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© Gil Williamson 1999 and 2005
Last Update 9 Feb 2005
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movie1
Ice Bridge - The Movie Concept - Outline
As with games, many successful movies tend to follow a
classic format:
- Initial action to establish the hero;
- The reluctant hero and his companions;
- The mission revealed;
- Early complications to the mission, and reverses of fortune;
- Build up of tension as the hero's plan develops while
the villains also gain in power;
- Victory snatched from the jaws of defeat.
I'd go with this pattern. The challenge is to make an
Internet movie gripping, and still about the Internet,
and not Cops and Robbers, Cowboys and Indians or
a soppy love story.
While a number of movies about the net, like the early
War Games, Hackers,,
The Net, and the more recent Matrix series
and their rip-offs
have concerned themselves with Internettish
subjects, they rapidly descended into action adventures of the
more usual kind, and I can see the problem. Computers aren't
that photogenic.
Further, a high percentage of conventional movies now
feature email and the Web, as a Deus ex Machina
to resolve a plot problem, but my concept would be a
movie that concerned itself very closely with the Internet.
So, the plot I have in mind is built and played out with
real Internet activities, and with a total absence of car chases,
guns, super-criminals, toilet scenes or vomiting. In fact,
I think all movies should omit the last two.
It's worth mentioning here that a number of the computer
movie clichés we are accustomed to should be absent:
- Where an impossibly fuzzy picture at a very low
resolution is clarified to 35mm quality by a few
mouse strokes;
- Where a complicated database is searched by a new and
different set of criteria never before tried, by a single
keystroke;
In particular, I'd like to see quite the contrary, where fuzzy
pictures just become hopelessly pixellated when you expand them,
where a programmer (who wears a suit and tie and doesn't have
a beard and weird habits) quotes a day or two for some
complex procedure, where the Internet doesn't reveal its secrets
at the first query to Google. And, of course, where computers
are revealed as the literal-minded irritating work-horses
that they really are.
In the next section, I propose a plot...