Developing story idea

I always think it's amusing when bloggers apologize for posting late or post news about changes to the blog. As if all four of my regular readers cared! Anyway, this blog has become part notebook, part production blog, part reflection site, so I decided to try to categorize things from now on. This will make it easier for you to find posts on a certain topic and also enable you to bypass any new posts on weird propeller aircraft.

Our hypothetical next story idea is still shaping up. Ben wants to do ensembles but I want to go a step at a time. Having two people and a little dialogue is a big enough step I think. I'm still liking the Star Wars Redux idea though now I'm grafting onto Starship Troopers Redux.The idea starts the same... it's about longing for something "out there," about hearing only the news of wars and seeing the artifacts of wars. It's about information being withheld. The idea though is to have the propaganda feeds slowly transform the viewer's take on the war and the stars of the show. So at first it seems like Star Wars—yes, the Empire is evil. Then, after awhile you think, no we're the evil ones. Then it kind of goes back and forth. Part of what interests me about this is the idea of propaganda and how it works. You'd see posters of the enemy as evil monsters maybe. Then maybe you'd see the dead skeletons of the enemy. Part of this idea comes from looking at those WWII comics with Japanese villains. It's incredible some of the caricatures. And then there'd be the organic technologies. Are those the new super technologies from us? Or captured technologies from the enemy? It would all be ambiguous. Remember, this is still from a child's POV so you're not sure exactly what's going on and when anyone tells you something, you know they're hiding something. This would be intercut with scenes of our hero and heroine. Ben talked about a scene where the two kids were playing with an ant and deciding whether to kill it. And they would kill it because people are worth more than ants. And that would change the context slightly of the propaganda films because you might wonder how these kids are being conditioned to think about death. And you might think poorly of their upbringing or it may seem wise.