TPG Week 220: Writing Challenge Entry 5

[Steven Forbes]

Welcome back, one and all, to The Proving Grounds! This week, we have Brave One Stewart Vernon. We also have Liam Hayes in blue, and I'm the guy in red.

Like I've said a few weeks ago, we have some things going on for the next few weeks. The writing challenge I ran a few weeks ago over at Digital Webbing. The rules were simple:

The story cannot be longer than 5 pages

The story cannot be a tragedy

There must be an artificial intelligence involved

There must be at least 50 words of spoken dialogue

The word “enlightenment” must be in the dialogue

String cheese must be an object, not just mentioned

We good? Let's see what Stewart has with

Life's Cheeses

Page 1

Three equally-sized panels on this page.

Panel 1

Full width of page, 1/3 of page in height. (You're going out of your way to control the artist. Back off a little.) Street level view, looking slightly towards the sky (Time of day?) from the front of the National Institute of Proficiency Studies. External of building is traditional 20th century three-story library-like in appearance, name of building in large letters over the main entrance. Main entrance has multiple entry/exit door. Sign/plaque in front of building, at bottom of entry stairs, with the same name as on the building. No dialog. (Why is the dialogue direction in the panel description?)

Panel 2

Full width of page, 1/3 of page in height. Just inside main doors. Eye-level view of large waiting room full of people. The room is largely undecorated, clean in appearance with only bean-bag-style couches with lots of teen-aged kids sitting atop them. Boys and girls, filling the room sitting and waiting. No specific dialog, but some crowd murmuring to indicate that there is noise in the room. (More dialogue direction in the panel description. Worse than that, you've described dialogue instead of actually putting it into your script. How is the artist supposed to show the crowd murmuring?) (This can be done, it's just lazy, and won't come off all that well.)

Click here to read more.

[Stewart Vernon]

Thanks guys... as I said when I submitted it, I knew some things needed fixing after I posted in the contest thread. When I started to think about how I might draw the story, I saw a lot of things that I would need to fix.

My inexperience at script-writing aside... something that might cover the "story is crap" and "dialog is crap" general comments... Consider the following overview I had in my mind when I wrote the script:

In the not to distant future, where things look mostly the same on the outside, they are much different on the inside. Children are mostly raised in sterile environments, instructed from a young age in all manner of knowledge and skills. They are expected to learn and do as they are told until they come of age.

Part of the coming of age is for the children to be placed in an unfamiliar environment and be given a choice for the first time since before their formal education began. Some children will be unprepared or unwilling to make a choice. Others will make the choice they believe they are expected to make. A rare few will make a choice completely of their own free will.

The intention of this story, was to convey a world where at some point society knew the importance of rigid structure in preparing and teaching their children all manner of things juxtaposed with the necessity for free will and creativity. The goal: to ensure each child gets exposed in the most efficient way to all possible knowledge without stifling their own creativity to grow beyond their formal education.

We come into the story with a bunch of kids in a sterile environment, they don't know why they are there. They only know to do as they are told. They wait until their names are called. They go where they are expected to go. Then they are presented with a choice. How they respond determines whether they are ready to go out into the world and make their own way or if they need to be counseled.

Maybe the idea was much larger than the 5-pages the contest called for... maybe I suck majorly at script-writing... or both!

[Kiyoko, Rin]

I would love to see what would happen to this script if David Lynch (or possibly Tim Burton) directed it. Their surreal, "wtf-was-that-about?" treatment would do wonders here, methinks.

I was also kinda hoping the cheese would stand in for something, that each cheese would represent a different consequence, much like Duane Korslund's writing challenge entry did.

Still, I was into it up to page 4, and although I felt page 1 and 2 could have been combined into one, you did a good job prolonging the mystery. (Hmmm. Maybe Hitchcock could direct it, too...)

[SamRoads]

If it's set in the near future, what is a 'mainframe'?

Right now you're considerably more likely to use some kind of cloud computing if you need power. In the near future, why would the room containing the cheese also be the server room? Mainframes are from 1950s-1990s.

But maybe this is in THE DISTANT FUTURE, THE YEAR 2000! and is a 1960s version of sci-fi, like an episode of the Twilight Zone. If you wanted to make it work, I'd go this route AND make this a dystopian totalitarian state, where making choice is a big deal.

Then, 'the cheese test' would be like room 101 from 1984, or similar scenes from Brazil or Gatacca.

***

Thanks to Steven and Liam for doing the edits!

[Stewart Vernon]

Yeah, in my mind I was combining a couple of visuals... One was the clean look of something like THX-1138 or similar futures where lots of the insides of buildings were clean, and sparse, and the people seemed like automatons a bit.

The other was retro-future.

Like how you take designs from the 1960s and use them today to represent the future... it works because it is design out of place but also familiar. Trends come and go too.

We have had "cloud computing" in the past, by the way... remember the days of "dumb terminals" that only connected to the mainframes? Then we moved away from that and had more localized computing... now we appear to be going back to the "cloud"... but history tells us the pendulum will probably swing back again and we'll have more powerful individual computers too.

My "mainframe" in the story, although not explicitly stated, is the artificial intelligence. We haven't mastered that with modern technology no matter how small the components of computers are... so IF it were to be accomplished in the near future, the only way to do it would be stacking a lot of today's smaller servers... and by the time you put all that together with a cooling system in a single room, you could very well end up with a retro-looking mainframe.

Again, some of this is what I wrestle with explaining in script-form. I could write the story in prose... it's getting all the right bits into a script that I'm struggling to figure out.

[James L Sarandis]

I think you have one of the same problems I do in which you see it in your head, but you don't describe it on the page. Also I think some propaganda posters could have helped the story as well. Like "Freedom through Obedience" or "No Choice, No Problems."

[Stewart Vernon]

That's a good thought... some posters or signs that told part of the story subtly might have filled in a few gaps.

I need to remember to think of those things. What happens if I'm drawing something myself is I think of that stuff and just put it in there as I go... but writing a script for someone else means I have to think harder about that in advance.

[Stewart Vernon]

Anyone here watch Once Upon a Time on ABC?

If so... did any of you have deja vu during the opening segment? It was eerily similar in a way to my choice of cheeses situation.