Production Concept - Scripting continued and Plot Summary

Over the past week, James and I have been hard at work adding more to the script. Before we continued we came up with the majority of the whole plot summary, outlining key scenes and everything that is to happen within them. This helped us to know what to include in the scenes we are writing, giving the script a better flow to it and making it easier for us to write.

We are currently almost half way through writing the script, with the aims to have the entire thing finished by the end of the week. Continuing on from the last blog about the script I wrote, we have written quite a few more scenes.

Within these scenes, Legrasse and his partner Aimie Fiber get put on new cases by the man in charge of them, Captain Michaels. Ever since the earthquake from the opening scene, New York has been under constant repair after the short unnatural earthquake struck, causing quite a lot of collateral damage. In this time Michaels explains that there have been a record number of missing person's over the course of the week, reaching almost 1000 different cases reported. He tells the duo that, as his best detectives, he wants them to look through the case files, and try and find a connection between them. Legrasse and Fiber see this as an impossible task but start to work anyway before giving up for the night. As they work however, their obnoxious coworker comes over to bother them, a man known as Detective Richards. He hits on Fiber and gets brutally knocked down, before wiping it off and heading to the showers. At this point Legrasse and Fiber head home as well.

Whilst in the shower, Richards is minding his own business, washing his hair when the shower stops. He manages to get soap in his eyes, and while trying to turn the shower back on, he doesn't notice the strange viscous, amorphous gooey substance excreting from the shower head. As it fully forms at the end of the shower, it jumps onto Richards face, latching onto it. He screams and struggles, trying to get it off. The blob manages to get inside of Richards just as he falls over. As he looks up we see his eyes are now solid black, it would seem he has been taken over by whatever this blob was.

Legrasse returns home, his wife, Rachel, not too impressed with him being late yet again, and a short argument takes place.

After a few more days, Fiber and Legrasse are back in the office still attempting to find a connection. Legrasse admits that him and Rachel haven't been getting along recently, due to him working too much and putting in too much over-time, thus barely getting to see his wife and child. Beaumont, Michaels' secretary comes and delivers a new batch of missing person's cases to the duo, who decide it would be best to start with the fresher cases. Fiber finds a cell phone number and suggests they call it, much to Legrasse's dismay. Upon calling, Fiber puts the phone on loudspeaker, as an answer is received, however it turns out to be a strange an unknown language, spoken in a strange voice. Legrasse records the voice on his phone, as a phrase is being repeated over and over again, and not responding to Fiber's questions. They decide this could be a lead and they could get the language deciphered.

Legrasse calls his wife Rachel, as he knows she could help as she had a Professor at her University who specialised in old languages, as a professor of Anthropology. She gives the name William Webb to Legrasse, who thanks her before hanging up, which doesn't impress Rachel too much.

The two head to the University of Columbia, where Professor William Webb is based. They enter his office and explain the situation to him. After replaying the recorded chanting back to him, he immediately manages to decipher it. He then tells the two about Cthulhu, and says that the missing person's cases could all be related to the resurrection of the Dark Lord, which the pair find very hard to believe and consider a waste of time.

With William Webb, we have implemented a series of quirks and mannerisms with him to make him seem quite strange and cooky, to fit within the character description that we have of him. He constantly says confusing things and never tends to look the detectives in the eye, showing a slight socially awkward characteristic of his. We show his enthusiasm of him being fascinated and incredibly happy to hear the language, running up and down bookshelves to find a particular book, which he seems overly proud of. The idea was to have him quite a bizarre character - an old nut, and so far I believe we have succeeded with this.

Production Concept - scripting

So James and I started writing the first part of the script for Cthulhu.

We managed to achieve the first 13 pages, including the opening scene. The opening couple of scenes, to roll before the title sequence, involve a group of marine biologists out at sea, on a rented fishing boat. While the fisherman do their work, the marine biologists are attempting to get readings on an earthquake hey believe to be imminent. As if out of nowhere, the bright sunny clear sky turns as black as night, fray clouds and a huge storm hits. This causes mass amounts of waves, and the biologists detect readings they never thought possible. Two marine biologists run out on to the deck, dangerously, and manage to get into their submersible, and head under water to see if they can find the cause. Whilst underwater,the biologists on the boat announce that the storm has suddenly stopped, much to their confusion. The two underwater continue on regardless, finding a giant underwater city with strange writing and decaying buildings everywhere. Suddenly the submersible starts shaking, and one of the biologists spies something, and a look of terror goes down his face. As the other biologist looks the outside of the submersible is seen, as a huge yellow eye opens, and the screen fades to black.

We then wrote the intro to the protagonist, which just included him at work, and a short phone all with his wife.

We intend to keep writing more and I shall keep this blog updated with everything we write which happens in the script.

Production package - Green light Pitch

After we pitched our project idea to Simon and Helen, we have received the Green Light to go ahead with our project. This is good as I can finally start the full writing process of the script. So far I have the characters laid out and the basic story. I will need to develop the story in a broader context now, and come up with the main story idea behind the main character, rather than just the base story that we have.
One thing that Simon mentioned to us is the overall size of Cthulhu. As mentioned before, his original size is around 10,000 ft however we wanted to scale him down to around 8-900 ft. This we thought, was going to be beneficial to us as it would allow Cthulhu maneuverability around New York, yet still be scary naturally. Simon mentioned that if we are trying to appeal to a fan base that know a lot about Cthulhu, would scaling him down significantly in size still have the appeal to them. It would also mean Cthulhu would be hidden at times by sky scrapers and the like. This now gives us the decision as to whether or not we want to keep Cthulhu at his original size or not. I feel that if we do decide to have him 10,000ft tall it could still work well, with his top half sticking out of the rivers and oceans of New York, not fully emerged but win his top half still being able to be very destructive to the city.
This is something we definitely need to consider, and upon discussing it with the group further, we will make a full decision in the next couple of days.

Production Concept - Man eater series

As mentioned in my last post, after watching some more SyFy movies, we do not feel our piece, would fit with the over the top tone of these movies,  as our monster isn't as fitting. Most of the more over the top films on the network feature hybrid monsters combined with a couple of different creatures.
Doing some more research into the network and their movies, we discovered what was called the SyFy Network "Man Eater Series". This series generally includes larger monsters, which fits in with Cthulhu, as well as taking a serious feel to the films, rather than them being over the top. They also tend to feature known mythical creatures or creatures of legend, reflecting the titles of the films from this series, such as "Wyvern", "Gargoyle" and "Behemoth" .
We therefore have decided that our original movie would fit in with this man eater series, as it features a creature of legend and it would make more sense to keep a serious tone to the film, rather than poorly written over the top gore.
I think this will benefit the piece a lot more as it won't need to be written in such a style that reflects upon the rest of  over the top SyFy films, which tend to feature none too fantastic speech and dialogue, which could have come across as poor writing of the script on my part, thus I am happy we discovered this series of films and am excited that we have placed ours within it.

Production Concept - Research

So earlier in the week, my two collaborators and I met to watch some original SyFy monster movies. The ones we watched were "Sharknado", "Piranhaconda" and "Sharktopus".
The majority of these original movies received  a budget of between $1-2million and usually contained Okay cgi and 1 or 2 larger actors, with the rest remaining as unknowns. A lot of these unknowns have been in other projects, but usually for other programmes or movies made by the SyFy network.
We noticed a correlation between the films as well, with scantily clad women, clearly to appeal to their target audience of late teen+ males and sci-fi enthusiasts. The two Shark based films ended with them beating the monster, but had very over the top and ridiculous deaths, as well as containing a lot of blood.
Piranhaconda differed slightly. The whole film took a more serious tone to it, but still featured half naked women in bikinis and a lot of blood. Whilst the film took a more serious tone, it ended with them thinking hey have own, but the last two survivors being killed right before the credits.
So while we have noticed these films contain a lot of death and blood, we do now feel that the overall tone of our piece wouldn't be fitting to be too over the top like these films.

Production Package - Elevator Pitch

We were asked to come up with an elevator pitch for our project. This is how you would pitch it to a producer or executive in the time it takes for an elevator ride. This is what we came up with:

An adaptation of H.P Lovecraft's short story; an over the top, New York based monster/disaster movie featuring the creature Cthulhu.

Production Package - Cthulhu Artwork

Cthulhu is a favourite in a lot of pop culture and fan art in this day and age, with a generally accepted look in this day and age. We will be commissioning an illustrator or graphic designer to help us with our own conception of Cthulhu, although I imagine he will look quite similar to most designs people have come up with. Here are a few examples of Cthulhu's look:

The top 2 and bottom 1 are just fan art people have drawn up, however the third image is from a recent cartoons interpretation, Rick and Morty, while the fourth image is from the popular three part Cthulhu episode of South Park.
This gives a general idea of what Cthulhu looks like. Once our artist is commissioned I shall post what our Cthulhu will look like up here.