I was thinking about how to do a documentary type movie of individuals/events that occurred when I fully realized that, as we all know, a tour of duty is thousands of hours of sheer boredom punctuated by seconds of absolute terror and action.

So I began thinking about a fictional account based on real events. That ended in failure when I realized that I don't have the time to research anything accurately enough (actual events/places/units/etc. upon which the fiction is based) to satisfy my harsh criteria.

About this time I heard someone in a nearby cubicle mention Jet Li, which made think of a movie of his. I think it was called "The One". This flick was a typical "multiple universe" sci-fi flick where each universe is mostly similar and exists entirely independently of the others. Of course, one of the universes develops the ability to travel to the Earth of the other universes and starts screwing things up. In the case of "The One", an individual's power was spread between all instances of them in each universe (I think there were 16). So, if you went to the other universes and killed the "you" in that one his power was then transferred to the remaining ones. Naturally in the end you end up with a battle between two identical super dudes who have the power of 16 divided between only two (although one is evil or else he wouldn't be killing himself in the first place - a goatee helps here). Or something like that.

Now back to my idea...

Set in the far future where we can't send people to these universes (or it's always failed as far as we know) but we can send small probes to the other universes. Furthermore, they can sit in some kind of "temporal" (note that I hate using TNG jargon but it actually works here) space where they can't be detected but can record the action.

Now, the video from this idea is a news type show showing all the different ways in which wars have played out in the various universes. Probes are sent out to the various universes to see what "year" they are in (or at least what we can reach - it's a fairly new technology) and when a suitable one is found more probes are sent out to find action based on what happened in our universe. Sometimes it works sometimes it doesn't. When it does we find that it's not always the same. Based on the video the probes come back with the show analyzes what did/might have happened.

This does several things. It plausibly (in the sci-fi world of course) allows very short and fairly easy to produce videos to tie into a larger framework/story. It also allows multiple people to produce these short stories and "anchor" them themselves (either as real people with real sets and/or chroma key or completely CGI - iClone/Movie Storm) and upload them to a central place (website that is). It's not limited to wars we know of or a specific time frame either. Some universes may have had totally different wars and the "show" does not have to concentrate on a specific time frame. This would allow many different engines to be used (IL-2, Crysis, Armed Assauly, Black Shark, etc.) individually or combined.

The name of the show...

Waryeur

and the website would be (is), obviously, waryeur.com.

Obviously there are all kinds of things that can be expanded on such as some type of device that gives first person views and just about anything else that can be imagines. Technical glitches can lead to "surprise" outcomes when new probes are sent out and retrieved. Even completely different outcomes to entire campaigns. For example, I've often wondered what would have happened if the Japanese had developed some drug to treat malaria. Guadalcanal might have been very different.

Also, the "world" in the show does not necessarily have to be "our" world. In fact, "our" world might be one visited by the probes.

Thoughts....


--Outlaw.

Whew, that's an ambitious idea! Think you can pull it off?

Almost certainly not, but, that never stopped me from trying anything before!!!

The first thing I learned is that news persons do actually have a real job. It is amazingly difficult to make standing/sitting in front of a camera reading a script look professional. I'm not talking about the sets/lights/make-up/etc. either. I'm just talking about the announcer's presentation. I've done quite a bit of technical instruction and presentation and even done some video production of the same but it's a completely different ball game to get the look/feel of a news show.

I am now experimenting with a 100% CGI announcer using iClone/CrazyTalk but with 1 billion dollars worth of projects at my real job and my Vette brakes still not working right, my time is limited.


--Outlaw.