After reading comments and further feedback, I've come up with a few more ideas. I've also made a few influence maps relating to the imagery, ideas, and emotions I liked. Some of the images look sinister (some of the robots and aliens) but I was more looking at what they are instead of how they look evil. I found images from ArtStation along with games like ReCore, No Man's Sky, and Mass Effect. I also remembered a sci-fi short called
'Uncanny Valley' that was posted on the course blog a while ago and I also looked at images from films such as Ex Machina, Star Trek, Star Wars, The Matrix, Prometheus, A Clockwork Orange, Total Recall, Edward Scissorhands and Guardians of the Galaxy.
Out of these ideas I quite like the idea of a synthetic alien (like an actual living AI) that was built but was unfinished and doesn't have proper eyesight but can see because of its programming and searches for proper eyes so it can properly see the beauty of the universe. The other idea I like is an alien (maybe a child?) loosing his cyborg pet at an airport-like space station and the robot needs to find his master before the ship leaves but the crowds of commuters makes it difficult for his navigation system to lock onto his master. Or something along those lines. Anyway, any feedback is appreciated like always.
Yes - I think you're really onto something now. For me, just in simple storytelling terms, the idea of the Compass implant is strong, because I can see how, in an Act 1 montage of shots, you could very quickly set this up as the societal norm. I can see too how, visually, the space-station as a sort of hub could be shown to be physicalising these pre-ordained paths; perhaps the space station is actually a whole set of teleports, sending these aliens out to particular planets: the Farming Planet, the Breeding Planet etc. Visually, each compass chip could be coloured, for example, which matches the colours of the specific teleport etc. In other words, I think you can set up a complex system visually with a bit of clever sequencing.
ReplyDeleteThis is all getting into Huxley territory: Brave New World, but also Logan's Run. I've just finished reading Never Let Me Go by Kazou Ishiguro, in which the characters come to understand they are clones bred so that their organs can be harvested for donations. It's a dystopian sci-fi trope, but I don't see that as being a problem at all - I think you could create a very 'universal' story.