The Community Brainstorming Thread

I've got an idea on how this could work. There is a guy in a safe, central control base, he has lots of TV surveillance screens etc. There are operatives on the outside, all over the world, documenting the zombie takeover. (Maybe in the end it was all some sick government experiment gone right).

That way we can have that in-between (like Four Rooms had with the bellboy), but instead of needing the same actor in each scene, you have him bridge them together by contacting his operatives or getting new packages of footage.


An idea for my segment, not sure if it would work. The zombies have already completely taken over Chicago and are now inhabiting it and have established a zombie culture, they shop for organic brains at the whole foods etc. Not the typical zombie-type, but stay with me. So there are these zombies who are vegan and won't eat brains and stuff and are all about conserving the environment and not wasting natural resources... that's all I got :P

One more thought: if we go in the zombie direction, we are going to at least have to agree on the 'look' and style of the zombies, to maintain some continuity.
 
That's definitely the sort of thread structure I had in mind. Man in control room might work nicely- or we could have someone picking up desperate radio signals with each different mayday turning into that segment of film? Or we could have someone unearthing a chest full of written accounts of the apocalypse and each time he starts reading a new journal it transitions into that particular story? There are plenty of ways to do this, me thinks.

As for your vegan zombies, this is something we need to work out at an early phase. It won't make much sense if we have savage mutant zombies in Texas but soccer mom zombies in Chicago.

My thought for this (if we are going zombie) is that perhaps we could have a scenario in which nothing biologically changes when people turn into zombies, except that they suddenly require human brains in order to stay alive. But all around the world we have groups of vegan resistance zombies who are determined to stamp out the plague... I just think that 'Vegan Zombie Killers' would be an amazing film title...

As for the look, yes, that's definitely the sort of thing we'd have to decide on early on. Probably we'd have to do some tests and post some photos until we all feel that we can achieve the same look for our zombies. That's if we go with zombies.
 
Just wanted to point out that you don't NEED to have anything done in advance. For the radio example I gave and you elaborated on, the actors need only ACT like they are hearing something about refuge in the mountains, final editing, will put in the CORRECT audio in post.

In regards to the organization...
In large software projects we have a similar problem. One method is to simply define the INTERFACE between the modules, letting the INTERNALS of the module be as unique as they want to be.

In a modularized movie like this, the producer could simply define the IN and OUT shots\scenes.. you start here, you end there.. the stuff in the middle is up to you..

So in the same Julie in the small town example, it might be that the remote unit director gets the BEGINNING of one scene and the END of another provided, the meat in the middle is up to the remote unit. This will assure that that no matter what is delivered, it could be cut down to just the two IN and OUT bits and it would still work.
 
This seems to be taking shape. The concept and theme are the first to be decided, positions of Producer etc, are of little importance in the writing stage. Be it an unusual combinding of many scripts, we needn't consider anything beyond our ideas taking shape as of yet.

Although that is not to say we exceed our known limitations.

So, let's decide our theme, our core, and most importantly, our Genre.

Have we compiled a list of those interested?
 
No list compiled as of yet PTP, but I'll certainly hammer my name to the door of the Wartburg...

I agree that, for now, the most important thing to do is come up with a solid concept. Simply having a community project isn't enough, we need to have something decent to work with. That said we should also be constantly thinking about how we can utilise our fairly unique position in order to improve and facilitate the story telling.

We seem to be swinging towards an apocalypse (of one sort or another) theme. Is anyone deeply uncomfortable with this? And different ideas?
 
There are several reasons why zombies might be an easy way of doing things:

1.) The effect can be acheived with make up rather than visual effects, which not everyone is going to be able to do.
2.) It can accomodate a wide variety of different production sizes. If you want to have a horde of thirty zombies running at you then great, but equally if you only want to briefly show one zombie or none at all that could work.
3.) It is an easy way of uniting the different threads of story. If we were to settle upon a uniform look for the zombies then it would be a clear way of telling that these were all strands of the same story.

That said I'm not a massive zombie movie afficionado personally, so I'm certainly not married to the idea. How about a general plague?

I would be cautious about the idea of having different End of the World scenarios playing out, simply because the idea of this project is to make it clear that all the remote units were working towards a common goal and in one, organised charge. So I think if we aren't going to do zombies then we should settle upon one specific way in which the world can come to an abrupt end...

How about super-hot, ripped vampires? Or has that already been taken...
 
Just thought i'd mention something, as nobody seems to have done so yet. Probably because it's more of a post-production area, but it needs baring in mind.

You've talked about quality levels for audio, as sound plays a massive role in the movie experience. However, nobody has talked about a potential score for the movie? Just my personal opinion, but for something like this to work on the whole, I think the score would need to be consistent throughout. If the picture changes from being shot on 35mm, to shot on a 550D, to shot on an iPhone, that could still work perfectly fine. If the score schanges to dramatically though, I think it would throw people. For example, on the zombie genre, the score from Zombie Flesh Eaters is excellent (also my opinion), as it fits the picture so well (dirty exploitatin). If the same score was put to Night of the Living Dead, I think that would be horrible! Just my thoughts.
 
That's an excellent point mad hatter.

I think I did previously put in one of the post that we would be wanting to do everything as a community, including composing, and I would stick by this. I think a solid score is an important part of the film and we certainly don't want random, disparate snippets of music popping up in each of the threads.

So if you are a composer (and this won't really matter for a long, long time) then keep an eye on this thread! It would be great if we could get one of the IT composers to do the score for that film, keep everything in the family... :)
 
good points about the mulitple EOTWAWKI begin problematic...

Perhaps a new take on Zombies might be cool ...
this idea might not be new as Im no zombie expert.. but I do have an AK.. that aside..

Maybe a highly communicable disease that has only one effect. When you eat living human flesh you tele-commune in rapture with an alien GOD LIKE being, some people have visions and some have new "alien" insights...

This lets you have the full gamut of zombie types. A guy could keep it together and hold down a regular life, while sneaking out at night and eating people... another gal could simply give in to the hunger and run around attacking everyone... ala typical movie zombie on speed... maybe one of the infected is a GOOD guy trying to find a cure, while munching on his own cloned flesh....

... just thinking of palatable zombies here..
 
I would worry that we'd face the same problem of not having a uniform disease. This seems like a way of getting around that, but it might come across as something of a shoehorning.

But I do think we can use that sort of twist on the genre. We could have a werewolf style zombie infection where they transform at certain times but don't remember what they've done...

I think the key will be to keep it visually simple. Communicating with an Alien is going to be tricky, especially for the directors who aren't strong on visual effects. I know that I would have no clue how to represent an alien diety.

Then again we could have one person working on all the alien scenes and then in post we could add them, individually, to each of the threads of the story. But perhaps this is over complicating things at the moment. I think we need to settle on something that is both original and practical.

What about starving zombies? In the apocalyptic world there's not enough fresh meat and so our zombies (who are basically just humans who require flesh to survive) are slowly starving/eating themselves/each other. Might make an interesting change from the usual zombie horror to have some sort of human (well, zombie) drama going on...

Thoughts?
 
My camera with its manual lens and shoulder mount has a distinct ENG (Electronic News Gathering) look to it. It could easily gather footage for use on televisions in the background. And this could force me to get more familiar with After Effects to add the text scrolls and framing. I also have the 16x lens with built-in optical stabilization for more steady hand-held shooting if necessary, although it doesn't have the snap-zoom-focus capability since there are no stops or markings on the rings with that lens (the stock lens that came with the camera).

Someone mentioned a guy in a control room. What about a guy (or a family) tuning in and intercepting signals from around the world? People taking shelter and hijacking public broadcast studios to locate other survivors? Anyone remember Red Dawn?

Weatgrinder alluded to this. The key element tying everything together could be a worldwide emergency broadcast that loops on the televisions and/or radios in every location. Characters each have their own dilemmas to work out, their own survival stories, told from the point of view of whatever recording equipment they had available, a video diary, so to speak, ala Blair Witch Project or The Last Exorcism.

And you know I'd make up my 5 year old nephew and let him kill and eat someone. Is that wrong? :lol:
 
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Another track.. apocalypses doesn't have to be with a bang..
In a previous writing effort, I had played with the idea that the humanity was just slowly wearing out, no babies were being born, lots of upheaval at the beginning, but after awhile nobody cared anymore and soon enough people just got on with living in the new situation. The plot and intrigue is in the WHY and HOW, so rather than needing to represent a sickness of the body, remote units can film sickness of the spirit... which again will manifest in many and varied ways which can be decided by the remote units. This is backdrop for some interesting story that needs to be written.
 
and another approach...

if we can come up with something that explains why everything SEEMS normal, but there is some underlying complete wrongness that only our cast of remote and separated characters seem to know about.. then filming becomes much easier.. the real world is your set, and you just have to stage some action in it.. rather then try and set up a apocalyptic look.. burned out cars etc...
 
I think that you're right VPTurner, we need to find some effective way of tying them all together. I like the 'guy in a control room' idea but presuming that most of us aren't going to be shooting in the found footage style, how can we link them in? My idea is that the only required prop we have for each remote unit is some sort of radio transmitter so that the guy in the control room can tune into each different radio transmission in turn and then that can blend into each thread...

As for wheat's idea, I think the first one will be difficult simply because it requires a fair amount of exposition. Unless we had one person working on a thread that explained heat was happening, it might take quite a lot of hammy dialogue to get the story across. I had the idea of an ovarian plague (which my mother informed me would actually be a uterine plague) which rendereed all women barren and so existence began to slowly peter out. But I'm not sure about this, it's a less visually striking idea than zombies.

But I agree with the second point, the more 'earthlike' we can keep the earth the better. I think this could possibly work well alongside the idea of humans not losing their cognitive sophistication, but just requiing flesh to survive. That way civilization would collapse but preferably slowly and unspectacularly.
 
NickClapper said:
I think that you're right VPTurner, we need to find some effective way of tying them all together. I like the 'guy in a control room' idea but presuming that most of us aren't going to be shooting in the found footage style, how can we link them in? My idea is that the only required prop we have for each remote unit is some sort of radio transmitter so that the guy in the control room can tune into each different radio transmission in turn and then that can blend into each thread...

I had the idea of an ovarian plague (which my mother informed me would actually be a uterine plague) which rendereed all women barren and so existence began to slowly peter out. But I'm not sure about this, it's a less visually striking idea than zombies.

But I agree with the second point, the more 'earthlike' we can keep the earth the better. I think this could possibly work well alongside the idea of humans not losing their cognitive sophistication, but just requiing flesh to survive. That way civilization would collapse but preferably slowly and unspectacularly.
Click to expand...

I agree with all of this. A "Uterine Plague" sounds very interesting, slowly but surely civilization collapses, fades out. Desolate neighborhoods, towns. Perhaps we're eighty, ninety years down the line. Groups have formed claiming territory, survivors. The most valued professions are few as the people perish. It will take alot of thinking to tie all this in, to make it believable, plausable...

What does everybody else think?
 
Papertwinproductions said:
I agree with all of this. A "Uterine Plague" sounds very interesting, slowly but surely civilization collapses, fades out. Desolate neighborhoods, towns. Perhaps we're eighty, ninety years down the line. Groups have formed claiming territory, survivors. The most valued professions are few as the people perish. It will take alot of thinking to tie all this in, to make it believable, plausable...

What does everybody else think?
Click to expand...

Just had a horrible thought but is this the plot of Children of Men?
 
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