design notes:
FLEXX JONES
30's female, thick with muscle and curvy, not video game pornstar. Medium greenish gray corpse complexion with lots of ritual scars. Dark smear of hair over mostly bald scalp, whiplike retractable antennae trail behind her in water, like thin bamboo. Eyes: pale to dark gray shot thru with purplish bruising. No pupils, When she focuses, the purplish bruising dialates:
-sketch: very creepy ECU of her eyes locking onto a target
Prominent cheekbones hold room for venom glands. Powerful jaws and overdeveloped neck like a bulldog, jaws like gorilla, huge chin, she can flex her teeth out through her closed lips, for intimidation
sketch: she has a 2-ton great white shark clamped in her jaws, transforming it into a zombie via her saliva -it thrashes mightily but her neck keeps it mostly still, it weighs her down but in seconds she releases it and it is now one of her undead minions:
zombie shark: (or any zombified victim) eyes now shine with new purpose, same mottled purplish like bruising. Body immediately starts withering, losing parts of torso/limbs/fins etc.
but gaining undead resilience, speed, and predatory cunning, along with appetite for flesh. Animal minions are mindless zombie servants. Human/intelligent targets require prolonged exposure and various 'treatments' -otherwise, toxins just wither and mark them with horrible scars.
Flexx can track those she marks with her scars.
Superhero-level strength, able to punch/bite/kick thru steel doors, etc, Overdeveloped jaws hold several types of fangs and molars. In full battle mode her mouth is a hideous display of dental work,
supported on a thick neck armored with bony plates. She can withdraw this back into her jaws instantly, silently. Can't speak clearly when fully toothed out, just standard zombie moans. Regenerates lost parts, heals fast when well fed. Combo of bioengineering and supernatural
Clothing: well worn flexible mesh armor in layers. Flexible knee-high lightweight boots with retractable swim fins. Pockets for random gear: zombieblood grenades, flares, waterproof maps.
Hands: black jagged talons on fingers, short enough to use tools. She does not carry guns/knives, her body is a weapon: Left hand has 2nd thumb, which is a spiked bioweapon that breaks off in a target, spreading her zombifying toxins, like a bee's stinger, growing back in seconds like lizard's tail.
Golden Gate Bridge: Pacific Fortress North
now a fortress seawall, border of Sub SF and USA. Hwy 1. is demolished on either side of the bridge (all roads into Sub SF are either cut off or guarded checkpoints) Cables are mostly replaced with other reinforced stuff, remaining cables are rusting uncoiled whips that ping against the bridge with a distinct haunting music. From bottom of bridge to below sea level, thick ceramic plates and rust-proof mesh armor form impenetrable barrier to ship and sub traffic. Bases of towers are sentry stations, tops of towers are airship docks with missile turrets and strange new weaponry, South tower dock is abandoned, hvy damage, cratered ruin from the war for secession. Former road deck is half gone, with chunks of random new armor and anchors for seawall. Traveling across bridge would require superhuman 'parkour' style acrobatics under the gunsights of overhead towers.
Orca ruler of Sub Francisco: Deepsinger
former human, bioengineered herself into an orca whale with advanced echolocation and telepathic powers. Can shapeshift at will back into human form
35 foot orca with pectoral fins that are also stubby arms: flippers are tipped with thick retractable fingernails, very human looking. Visible hand bones under skin, fins are highly dextrous like razor-tipped mittens the size of a small desktop. Dorsal fin is raked back, streamlined. Her eyes are golf ball sized, very expressive.
Her minions:
octopi: standard giant pacific octopus, trained as guard dogs. up to 2 meters fully outstretched. they carry balled-up nets and harpoon guns, they ambush by shooting out of tiny hidden spaces while shooting ink and unfurling nets with incredible dexterity and speed. Hundreds of them guard any particular area where Deepsinger is, emerging out of camouflauged tiny corners, swarming and displaying multiple spears/machetes /giant elyctroharpoon cannons requiring several octopi to use.
Moray eels: lesser sentries, they are genetic experiments with bioluminecent flashers to communicate.
Giant squid: evidence of hooked sucker marks on rusted steel... sequel.. living in an trench somewhere nearby
Wednesday, March 24, 2010
Sub SF reference images
1)Deepsinger's front hand/flippers
2) airship /boat/sub hybrid
3 steampunk submarine drawing w/ schematic overhead
2) airship /boat/sub hybrid
3 steampunk submarine drawing w/ schematic overhead
Sub Francisco 1500 word story
Sub Francisco
genre: Steampunk/Noir/Horror
Format: music video / graphic novel
synopsis: After several hundred years of rising sea levels and civil war, Sub Francisco is the only major city to have repelled the zombie armies of the US government. The city is under 110 feet of water, and the ruling faction for 10 years is a shapeshifting orca whale and her council of marine advisors. Ten years ago, the orca queen and her research partner, a bioengineering prodigy named Phlex, had a falling out. Phlex left her friend and hometown just as civil war started. Now Flexx Jones is a federal agent zombie-like ReLife experiment sent to cause chaos in Sub San Francisco. Flexx has plenty of contacts in her old city, but has no idea of the changes her old partner has undergone.
San Francisco Bay Delta
Tri-hulled stealth warship USS HAVER
"NORCAL CMD. TO USS HAVER, WE UNDERSTAND YOU HAVE A MEDICAL EMERGENCY ABOARD -CONFIRM MISSION STATUS"
"SSHK-THIS IS HAVER, WE HAVE JUST RELEASED TARGET, UH, SUCCESSFUL LAUNCH, BUT SHE -SHE TOOK THE CAPTAIN'S HAND WITH HER. SITUATION UNDER CONTROL. RETURNING NOW CCCHHK"
The destroyer roostertails back up the delta, spooking the local scavenger tribes cowering in the reeds. The diver waves her severed trophy around for bait, sinking to walk on the bottom, slipping past the ruined Carquinez Bridge a few meters below the bay. In the murky brine, what might look like a helmet is the diver's treestump neck and jawbone, now unhinged to gnaw down into the mud, scooping up a few crabs and a bucket of muck, all swallowed back in a flash. Flexx Jones blinks once, twin flashes of bruised purple on a biohazardous face. No bubbles mark her descent, she moves without disturbing the water, without air tanks.
The great white shark never knew what hit it. Flexx shakes the two ton thing into Relife, releasing fangs only when the beast shudders and opens its new and improved mouth. With a flick of her hand she sends her new pet into the deeps of Sub Francisco Bay, triangulating her approach. A pack of morays rushes her out of nowhere, locking onto her here and there. Feet together, she dives fast and deep into the bay, trailing eels that keep biting down. By the time she reaches the busted open Transbay Tube, she leads a nice little undead armada. More sentries harass Jones inside the tube, some human, all too slow. More minions for the real work ahead. No flashlight, no bubbles. Silent entry into softly lit subway tunnel, the best entry point to ignore the towering hulk of Pacific Fortress North, spanning across the bay 20 miles west, with its airship stations and railguns marking the border of America, and this other place.
Flexx Jones is American. United States Counterintelligence Relife Experiment # 1, actually. Protein-fueled hoodoo bioengineering on a mission to "go out and do your worst." This is Flexx Jones hammering through the ceramic blast doors of Embarcadero BART, 100 m eters below sea level. These are the garbled curses she croaks -still without air bubbles- as the royal guards introduce themselves. Octopi smear themslves around her from all sides, wrapping nets around her and twisting elegantly to avoid her snapping beartrap teeth and claws. They are trained not to bite anything unfamiliar, they signal with pulsing lights to their leader.
This is their customized ink that clouds her terrible eyes, and from the far end of the station, gripping her Xeramic double-bladed harpoon in stubby emerging fingers, Deepsinger the Orca Queen watches, pinging some little echo that messes with Flexx's sense of right and wrong...
Wrong wins. There is a lot of drama in the water. The orca queen is unimpressed. She moves south towards Daly City, taunting Flexx with some crazy song about a way to set her uninvited guest up at the helm of her very own airship.
Zombies were designed by the Federal government to be harbingers of doom, not drivers of vehicles. It just sounds too good to be true. Jones follows, herself shadowed by the octopi fast enough to avoid being zombified. Down more tunnel, thru the stations Flexx remembers from her wartime childhood as bomb shelters: Montgomery, Powell (the water here tastes like rot, the mass graves are close) and now in the waving kelp beds of Civic Center Station, The Orca Queen attacks. Her harpoon is alive, more biomagikal trickery, and it hunts Flexx while the queen shatters the zombie's teeth and eardrums with songs that rumble up to the surface through great iron trumpets rising up from the depths. Sub Franciscans hear this music in their bones and hold their children close, and wonder how this new unlucky stupid bastard will die.
But Jones is right where she needs to be. She parries another jab from the living harpoon with her severed right arm, then sends her chompy guards forth as a shield while swooping up the levels, rippling her body faster towards the surface. Just a meter to go when a massive spiked rubbery mitt wraps around her legs and pulls her down, but not before she fastballs a grenade, which bobs to the surface and explodes, sending her chemical beacon out in oily rings.
Back down into the depths, pinned by something stronger. She's lost her arm but a new, better one is already growing back. Perhaps, lodged in some dark corner, her arm is growing a new, better Flexx. She looks down at her captor. It watches back with luminous golden eyes the size of dinner plates. She wonders if she'll get another meal in soon. Might need more food to make enough toxin to zombify a giant squid...
No meal. Not yet. They keep her subsurface, watching her arm grow back. Three thumbs on the new hand, all resting on coils of muscle, spring loaded. They argue for her death, then debate on how. Nights pass. The Orca Queen and her human and cetacean council finally sense her rejuvenation and teleport her up to the streets. They figure she can't kill all of them. And they are always right...
Dry Streets: Jones is finally happy: her contacts have come through and after dodging Deepsinger's agents, she now knows about the airship factory in Daly City. She rallies her friends to take control of the factory. But Deepsinger always seems to have the upper hand, and in the industrial chaos of the factory, the Orca queen reveals her past identity to Flexx, shapeshifting into an exact mimic of the zombie while escaping in a giant submersible airship. Betrayed and exhausted, Jones now is the most powerful figure in Sub SF, where the majority has fiercely defended their city against hordes of undead. Her loyal army can defend the factory, but somewhere along the Pacific coast, she is being impersonated by a telepathic echolocating shapeshifter aboard a ship with radical new technology...
genre: Steampunk/Noir/Horror
Format: music video / graphic novel
synopsis: After several hundred years of rising sea levels and civil war, Sub Francisco is the only major city to have repelled the zombie armies of the US government. The city is under 110 feet of water, and the ruling faction for 10 years is a shapeshifting orca whale and her council of marine advisors. Ten years ago, the orca queen and her research partner, a bioengineering prodigy named Phlex, had a falling out. Phlex left her friend and hometown just as civil war started. Now Flexx Jones is a federal agent zombie-like ReLife experiment sent to cause chaos in Sub San Francisco. Flexx has plenty of contacts in her old city, but has no idea of the changes her old partner has undergone.
San Francisco Bay Delta
Tri-hulled stealth warship USS HAVER
"NORCAL CMD. TO USS HAVER, WE UNDERSTAND YOU HAVE A MEDICAL EMERGENCY ABOARD -CONFIRM MISSION STATUS"
"SSHK-THIS IS HAVER, WE HAVE JUST RELEASED TARGET, UH, SUCCESSFUL LAUNCH, BUT SHE -SHE TOOK THE CAPTAIN'S HAND WITH HER. SITUATION UNDER CONTROL. RETURNING NOW CCCHHK"
The destroyer roostertails back up the delta, spooking the local scavenger tribes cowering in the reeds. The diver waves her severed trophy around for bait, sinking to walk on the bottom, slipping past the ruined Carquinez Bridge a few meters below the bay. In the murky brine, what might look like a helmet is the diver's treestump neck and jawbone, now unhinged to gnaw down into the mud, scooping up a few crabs and a bucket of muck, all swallowed back in a flash. Flexx Jones blinks once, twin flashes of bruised purple on a biohazardous face. No bubbles mark her descent, she moves without disturbing the water, without air tanks.
The great white shark never knew what hit it. Flexx shakes the two ton thing into Relife, releasing fangs only when the beast shudders and opens its new and improved mouth. With a flick of her hand she sends her new pet into the deeps of Sub Francisco Bay, triangulating her approach. A pack of morays rushes her out of nowhere, locking onto her here and there. Feet together, she dives fast and deep into the bay, trailing eels that keep biting down. By the time she reaches the busted open Transbay Tube, she leads a nice little undead armada. More sentries harass Jones inside the tube, some human, all too slow. More minions for the real work ahead. No flashlight, no bubbles. Silent entry into softly lit subway tunnel, the best entry point to ignore the towering hulk of Pacific Fortress North, spanning across the bay 20 miles west, with its airship stations and railguns marking the border of America, and this other place.
Flexx Jones is American. United States Counterintelligence Relife Experiment # 1, actually. Protein-fueled hoodoo bioengineering on a mission to "go out and do your worst." This is Flexx Jones hammering through the ceramic blast doors of Embarcadero BART, 100 m eters below sea level. These are the garbled curses she croaks -still without air bubbles- as the royal guards introduce themselves. Octopi smear themslves around her from all sides, wrapping nets around her and twisting elegantly to avoid her snapping beartrap teeth and claws. They are trained not to bite anything unfamiliar, they signal with pulsing lights to their leader.
This is their customized ink that clouds her terrible eyes, and from the far end of the station, gripping her Xeramic double-bladed harpoon in stubby emerging fingers, Deepsinger the Orca Queen watches, pinging some little echo that messes with Flexx's sense of right and wrong...
Wrong wins. There is a lot of drama in the water. The orca queen is unimpressed. She moves south towards Daly City, taunting Flexx with some crazy song about a way to set her uninvited guest up at the helm of her very own airship.
Zombies were designed by the Federal government to be harbingers of doom, not drivers of vehicles. It just sounds too good to be true. Jones follows, herself shadowed by the octopi fast enough to avoid being zombified. Down more tunnel, thru the stations Flexx remembers from her wartime childhood as bomb shelters: Montgomery, Powell (the water here tastes like rot, the mass graves are close) and now in the waving kelp beds of Civic Center Station, The Orca Queen attacks. Her harpoon is alive, more biomagikal trickery, and it hunts Flexx while the queen shatters the zombie's teeth and eardrums with songs that rumble up to the surface through great iron trumpets rising up from the depths. Sub Franciscans hear this music in their bones and hold their children close, and wonder how this new unlucky stupid bastard will die.
But Jones is right where she needs to be. She parries another jab from the living harpoon with her severed right arm, then sends her chompy guards forth as a shield while swooping up the levels, rippling her body faster towards the surface. Just a meter to go when a massive spiked rubbery mitt wraps around her legs and pulls her down, but not before she fastballs a grenade, which bobs to the surface and explodes, sending her chemical beacon out in oily rings.
Back down into the depths, pinned by something stronger. She's lost her arm but a new, better one is already growing back. Perhaps, lodged in some dark corner, her arm is growing a new, better Flexx. She looks down at her captor. It watches back with luminous golden eyes the size of dinner plates. She wonders if she'll get another meal in soon. Might need more food to make enough toxin to zombify a giant squid...
No meal. Not yet. They keep her subsurface, watching her arm grow back. Three thumbs on the new hand, all resting on coils of muscle, spring loaded. They argue for her death, then debate on how. Nights pass. The Orca Queen and her human and cetacean council finally sense her rejuvenation and teleport her up to the streets. They figure she can't kill all of them. And they are always right...
Dry Streets: Jones is finally happy: her contacts have come through and after dodging Deepsinger's agents, she now knows about the airship factory in Daly City. She rallies her friends to take control of the factory. But Deepsinger always seems to have the upper hand, and in the industrial chaos of the factory, the Orca queen reveals her past identity to Flexx, shapeshifting into an exact mimic of the zombie while escaping in a giant submersible airship. Betrayed and exhausted, Jones now is the most powerful figure in Sub SF, where the majority has fiercely defended their city against hordes of undead. Her loyal army can defend the factory, but somewhere along the Pacific coast, she is being impersonated by a telepathic echolocating shapeshifter aboard a ship with radical new technology...
Monday, March 8, 2010
Screenplay exercise:Sandman (rejected by WB)
SANDMAN by Neil Gaiman; screenplay exerpt by Ted Elliott & Terry Rossio, rejected by Warner Brothers, 1996.
Synopsis: England, 1915. BURGESS, a scholar of the occult, gets his hands on an ancient text of great power and attempts to summon Death. He is almost successful, summoning one of her family members instead...
4.
INT. BURGESS MANOR - CELLAR - NIGHT
Candles burn in the darkness. Robed figures inscribe a large
circle on the floor -- chalk white against the black stone.
Runic characters decorate it.
ACOLYTE
It is midnight, Lord Magus.
BURGESS
It is time. Elspeth, love..?
A beautiful YOUNG WOMAN nods adoringly. She crouches on all
fours at Burgess' feet.
Items are placed on her back: a ceremonial bowl, inside which
floats a human heart. A long twisted knife. A feather. Coins.
The Magdalene Grimoire. She is a human altar.
Burgess opens the book. He begins to intone, displaying the
items as he names them:
BURGESS
I give you coin I made from a stone. I
give you a song I stole from the dirt. I
give you a knife from under the hills.
And a stick I stuck through a dead man's
eye. I give you a claw I ripped from a
rat. I give you a name, and the name is
lost.
He jabs his forearm with the knife. Blood drips onto the
feather.
BURGESS (CONT'D)
I give you blood from out of my vein, and
a feather I pulled from an angel's wing.
He throws the feather into the circle.
BURGESS (CONT'D)
I summon with poison, and summon with
pain. I open the way and open the gates.
Come.
The acolytes echo the word 'Come.'
BURGESS (CONT'D)
I summon you in the names of the old
lords. Namtar. Allatu. Morax. Naberius.
Klesh. Vepar. Maymon. We summon.
The acolytes chant 'Come.'
5.
BURGESS (CONT'D)
From the dark they call you ... into the
dark they call you. Coin and song, knife
and stick ...
In the center of the circle, the air SHIMMERS --
BURGESS (CONT'D)
Claw and name, blood and feather ... Here
in the darkness ...
The air SOLIDIFIES, taking shape --
The acolytes echo 'Here in the darkness.'
BURGESS (CONT'D)
Here in the darkness, we summon you
together. COME!
There is FLASH --
-- and a black-cloaked FIGURE materializes in mid-air.
His head and face are covered by a HELM that looks like the
skull of some dead ancient god (which it is).
A large, vibrant heart-shaped RUBY adorns his neck.
A small leather POUCH hangs from one hand.
-- and then the figure collapses. He lies splayed on the
floor, in the center of the circle.
The acolytes are hushed, amazed.
ACOLYTE
We did it. I don't believe it. We did it --
BURGESS
No. We failed. This isn't Death. Damn it
to hell.
Silence from the others as Burgess considers the figure.
BURGESS
Even so ... strip him.
The Acolyte nods, reaches across the circle --
-- and SCREAMS as his arm TWISTS violently, torqued by some
unseen force. Burgess shoves him away from the circle.
BURGESS
Fool! If you'd broken the circle, he
could have escaped!
He grabs Elspeth by the hair, slashes with the knife --
6.
Elspeth's head lolls to one side. Burgess catches her before
she collapses.
ACOLYTE
My god --
Burgess lets Elspeth fall to the ground. He holds his hands
up like a surgeon. They are stained with Elspeth's blood.
Careful not to break the circle, Burgess steps close to the
captured FIGURE. With bloody hands he strips off the cloak.
He takes the ruby.
He takes the pouch.
And then he removes the helm --
The face revealed is bone white, framed by jet black hair. An
aquiline nose and high cheekbones, a face carved from finest
marble -- save the eyes. These are obsidian, deep as the
universe -- and staring directly at Burgess.
He is SANDMAN.
Burgess draws back, unsettled.
BURGESS
(shaken)
... I think, at day's end, this will have
been a very profitable evening's work.
Wednesday, March 3, 2010
Tuesday, March 2, 2010
Chapter Six Summary: Composition
The visual design of a film can add depth and meaning to otherwise plain acting or dialogue. Frame composition is defined by elements such as shape, focus, scale, contrast, chaos, balance, positive or empty space, even the choice of different film grain, lenses, and exposures. These selections can be overused to the point of style over substance, but when used carefully, quality composition defines films that stand the test of time.
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