Don't Even Joke Lad

I refuse to go down like last year. I really want to be proud of our final result, so I'm choosing to prioritize this project fully, especially the planning part. And by that, I mean that we already have a (very tentative) idea. I'll just copy and paste my incoherent ramblings that I wrote at like 1 am when the idea came to me. This is a very general outline of an idea and some themes; there's still a lot of tweaking left to do. But here it is:

Told through a series of voice recordings.

We open on a woman seated. Her face is not visible. The room is dim, with messy drawing of anatomy plastered of the walls. The woman is holding a voice recording device in her hand. She presses play.

Fade to black

“Day one of consciousness”
Fade up from black

We open on a robot-like man (we’ll call him The Subject). He examines the patches of metal on his body as a voiceover explains what is going on. The population of the human race is dwindling, a result of the climate crisis, low birth rates, and wars. A group of rogue scientists have decided to experiment with playing God. They want to test if Artificial Intelligence can go beyond impersonating humanity. They created a dozen or so cybernetic organisms with an implanted program that gradually improves their software, including the eventual understanding of emotions. The Subject goes through a checklist of possible symptoms he may be experiencing before ending the first recording.

Fade

The woman plays the next recording

Fade

Day 8

We open back on the man, his features seeming a bit more human, but mannerisms still lacking. He is seated intently watching television with a clipboard on his lap. The screen shows a home video of a couple in the rain. These organisms will be exposed to an assigned human for 3 months, including exposure to videos of them, a physical body modelled after them, and the eventual implantation of their memories (they are not aware of this last part and also this human is dead but their family have volunteer their body and memories for research.)

On voice over, he explains that the scientists give him the tapes to watch, as well as films, artwork, literature. He is to report his feelings on it. The video seems to elicit no emotional response from him, rather he comments on the dangers of humans being out in the rain and the possibility of illness. His response is still very robotic, lacking very little traces of humanity. He routinely goes through the list of symptoms again.

Day 26

The subject, looking more and more human, rewinds through the home video over and over again. Through the voice report, he explains that he was given a book to read, Love in the Time of Cholera. The researchers are trying to introduce him to the concept of love. He thinks he may be understanding Florentino’s pursuit. He even relates to the character a little. He’s been watching the home video a lot lately. The woman in it looks so familiar.

Day 42

The procedure takes a turn for the worse. Although the Subject has completely human features, he is deteriorating. His cheeks are hollow and his eyes sunken, he looks unhealthy. He explains that for the last two days, he has been seeing the woman from the videos. Like little videos in his mind. The researchers have explained to him that these are called memories. He doesn’t understand how he can have memories of something he never experienced.

Day 58

The room where the Subject has been secluded in is a mess. The walls are filled with images and drawings of humans. The Subject, again, is seated towards the television screen. He watched (insert romance film here) recently. He begins to become curious to how love and being loved feels like. The woman plagues his thoughts and memories, even appearing in his dreams. Her image accompanied with a tinge of longing and emotion that he can’t quite comprehend, but he feels it anyway.

Day 65

The Subject is resentful. He hates the humans for afflicting him with these feelings. For introducing him to all the wonderful and horrific feelings that make up a human’s life, and cursing him from ever being able to fully understand or experience them. In a furious rage, he rips the drawing and papers off of the wall, and starts clawing at his metallic exterior.

Fade to black

Fade up from black to the woman who was seated at the beginning with the voice recorder device. The camera pans up to reveal that she is the woman from the home videos. She walks towards the corner of the room, where The subject is slumped over. His eyes are open but he is not moving, his body is surrounded by wires and cables protruding from him.

So yeah. There's a lot here that doesn't make sense. I'm aware. But don't worry. We're working on all that. Just wanted to throw our general idea on here early so the next couple posts will make sense. I'm like so scared of putting it on here because it really solidifies it in a way...But I'm a little side-tracked. This blog post was originally supposed to be a genre research post and I still wanna do that so I don't have to do it later. I'll talk about little more about the idea for the next post.

How We Got to Sci-Fi

When I first read the initial outline to my parents, they were pretty shocked at me going with the sci-fi genre. And I'll admit that I was a little shocked too. I've never been the biggest fan of science fiction films, there's a handful that I find to be really good but overall I've never felt particularly drawn to them. But I realized that when discussing more short-form types of media, I definitely gravitate towards sci-fi. I love reading short story collections, and I often buy either sci-fi or horror collections (one of my favorite collection is Stories of Your Life and Others by Ted Chiang). And the idea itself was born from my favorite episode of Love Death + Robots. I guess it makes sense why my idea seems to fit more of a book format than a film one. I have to try to adapt the idea to film the best I can, and the only way to do that is to familiarize myself with the genre.

History 

While we often relate science fiction to flying cars and robots, the genre goes much further back in time. The Greeks and Romans created all kinds of stories about technologically advanced cities like Atlantis. Eventually, science fiction was picked up by authors like Mary Shelley and H.G. Wells, and cemented itself as a major subgenre in literature. 

And of course, A Trip to the Moon, which many people seem to think was the first film (it wasn't), was science fiction. Pretty innovative for its time of 1902. Not too long later came Metropolis which was probably the first feature-length science fiction film back in 1927, but its hard to tell considering how much is now lost. The 50s saw a burst of the genre, probably reflective of the times and fears following the war. And some of the most iconic films of the genre were made from the 60s to the 90s. Films of these times were both indicative of what was going on in the world, and speculative of our future. Nowadays, the subgenre has begun to branch off and merge into other genres. There's romance sci-fi films, there's horror sci-fi films, there's probably other ones that I'm forgetting. What I'm trying to say is that there's practically an unlimited world of possibilities for this genre.

Subgenre

Terminator

Within the sci-fi genre there's like a tonnnn of subgenre. Here are a couple:

Science Fantasy - Ex. Star Trek

Apocalyptic/Post Apocalyptic - Ex. Mad Max: Fury Road

Alien Invasion - Ex. Arrival

Cyberpunk - Blade Runner

Time Travel - Ex. 12 Monkeys

Parallel World/dimensions - Ex. Coherence

Robot Fiction - Ex. The Terminator ***

Dystopian Future - Ex. The Hunger Games

Space Western - Ex. Star Wars

Space Opera - Ex. The Fifth Element

Steampunk - Ex. The Prestige

I emphasized the robot fiction genre since its closest to our idea.

Tropes

The Martian

Final thing I researched about the genre are common tropes and conventions

Themes and tropes:

- I found that isolation is a theme that is often explored in this genre. In some cases, like the movies Gravity and The Martian, the loneliness is surrounding the vastness of space. In others, isolation comes as a result of the ever-advancing technology of the time.

- Another common trope is how the advancement of technology, particularly artificial intelligence, affects humanity. This one is pretty relevant to me

- Oppression and totalitarianism is very, very common, especially amongst dystopian science fiction stories, Examples of this would be 1984 and Brazil.

- Colonization and expansion is explored in films like Avatar and Starship Troopers.

- Human nature and identity

Conventions

- Futuristic settings

- Machines or technologies as characters

- Post apocalyptic or dystopian future

- Establishing shots to introduce the time and world