Produce Concept Outline

[Mark Suszko]

Can you be a little more forthcoming on details here, Felix? So, is this a demonstration piece to showcase your effects skill, and how ” Short” do you mean it to run, when you call it a “short”? Besides demonstrating fx skills, what story, what message, what theme, are you trying to communicate? And would this be dramatic, comedic, what? Are there any examples out there of something you’d like to emulate? I want to help you, but you’re making this too much work, forcing us to tease out details a piece at a time, over days, so please, just dump it all out on the table at once, and explain what you’re really after. Then we can be of much more help.

[Felix Liewhan]

Actually this is for my research and vfx short film.. My company had give me a freedom to choose any concept for this short movie. So I thought maybe I’ll make a film that had related to futuristic stuff. The film was to reach the young and talented generation to come to our school for Vfx course. So the story is like an alien airship come from noway to the earth and try to create a chaos in earth in the year of maybe 2500 . So it more like the end of the world. I assume that this should take about 8 min length. So how should I do the treatment for this story before making this video ?

[Mark Suszko]

There’s still a lot we don’t know about what kind of effects you intend to demonstrate. Planets, spaceships, explosions, laser beams, and robots are somewhat easier to pull off than realistic alien bodies with textures, hair, scales, etc. and character animation that conveys expression and personality. When you define the specific effects you want to demonstrate, a story will start to evolve out of that. Take a look at the annual demo shorts produced by Red Giant: they do this very well by establishing one new, fantasy or futuristic element in an otherwise familiar world, and seeing what evolves from that event.

Here is one loose example of an idea that you might develop into a treatment. For your science fiction premise, assume aliens have made contact with humans and it has generally gone well. To the point where alien children go to school with human children. Now set your story in a classroom of that era, and translate the hijinks and typical issues kids have in school, to one where these aliens, and their abilities and technologies exist. Instead of shooting paper wads from straws, maybe once he’s been hit this way by a rival student, the alien kid returns fire with a laser gun. Or maybe he has nano-technology that re-builds items on his desk into defensive anti-spitwad interceptors… all while the lecturer is oblivious… and maybe this all ends up being something going on in the imagination of a bored student who has tuned out of the lecture they are supposed to be watching. In a final twist, the story is all from the alien point of view, and “humans” are something the bored alien came up with in his daydreams.

I want to back up here for a minute and talk about my definition of what is “real” science fiction, as opposed to what is fantasy with some technological window dressing on it. A “pure” sci-fi story is based on an extrapolation of an idea or invention, technology or science, that may or may not yet exist, but possibly could exist in the future, and is one where the plot can’t happen without that “whatever” existing. The simple example for this is that, if you can replace the spaceman hero with a cowboy, robots or aliens with Native Americans, the ray guns with six-shooters, and the spaceships with steam trains, sailing ships, or horses, and still tell essentially the same story, you’re not really writing “pure” science fiction – it’s fantasy with technological trappings. Star Wars is an example of this. You can set that story in any era and it’s basically the same.

The best example of “pure” sci-fi in this context that I can give you, would be the film: “Eternal Sunshine Of The Spotless Mind”. In that movie, the extrapolation from reality is that existing techniques and knowledge of the brain eventually let us choose to erase specific memories at will. Once those memories are edited, who we are and what our “reality” is, becomes mutable in a way it is not today. The world of the film, and the characters, are fundamentally affected by the availability of this technology, and you couldn’t tell this particular story without that technology.

“But, memory wiping by magic would do the same thing.” You say. Yes and no. Invoking “magic” is generally a cop-out because it introduces an element that is not an extrapolation of science or technology, but some ill-defined outside “force” that’s not a part of reality. Don’t drag Clarke’s famous quote into this; highly advanced physics is not the same as metaphysics.

So, why did I bring up this huge side-conversation? I’m looping back to the idea of writing the treatment of the story with a sense of internal logic and consistency, and of extrapolating the plot from a pure science fiction idea. The classroom bully premise I outlined is not really a “pure” sci-fi story, it’s a cute comedic take on bullying the foreigner/outsider, but you could set that story in any era and tell it more or less the same.

So, what about this VFX extravaganza, then? Doesn’t everybody LIKE huge space opera-like spaceship battles, with the lasers going”pew,pew,pew”?

Personally, as a science fiction fan, I don’t believe the economics of space flight would ever make it “easy” to have interstellar wars that look anything like the aerial or naval engagements of our existing military. Generally, in fiction, massive star fleet battles are really just a metaphor for terrestrial naval engagements and tactics. Fun to watch, but unlikely in any kind of “real” world. Where you’d see space battles would be where humans, not interstellar rivals are in conflict over nearby, shared resources, within our own solar system, but even there, in many scenarios, the economics of waging war in space make it unlikely.

I do however think it a little more likely that space-going life would seek to colonize or populate other worlds where it was practical. More and more, scientists see evidence that suggests extremophile life forms, or at least their precursors, can survive the harsh environment of space, or harsh planetary epochs, for long durations, hitching rides between worlds on comets and asteroids and keeping alive anywhere from the upper wisps of our stratosphere, to the bottom of a glacial lake that hasn’t seen the sunlight for millions of years… Here we’re talking about microbial life, or pre-microbial life, taking millions of years to circulate thru a solar system until finally finding a place where conditions are right to grow and evolve. Are we being invaded at this very moment? Colonized? And is it a friendly invasion, mutually beneficial, like the gut bacteria that help us to live, or must it be a deadly rival?

So, back to working on the treatment then… build a list of the specific effects techniques you want to demonstrate. What kind of world, what kind of characters, could you use to demonstrate the effects on?

[Felix Liewhan]

Hello Mr Suszko, thank you for your past feed back. I just want to know that is it “genre outline” really exists. If we want to write a screenplay should we create an outline for genre. Do you have some tips on how to create a high concept genre. I just want to get the general idea about how does this concept genre work in any story. I just want to know about this genre stuff based on your experience as a writer.