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"Agents of ILM" campaign idea: Help me flesh it out?


Funksaw

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In 1946, at Area 51 in Roswell, New Mexico, experiments overseen by Albert Einstein in an attempt to find a universal field theorem result in what is at that time described as a "dimensional breach" on December 18, 1946.

 

What came out, however, was a flying saucer piloted by little green men straight out of the pulp fictions, movie shorts and radio plays - in fact, a little too straight out of fiction.

 

At that exact moment, in Cincinatti, Ohio, Leah and Arnold Spielberg give birth to a boy. They name him Steven.

 

By 1964, young Steven Spielberg's obsession with storytelling results in an independent film involving aliens, called "Firelight." The film is a success, inspiring Spielberg to go to Hollywood and create movies professionally. He has a blockbuster hit, "Jaws," which allows him to remake "Firelight" into the high-budget blockbuster, "Close Encounters of the Third Kind."

 

Originally, the script for "Close Encounters" was going to be written by Paul Schrader - but as more and more creative people got involved with the idea, Speilberg took over writing entirely - with the movie taking an entirely different form than Schrader's original drafts. Writing like a man possessed, Spielberg writes about benevolent aliens meeting humanity on Devil's Tower.

 

This movie captured the imaginations of millions around the world; and with millions of people tuned into a universal, iconic, fictional version of aliens - the aliens came. It was when Spielberg revisited Devils Tower in 1978 for scouting locations for his 1980 revision of "Close Encounters" that his very own alien creations - straight out of his movie - made contact with him.

 

Confiding only in fellow filmmaker and friend, George Lucas, who was at that time working with Spielberg on a homage to 1930s adventure serials, "Raiders of the Lost Ark," Spielberg and Lucas started following "Fortean" events - and though they were looking for "aliens" they started to notice a pattern emerging.

 

People, places, and things that had captured the imaginations of people around the world started turning up in real-world news events. By late 1979, the duo realized that it was not aliens from outer space coming to Earth that explained what happened to Spielberg on Devil's Tower.

 

It was fiction - invading reality.

 

The two relocated their special effects shop, "Industrial Light and Magic" to San Rafael, providing a cover to establish a secret foundation, "ILM Investigations," devoted to tracking incursions of popular fiction into reality and to make sure that none of the darker ideas of humanity's own fantasies fall into the wrong hand.

 

Inside ILM's underground vaults, millions of iconic pieces of fiction and imagination are stored, only to see the light of day when humanity is finally ready to handle them.

 

In 1997, over two thirds of the agents in Speilberg and Lucas's employ are tragically killed in a protracted secret war against the biggest threat to reality to date - an invasion by Lucas's own creation, Darth Vader himself.

 

The only way ILM was finally able to succeed in defeating Vader was to hurt him at his source - he destroyed Vader's standing in the eyes of the populace with a conspiracy to undermine him. This conspiracy took the form of 1999's prequel to Star Wars, "The Phantom Menace."

 

It was a success - but one that cost ILM Investigations dearly. Since then ILM has covertly started recruiting new agents from creative industries - film, television, video games, books, comics, and art of all stripes.

 

And the mission?

 

Make sure that iconic "MacGuffins" don't fall into the wrong hands. Get fictional characters back to the works where they belong. And above all, protect humanity from it's own darkest nightmares.

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Re: "Agents of ILM" campaign idea: Help me flesh it out?

 

Some half baked ideas:

 

  • Uwe Boll as recurring villain
  • Areas of reality which have different physics than others - "Movie physics" where shooting a car with a .38 pistol results in a massive explosion - survivable explosion.
  • Special cameras which can "capture the soul" of a fictional character.
  • Rapid computer development in the 1980s and 1990s coming from a dissected HAL
  • Fictional Characters trying to escape ILM and remain "real" by kidnapping and taking over the lives of the actors that portrayed them.
  • Guns that never need reloading - unless it's dramatically appropriate.
  • A ninja who can force an entire army to attack him one at a time.

 

 

And plot seeds:

  • Mork (from Ork) attempts to take over the life of Robin Williams.
  • An oversized man wearing a massive diving suit and wielding a drill starts attacking offshore oil rigs.
  • Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull was merely an excuse for Harrison Ford to attempt to infiltrate a cabal of movie characters as "Indiana Jones"
  • Two Words: Dalek Invasion
  • Little kids getting lost in a fantasy world. Like, literally.

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Re: "Agents of ILM" campaign idea: Help me flesh it out?

 

Some more ideas that I got in traffic:

 

  • Reality Television is exactly that - teleivision which, because it uses real people, actively reinforces the foundation of reality.
  • Your favorite show (Firefly, Wonderfalls, etc.) was cancelled before it had time to build a following because the last thing that reality needs is fictional characters "building a following"
  • Yes, your script was rejected from Hollywood because it was good. 95% of everything is crap. The Crap ratio is currently maintained at that stable level. Studio executives KNOW that they're stuff actively ruins movies.

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Re: "Agents of ILM" campaign idea: Help me flesh it out?

 

This is just brilliant. :yes:

 

Here's another suggestion. The death of actor Christopher Reeve resulted in a massive wave of sympathetic imagination which caused his incarnation of Superman to appear on Earth. ILM is faced with a dilemma: Superman could be the greatest force for good the world has ever seen, but any public actions by him in the real world would seriously challenge the credibility of established physics, and panic world militaries over his potential threat. ILM agents have to keep track of Superman and persuade him to maintain a low profile, but when there's a major crisis in the world how do you keep Superman from interfering?

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Re: "Agents of ILM" campaign idea: Help me flesh it out?

 

Another part of the job for the Mythbusters is the simple fact that they bust MYTHS. They keep their fanbase anchored to real world reality by proving that all the nifty stuff you see in movies and on tv just can't happen.

 

For the most part, anyway.

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Re: "Agents of ILM" campaign idea: Help me flesh it out?

 

Actually, the Discovery Channel, the History Channel, Animal Planet, The Learning Channel are all setup to reinforce reality.

 

MTV was ruined when the videos they were showing started to affect reality. Hence all the 'reality' shows on it now instead of VIDEOS! :sneaky::P

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Re: "Agents of ILM" campaign idea: Help me flesh it out?

 

Some more ideas:

 

A fictional character can only truly be defeated when it is "recaptured" - but it only works in the medium that the character was first recorded on. The more iconic the character, the more specific the medium has to be.

 

Robin Hood had to be recaptured on goat-skinned parchment treated with a lime bath. For the less iconic Ivanhoe, created in 1819, a blank, hand-bound book from the 1940s sufficed.

 

One of the reasons Darth Vader presented such a problem for ILM was because the character Darth Vader, the character could only be captured on a Panaflex 35mm camera, using an Arriflex anamorphic lens, on film stock that was so prone to fading that it was discontinued in the 1980s. Attempts to recreate the filmstock in-house proved futile.

 

This is one of the reasons for the 1997 re-release of "Star Wars Special Edition" - an attempt was made to make the character vulnerable to much more readily available digital stock. This failed until the 1999 "Phantom Menace" weakened Vader's iconic power, and made him vulnerable to digital stock.

 

 

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Hollywood has continually increased the amount of time that works are subject to copyright not because they're greedy but because characters in the public domain can be freely used - or released - by anyone. I won't bother to get into the number of zombie outbreaks since "Night of the Living Dead" slipped through the cracks and got brought into the public domain.

 

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ILM's reach is limited - sadly, the reports of vampires and witches in some of India and other near-east countries are the result of unchecked expansion of Bollywood.

 

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Several fictional characters understand their fictional nature and work with the ILM to contain the fictional threat; though thier obviously fictional mannerisms and recognizability rarely let them work outside of the ILM underground labs.

 

These include Don Coreleone (Logistics), The Cowardly Lion (Combat Strategy), Clarence the Angel (Profiling), General Jack D. Ripper (Military Liason), Annie Hall (Therapist), Fay Wray (Exotic Location Specialist), Grumpy (cook), and recent addition Borat Sagadiev (Goodwill Ambassador).

 

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Halloween is a particularly hectic time as fictional characters are more likely to work out in the open.

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Re: "Agents of ILM" campaign idea: Help me flesh it out?

 

Some ideas to help:

 

3-D movies, especially horror movies, as a plot by evil forces to reinforce fictional infringement on reality (making the fictional seem more real). A 3-D zombie movie could cause zombies to literally step out of the screen and into the theater.

 

Increased use of CGI in movies is an attempt by ILM to use computers to remotely recapture fictional characters. In fact, the Hulk was all CGI for this very reason. However, internet fanfic and fan-made videos on YouTube interfere with this recapture plan with some characters.

 

The Harry Potter universe (a magical population actively hidden from the real world) as an attempt to "brush" fictional characters under the carpet so-to-speak until ILM can recapture them.

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Re: "Agents of ILM" campaign idea: Help me flesh it out?

 

Don't forget the 'Little People' either.

 

Remember the movie "The Indian in the Cupboard"?

 

It actually used a variation of this very idea. A young boy could put any plastic figures into his magic cupboard, close the door, turn the key and open the door again and they would come to life (and it worked for a T-Rex, Robocop and Darth Vader). Of course they were still the same size as their original plastic figure.

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Re: "Agents of ILM" campaign idea: Help me flesh it out?

 

Large fire devours movie sets at Universal Studios

 

I guess ILM decided that the Back to the Future set was dangerous. I think there was a temporal rift there that allowed travel to the future.

 

Fortunately, the videos and movie reels were saved, allowing ILM to send the characters back to their movies and TV shows.

 

Or, was there a more insidous reason?

 

A recent escape by a major Villian who wanted to make sure there would be no way to send him back to his movie.

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Re: "Agents of ILM" campaign idea: Help me flesh it out?

 

Moving Pictures combined with a variant Gestalt universe gives us fictional characters possessing people, and depending on how much Belief is imbued in them, they can alter the body they're possessing and their surroundings.

 

So, the Fict known as El Zorro possesses somebody, morphs the body to match the movie image, and can warp reality enough to perform his legendary feats in modern society (and get away with it).

 

If the possession moves from person-to-person, I can see quasi-religious rites (Voodoo anyone?) used to try to entice the Fict to possess the subject for a time.

 

Criminals would compete to attract famous movie villains, especially the unkillable or uncatchable ones.

 

Steve

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Re: "Agents of ILM" campaign idea: Help me flesh it out?

 

Moving Pictures combined with a variant Gestalt universe gives us fictional characters possessing people, and depending on how much Belief is imbued in them, they can alter the body they're possessing and their surroundings.

 

So, the Fict known as El Zorro possesses somebody, morphs the body to match the movie image, and can warp reality enough to perform his legendary feats in modern society (and get away with it).

 

If the possession moves from person-to-person, I can see quasi-religious rites (Voodoo anyone?) used to try to entice the Fict to possess the subject for a time.

 

Criminals would compete to attract famous movie villains, especially the unkillable or uncatchable ones.

 

Steve

with zorro's opososion to corrupt law officers and politicians that would be a good thing to come out of this

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Re: "Agents of ILM" campaign idea: Help me flesh it out?

 

The reason so many movie studios and tv networks hate fanfic and fanfic writers* is that their enthusiastic writing makes it easier for fictional characters to escape into reality. Fans so devoted to a show/movie/character that they produce more (written) adventures for them are a real problem. As is the fact that enough "fanon" (fan-created 'canon') can fundamentally alter the character in question...rendering the expected means of corraling a character null and void.

 

 

*Like Yours Truly, I confess

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Re: "Agents of ILM" campaign idea: Help me flesh it out?

 

As is the fact that enough "fanon" (fan-created 'canon') can fundamentally alter the character in question

 

This is the real reason Hollywood hates fanfiction; it blurs the clear image Hollywood creates enough that:

 

1) the "avatar" is no longer clear enough to made Real.

 

2) the "avatar" creates multiple shadows on Reality, none of whom act the same or have the same powers/weaknesses. These shadows are thus more unpredictable.

 

Steve

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