Daughter of God

Making movies – I’ve discussed how much work is involved and how there’s not enough me to go around.  I need to amp up 1) art / production and 2) fundraising and outreach. I am in the process of contracting two artists who have worked with me in the past, Jonathan Kelly and Melonie Steffes. Jonathan built 3D models for DOG (2007-2009), while Melonie constructed sets and props on location in Canada (2006). Together, we three will form an art department and manifest the rest of these movies.

Meanwhile, I’ve also been cultivating advisors and collaborators, polymaths all. Faisal Azam has generously re-imagined the editorial for DOG last summer and fall. Andrea Maio has been a savvy advisor for ALM, both from the story and fundraising perspective. Julie Constantin and I are exploring social collaboration and outreach for the projects, and she’s a funding powerhouse. Steve Elrick is a long time ally with great insights about expression and storytelling. Then of course there’s Jeff Gibbs, keeping it real.

I am pretty lucky to have all these folks, now I want to figure out how to bring them together and really tap their power. Is it a forum or what? I imagine resumes and portfolios too.

When you love a lot of people, how do you keep the connections fresh? This is a quandary for me as I’m blessed with a large extended family. Blogs help me make big chunks of my life public.

With the explosion of activity on the net, ‘public’ doesn’t mean seen by everyone. The idea that privacy is dead is misleading. I can publish my life via this blog and 99% of humans will never know I exist. Only 25% of poeple on earth have access to the internet and maybe 50% of those read English. Only a tiny fraction of the remaining 1 billion will ever know about my blog, read one word of what I write.

Public really means available to my clan. Let’s face it, most of the folks who are willing to wade through this dross already know me. They are here because I invited them. My guess is that even with all my tagging and whatnot, most of my bloggees are going to have some RL connection to me.

Blogging is really  for my extended family – that’s today’s insight – and I ought to remind the tribe of that. I fantasized that I was writing for a future world, for the crowds who will be showing up once I hit my stride as a filmmaker, world saver, visionary. Reality check – I write for myself and for the crowd of simulations that run in my head, my cast of precious and very personal characters.

What a relief!

2.0 Objectives

2.1 Objectives common to both projects…

2.2 Objectives of DOG

2.2.1 a daring and decisive edit
why – I don’t need to emulate the same movie that’s already been made over and over. I give myself permission to breath, to really shine. Let’s release our full power, let’s rock. Tip – use of placeholder descriptions in roughing out assemblies.

2.2.1.1 the essentials of the story

2.2.1.2 most vivid and startling performance moments

2.2.1.3 cutaways – jutapose / timeshift / place shift

2.2.1.4 act I mix w/ establish apocalypse (s)

2.2.1.5 act II mix w/ backstory (s)

2.2.1.5.1 gerry’s seti self upload (backstory)

2.2.1.5.1.1 joe – he got involved in seti@home as a kid, and then hacked boinc to distribute himself. His digital self is scattered over 10,000,000 solar wireless XOs, he basically is the internet now. (jerry sleeping, cut to boinc and seti@home page, Sou on an XO with gerry on screen, gerry brushing teeth)

2.2.1.5.1.1.1 digression he’s got evolved XO assembly pods wandering the swollen seas, extracting heavy metals and rare earths from the sea water and compiling rafts of floating networked XOs

2.2.1.5.1.2 code sample… http://boinc.berkeley.edu/trac/browser/branches/boinc_core_release_5_2/boinc/client/app_graphics.C

2.2.1.5.1.3 XO http://laptop.org/en/laptop/hardware/index.shtml. where are XO’s made? shots of factory?

2.2.1.5.2 other backstory – apocalypses, the office, god embargo, joe and christina, shortwave chatter, joe dies… some solid exposition, other just fleeting impressions

2.2.1.6 act III story twist (s)

2.2.1.6.1 multiple christinas

2.2.1.6.2  joe’s off the reservation

2.2.1.6.3 gerry’s amazing recovery

2.2.2 never the same movie twice, linear i ching
i like the idea of creating a visual oracle, almost like a tarot deck, each scene corresponding to a card in the deck. They all unfold in the same order, but if each scene were a chapter and then randomly played back, the movie would still work. That’s an interesting perspective for the edit, each scene has to be a hologram, containing the whole

2.2.2.1 multiple interpretations

2.2.2.2 subtle details

2.2.2.3 ambigous / rich meanings

2.2.2.4 conflicting information

2.2.3 workshop scenarios about the attack on earth, who and why? the key questions find more mind share

2.2.3.1 narration, “and then they pulled out all the stops, the colonial endgame. they tried every lousy trick in the book to trash the planet once and for all. it was like some kind of sick fireworks finale, all the grim and dire science fiction scenarios coming down, live and direct. we still don’t know what they were about exactly, but there are plenty of clues…”

2.2.3.1.1 interstellar invasion, asteroid strike, sea level rise, militarized plague, nuclear warfare, robot rebellion, gmo accident, monsters from the id, colonial /  plantation end game, DIY cryogenics, space arc migrations, human harvest / rapture, toxic overload, carbon saturation, and more…

2.2.3.2 a delicious ramble through my fav conspiracy theories, mental gymnastics to limber up conceptual capacity

2.2.3.2.1 earth is a theme park

2.2.3.2.2 an installation by a mediocre cosmic artist

2.2.3.2.3 pain and suffering factory to feed intensity vampires

2.2.3.2.4 character “they didn’t seem to want the obvious resources, they set up civilization to piss them all away, what were they really after? maybe we’ll never know.”

2.2.3.2.5 impoverish the planet so it can’t be integrated into the galactic network, a dead node. god is exiled

2.2.3.2.6 look to bio strategies, clash of civilizations, corporate greed, power struggles disguised as political / religious dogma

2.2.4 10 – 12 minutes or feature length

whoo

2.1 Objectives common to both projects…

2.1.1 completion in 2010 OR new funding and remake

2.1.1.2 if new funding and remake,  some version of the original becomes a fund raising vehicle, proof of concept, extensive previsualization etc.

2.1.1.1 if completion, then quality (hits personal aesthetic, key collaborators thumbs up)

2.1.2 expansion of post production team with dynamic and effective work approach, tuned workflow, ideal gear mix and just enough knowledge

2.1.3 success

2.1.3.1 accepted 3 oscar qualifying festivals 2011

2.1.3.2 awards / recognition for innovation/experimental, visual impact/effects, story

2.1.3.3 vehicle for future funding, collaboration, career

2.1.3.4 500,000 views in first 6 months after release

2.1.3.5 favorable reviews and appreciation by relevant players

2.1.3.6 spanish or chinese subtitle versions

Good Earth, have you been reading the recent posts from http://ondesire.com and http://holyboners.com? I have – and they are beginning to spin out of control. Some sort of fugue state is being entered into here, so many eggs are cracking wide I expect there’s one heck of a mega omelet on the horizon. I haven’t even done my review of Cameron’s Avatar in 3D or last night’s dinner with my favorite Africans. Let’s get this sorted out right now.

The Questions

What are my objectives for the two current projects?

What’s my plan to finish them / take them to the next level?

The Answers

I’ve got a mission, so let’s start there, Activating global consciousness to steward and expand the wilds. It’s a good mission, and one would expect my current projects to be in alignment. How then do these two movie projects support my mission?

1.0 Mission

1.1 DOG

Daughter of God is my most ambitious narrative project to date. It’s a surreal exploration of how picturesque and hilarious a crippled global life support system can get. The backstory also explores colonization and exploitation on a planetary scale. With this project I model my theories, channeling the answers to the questions that Fia asked last night – who benefits from the demise of an entire planet? Follow the money, follow the extraction of wealth. Who’s targeting all the world saviors, whose running this prison?

So Daughter of God is a vehicle for piercing the veil. It’s a way of figuring some things out, of playing with the story. Ah, there’s an insight.

What if the story has fragments, alternate eddies and branches? What if the edit is actually scrambled up to suggest alternate possibilities, variant explanations, visions beyond the existing narrative where all the backstories intermingle and cross pollinate? Y’all getting this? That’s how we rebuild the edit, with intersecting time lines and outcomes. Moments that suggest, fragments.

That means that the best moments are extracted and then interwoven as flash sidewise or parallel possibility, while remaining perfectly ordinary, like brushing teeth. Little diversion this, but worthy.

In summary, DOG supports the mission by being a way to better understand what might actually be going on in RL, suggest in ways like the i ching, never the same movie twice, ya get me? Got cha.

1.2 ALM

Seeking the artifacts of a future sustainable civilization is pragmatic action. No external authority is going to assemble our optimal existence and conveniently implode. We are responsible, I am responsible. The future surrounds us, fragments of annihilation and transcendence for the taking. We choose what we gather, I choose. That’s ALM, humans taking responsibility for our collective destiny, one Dan at a time. An adventure of autonomy and connection, of becoming miraculous and capable of planet saving. A hero’s journey waiting for each of us.

It’s about me, as Andrea pointed out, and my reinvention disguised as a sailing trip. Is it universal? Does it translate beyond boats and big lakes? Only if folks share my starting point. They don’t have to agree, they just have to get me. Stepping back, I realize that I am a character in this story.

The Dan Kelly character has a premise, aspirations, a costume, a budget, skills, assumptions, experience and a history. What do we need to know about him so that we can travel with him, suspend our disbelief, make his joy and pain our own?

He is a treehugger, an artist, a science fictionary, a warrior, a lover, a mystic, a caretaker, a technologist, a dreamer, a visionary. My character needs to be introduced to the audience, my character wants something badly and is having trouble getting it, my character undergoes a transformation. Don’t we all?

In summary, ALM supports the mission because it’s about what happens when WE decide to thrive. As my glorious destiny relies on the repair and care of the global life support system, I must become capable of healing planets. I must discover and eventually implement sustainable civilizations. If these epic outcomes are beyond the scope of my present self, then I must purposefully transform and become miraculous. That is the journey worth taking, the true and vital journey of ALM, common to all.

Epilogue

Many folks will find the premise crazy, so I’ve got to make a solid case that my character actually believes that he can develop extraordinary abilities and has ‘evidence’ to support it. Then even if they think my character is crazy, they’ll go on the journey with him. This crazy character will venture out to become a super hero and the surprise ending will be – maybe he was not so crazy after all.

The audience attitude might begin with ‘the poor delusional fellow is captivating’ then gradually progress to ‘wait, maybe he’s making sense’ and finish with ‘whoa, where do I sign up?’ It’s a cognitive hack for extracting folks from the suicidal hypnosis of dominant culture. Start them off with the idea that they are watching a crazy person running amuck, then give them cause to question that premise and in so doing examine their assumptions about what it means to be rational in a culture bent on apocalypse. Wonko the Sane lived outside the asylum (and he got his movie made).