I posted an idea for a story about aliens amongst us yesterday and have refined it a little.
For a short story I would start with the Chief Executive Officers of a couple of large fossil fuel companies ie a coal company and an oil company separately do press conferences announcing government backed increase in mining / oil drilling. These CEOs would then go backstage and into their chambers where their human skin would be removed and their true form revealed.
It would cut to them in conference with an alien fleet of spaceships on their way to Earth.
They would talk about another colleague working on causing a meltdown at a nuclear power plant.
The massive destruction of the Earth's natural resources will change the atmosphere and in turn, make it suitable for this alien race to make their home after their own planet was destroyed in a galactic war.
There's still a lot to work on to make this work, but I think it's something I can develop further.
This idea is really interesting I feel it could work well as a series that way you could slowly reveal the disguised alien race as well as the reasons why the human's have a self-destructive nature. There is also the possibility of a strong back story which may not be necessary for a short but if it were a series or feature length based story then, how the alien race infiltrated the human's could be explored.
ReplyDeleteI agree. I think it is probably a bit too ambitious for a short film. A series could be good. If I simplified the concept and maybe added some humour I could make it into a short.
ReplyDeleteAn idea for a short version is that there is a scouting fleet of aliens and they get a 65% atmosphere match with Earth, which is good enough, so instead of secretly and slowly trying to change the atmosphere, they have to cause a nuclear meltdown.
The aliens could be really small compared to humans and have trouble getting into nuclear power plant.
The obstacles could be developed around the setting of the power plant, and the simplified goal is just the one sort of environmental catastrophe.
Possible obstacle scenarios could be :-
- the alien gun malfunctioning in Earth's atmosphere.
- the aliens having to do the classic one on the other's shoulder disguise using two of them to pretend to be one human and failing.
- there is a secret government alien taskforce who fight with the aliens.
- the aliens use apple maps to try and find the power plant, and it obviously sends themto the wrong place.
- the aliens get distracted by a dog with a fluffy tail.
These are a few rough ideas, but developing this change in idea would be a lot more fun and I think it would be a pretty cool story to be done using animation over live action.
I don't think you have to compromise the seriousness of the story by making it a comedy, although your ideas do sound interesting and fun. But if you decided to keep it more serious you would have to find a way to quickly introduce the goal and motives of the aliens. Symbols are one way to avoid lengthy literal representations - e.g. the opening title sequence in Prometheus did this with the DNA forming together in the water. It gave you an indication of some of the back story.
ReplyDeleteOn that note I came across this article recently which may or may not help with idea's.
http://news.discovery.com/space/alien-life-exoplanets/could-an-alien-message-be-embedded-in-our-genetic-code-130401.htm