Thursday, January 24, 2019

Experia




This is an outline, fleshing out the story later. 

Havelock vs Puck. It was the biggest event in sports entertainment, ever. Millions of users followed the make believe race between these two heroes, flying solo on their ships, The Adonis and The Marksman. The two were racing between the planets to get to a recreational psychic phenomena testing space station, known as Experia. Apparently in orbit around Mimas, the pockmarked Moon of Saturn. That the whole thing, including the space station, was pure imagination, was a closely guarded open secret.
StarDash was not the first space based reality show, but it was the most successful. The network never publicly admitted that the whole thing was make believe, and carefully cultivated the suspension of belief in epic proportions. Superfans such as Phoenix Guevara hosted discussion sites that propagated the myth.
News sites that covered the developments of the show, unintentionally played into the whole charade. While they would merely report on what was happening within the show, on the Internet, it was interpreted as things that were actually happening. The history of space hoaxes and conspiracy theories somehow made it easier to believe that Experia was a real thing.
StarDash started claiming increasingly impossible things, and the public would believe it. They claimed that Mimas was visible to the naked eye. A non believer would point out to the bright, unflickering blue dot that was Saturn, and ask a believer to point at Mimas. The believer would then imagine that they could see a small moon. The fever reached such a pitch, that some fans imagined that on a clear night, they could even see the rocket trails of the Puck and Havelock ships, through a pair of binoculars.
Oscar Ramsey, a young fan put together a home brewed kit of electronics, and used over the counter chemicals to construct a rocket for himself. The whole operation and the orbital mechanics involved were planned out using thumb tacks and pieces of string, which the police later found. His plan involved retrofitting a fourth stage ISRO booster left in space, with the capabilities of making an interplanetary hop. On board his own rocket were life support systems, and essentially little else. Ramsey wanted to make a daring dash towards Experia, on his own hacked together ship. Satellites and ground based systems could track the sudden new trajectory of the discarded rocket booster, but since Ramsey had taken no communication systems, there was no way of knowing if he was dead or alive. The world watched in dismay, as Ramsay's "ship" successfully executed a slingshot manoeuvre around Jupiter, and headed towards Mimas. It was a complex operation for any sixteen year old. The sad part was, even if he survived the hop, there was no Experia waiting for him.
The network came clean, and put up a prominent disclaimer that specified that the show was fake. Guevara took down the discussion site and disappeared. The fan community slowly died out, and although a few additional seasons were released, the public lost interest in Experia. Even Puck reaching the colony and winning the race did not manage to get back the lost audiences.
Above Mimas, a fleet of discarded space junk and dumped stages began to assemble, into the skeleton of a space station.

Tuesday, January 15, 2019

The screenplay is better than the movie

Fandoms are perpetually locked in discussing exactly how the movies were better than the books or vice versa. The question is what happens when a novelisation of the screenplay is released. Take the 1998 Godzilla for example, the screenplay was actually better than the movie, which tracked the screenplay for the most part. Here are some of the main differences.


Philippe Roaché looking at Nick take the sample at the start of the movie - in the screenplay, he is standing in the background mysteriously, and Nick notices him only towards the end. In the movie, this is a casual moment that is not played up at all.

Audrey throwing the bag at Caiman - she just tosses it without the middle finger as the elevator closes. In the book, she flips him off.

The pectoral fins not big enough in Godzilla, in the screenplay, these fins were wings that did not fully grow, and could be flapped.

Dude guy in the bedroom does not show up at all. This is a random guy from the street who flashes the peace sign at Animal, while he is consoling Audrey.

Elvis Presley movies is where Roaché gets his flawless southern accent from, a scene which seems to have been cut from the movie.

The names of the submarines are changed for some reason.

There are large, squirming parasites on eggs which have been left out. Godzilla has apparently been infected with a mutation.

Smell like the fish is not in the screenplay, but included in the movie.

Nick presses a bunch of lift buttons by accident, while escaping from the babbyzillas, but this is shown in a slightly different way in the movie.

There is a scene where the Frenchies complain about the butter, but Roaché investigates the wrapper and notices that it is actually from France - this would have been a nice ending to the repeated gag of the French finding the Amurican food disgusting.

The scene of Godzila being trapped in the bridge has been simplified.

There is a really cool sequence in the end where Philipe Roaché is exposed as a French agent, and he writes to Nick, informing him that it is safe to talk now.

Considering the changes and tweaks, looks like even if you enjoyed the movie, the original screenplay is always better.