arrives, brushing off John's concerns about the "old" tram as a sign of aging. He is the voice of rational, mundane reality.
4. **THE PAPER FROM TOMORROW:** Terry casually reveals his newspaper is dated for the next day, complete with future headlines. He finds it amusing; John is horrified, seeing it as another piece of a disturbing puzzle.
5. **THE KEEPER'S RIDDLE:** LINDA, the owner, makes a cryptic comment about time being like "backstreets," confirming she knows more than she lets on and that the shop is the nexus of the strangeness.
6. **THE GHOST AT THE TABLE:** A young man in a 1940s demob suit enters, completely lost and overwhelmed. He approaches John, the one person who seems to grasp the situation, and asks for the year, confirming John's worst fears are real.
## Visual Style & Tone
The visual style will be grounded realism, creating a stark contrast with the surreal events. The coffee shop is warm and mundane—worn wooden tables, soft ambient light, the gentle hiss of an espresso machine. This normalcy makes the temporal glitches more jarring. The "flickers" of the past will be depicted with subtle shifts: a brief change in color grading to a more desaturated, sepia-toned palette, a faint film grain, and muffled, era-specific ambient sounds that bleed through for a moment. Close-ups will be used to emphasize detail: the intricate gears of John's personal watch versus the simple, malfunctioning face of the wall clock; the texture of the modern newspaper versus the phantom image of an old broadsheet.
The tone is one of quiet, creeping dread and psychological unease, starting with subtle mystery and building to a climax of existential horror. It aligns with the high-concept, character-driven suspense of *The Twilight Zone* and *Black Mirror*, focusing on the human reaction to a reality that is fundamentally breaking down. The atmosphere is deliberately understated to make the surreal elements feel more impactful and terrifying when they occur.