by Roger Bourke White Jr., copyright January 2017
Assignment:
- Choose TWO concepts, good candidates for your original screenplay
- Write a half-page on each concept, including:
- who is the protagonist?
- what does the protagonist want?
- what is the main setting?
- who is the primary antagonist?
- what is the genre?
- Upload to this assignment
I like writing about the future. I write both forecasting and science fiction, and often mix them together. These days I'm thinking and writing a lot about the near future -- what things are going to be like in the 2050's era. The center of what I write and think about is how new technologies change how we live, and how we think, as in, they change what we take for granted. But what remains constant in all this change is our instinctive thinking, things such as falling in love. This mix is a fun challenge to address.
The two concepts that follow are part of this thinking.
-- Introduction
Society is changing. One change is our relations with our children, which is changing how we raise them. I envision baby clubs replacing marriage as the central institution for child raising. Technology is going to also bring on dramatic changes in how we create children. We will edit the DNA that makes the zygote.
What be the same in the future is the instinct to want the best for a child we are creating and raising.
Exploring what is coming next in creating and raising children is the theme of this story.
-- who is the protagonist?
Janalee Crosby -- 30's, Augmented Reality (AR) engineer, into tennis and bicycling, she is ambitious and living an ambitious person lifestyle, not a Total Entitlement State (TES)/Necessity Person lifestyle.
-- what does the protagonist want?
It is time. She wants to create and raise a child. She wants the best for this upcoming child and exploring the choices she has is the center of this story.
-- what is the main setting?
This is the near future. This is a US urban environment of the 2050's. Janalee has a good job, a fulfilling lifestyle, and she wants to add child raising to it.
-- who is the primary antagonist?
Working her way through the choices, and overcoming the obstacles to getting the best are the antagonist.
-- what is the genre?
This is a "day in the life of" hard science fiction story about the near future.
-- Introduction
This story is exploring the Total Entitlement State (TES) lifestyle of the 2050's. This is about the lifestyle that people have when they don't have a productive job, in the 2010's sense of that concept. The TES people are keeping themselves busy, but it's not adding to the material prosperity of society -- automation (cyber) is handling that. This is about how people are keeping themselves busy and enfranchised in non-productive ways.
-- who is the protagonist?
Megan Silver/(Lola Lovegood in AR) -- 20, is deep in the TES lifestyle, she lives on necessity money, fashion is her deep interest, her athletic interest is dancing in AR and real world.
-- what does the protagonist want?
She is looking to have a good time in both the AR world and the real world. In the AR world she is a fashion designer and she plays RunWayWild, a fashion designing game. In the real world she likes to get out to RetroDisco, a nightclub, and party hearty with her friends.
-- what is the main setting?
There are two main settings: the real world urban setting where Megan lives on a low budget in an apartment with her parents, and the glamorous AR setting where she plays Lola Lovegood, a high profile fashion model.
-- who is the primary antagonist?
I don't know yet. This is a romance. I've started describing the guy she runs into, but I haven't decided how their relation will evolve.
-- what is the genre?
This is romance taking place in the 2050's in NYC. Megan is going to do lots of partying and fall in love with a person she meets while gaming in AR -- by pure coincidence, it turns out he lives not far away in the real world.
--The End--