Impossible-Mission. Festival / Screenplay 7 : My precious
You’ll grant me that I can’t always talk about ultra-serious subjects. Especially when I see Altair getting bogged down in the sands of that damn virus and his future reality becoming totally… virtual.
So, to cheer myself up, I need to look elsewhere.
My whole series of festivals to be staged offers me such a great opportunity to let my imagination run wild that I can’t deprive myself of it too often.
I was looking for how to correctly link my 3 narrative arcs – each of which will be conducted in one of the 3 major Festivals.
I needed something simple enough for everyone to remember even years later.
Something that would save me from having to start all over again and do things like: I’m the son of my father whose aunt was involved to the 4th degree in the destruction of Altair Twin, but who had a grandmother with trick powers… Anyway, family stuff wears me out. I’ll be able to lose myself in my story.
So, since my bad guy wants to save the world from the Internet plague, and will use all the virtual means made available to him by all the nice geeks in the world, I went to learn about digital cryptography.
And there it was, the miracle of chance. We were talking about something else, and then Jean handed me my keystone on a silver platter (Jean is the youngest among us, the one who is the most aware of the various worlds on the net, and a rabid gamer).
It’s a coding system that can’t be cracked. Unbreakable. Put your computers on in rhinoceros mode that goes through everything, you won’t get it.
You know why? Because it’s code on two planes : a real plane and a virtual plane.
And this… this is exactly what I’m talking about.
That’s exactly what Altair is all about, a real plane and a virtual plane.
I almost had a real heart attack : something like that falls right in front of me when I need it.
All I had to do was write the concept: here I am with a code with a hole in it, a two-part code. Taken separately, the pieces are useless. Together, what they were protecting opens up.
As a result, I, the screenwriter, get: a magnificent investigative sequence and I love everything that is a detective novel, clues, interrogations, suspects. Who has the code for “real”? Where is that code? Where’s the virtual code? Who put it there? To open what?
What happens when you break the code?
Can we find another way?
What are the decoy codes?
I’m writing three movies with this.
In Altair Twin, there will be the virtual code. Or not. Either way, it will most likely be placed there, in the coding lines of this pretty, totally virtual machine.
So, when the viewer understands this, he’ll think that all the bad guy’s speech was “perlimpinpin powder” and that his goal is to disassemble Altair Twin to find this code.
It’ll probably be true.
My hero doesn’t know this – he’ll have to understand it.
Do you see the end of the Impossible Festival? Do you understand what the Virtual Reality Helmet will be used for?
Because I’m telling you, it’s going to be used.
And I want a magnificent one, one never seen before, an “impossible” that doesn’t exist yet: one that is duel – on both levels, virtuality and reality.
I don’t think I’m just going to put it on my hero’s head.
All or some of the spectators will have one too, and will be asked to move their eyes and brains to help the hero.
As for mine, my brain, I’m going to blow it up but I’m going to succeed in writing this scene played on both levels at the same time – with the same characters, who will confront each other in reality and in virtuality to get their hands on the real code first (obviously, there will be false codes, decoys are amazing in a story – the problem will then be to understand how they were made in order to be able to detect them).
And of course… at the end of the Legendary Festival, the villain will have one of the two keys.
At the beginning of the Mythical Festival he will have got both codes – and he will crack the code. That’s good, that puts a whole Festival in a panic right off the bat.
Yes. I like that.
You see, with that, now I know I’ll have to place other characters: those who know of the existence of this “weird” key – those who created this “double” key – those who keep them – those who hid them. If I want to go to a short script, I reduce the number of characters – to the point of reducing to one computer genius character who did it all. It’s not credible at all, but so be it.
If I want to stretch my story and make it unbearable from stress, I multiply the characters in connection with this double key.
As I start with the idea of three arcs, I’m going to multiply.
It probably doesn’t sound like much to you – but when you start writing a story – especially over several episodes – little things like that are just fundamental. I found: my precious.
Featured image: Keystone from the Church of Issigeac. Ego dormio et cormeum vigilat: I sleep, but my heart is awake. (Song of Songs)
ALTAIR - Concepts 