LSGL BRAINSTORM
Th 01.24.08

Premise:  Try to go through all of act II at 3 levels:  (1) timeline, (2) significant turning points, (3) moment-by-moment color/texture.  Articulate the story as told in ATMOM; enumerate departures from the original.

1.  Lovecraft’s version:  the species’ timeline
Let’s review the story as Lovecraft actually told it -- and I’ve been able to construct it...  since it’s ambiguous on certain points.  (This is from memory, not referring back to the book.)

The elder things originated in another galaxy, perhaps in another universe.  They arrived on earth 1 billion years ago, when the entire planet was covered with water.  The location where they arrived is the site of the current south pole -- and so forever after this location is somewhat sacred.

The elder things created life from nothing...  Primarily for food, but also for labor (shoggoths).  The elder things at a previous point in their ancient history were a more technologically oriented species, but had become less so by the time they arrived on earth.  They enjoy eating meat, and are perhaps hunters.

Continents rise from the oceans.  Cthulhu and his spawn come to earth and colonize.  I forget:  they either take living on the land for themselves, or they take northerly oceans.  To an extent there’s peace between the elders and the spawn.  R’lyeh sinks and Cthulhu is imprisoned in the course of events that the elders have nothing to do with.

The shoggoths are initially without intelligence or language, and can only travel in the oceans.  Increasingly the shoggoths escape the elders’ control.  The elders wage a “war of resubjugation” and bring the shoggoths back under control.

The mi-go come from Pluto and colonize the land masses.  The elders don’t seem to mind retreating to the oceans.

A great ice age descends on the world.  Plate tectonics lead to several of the old cities being destroyed.  The elders gradually retreat to their initial arrival place on earth.  By this point in time they have lost the power to create life from nothing, and instead are only able to shape evolution by breeding/mutation.  They have also lost the secret of space flight.

A city is built on the plateau of Leng, 50 million years ago.  Three hundred miles away, the “mountains of madness” can be seen.  These are the tallest mountains on earth, which were formed when the moon ripped away from the earth, and they are home to primal gods which are more powerful than anything else on the planet -- elders, yith, even Cthulhu.  Occassionally terrifying things float down from a river that begins in those mountains.

Over time, the river carves a honeycomb of caves in the plateau beneath the elders’ city.  They do some exploring there.  As it gets increasingly colder, the elders deliberately abandon their city and move underground to a giant lake that his kept warm by geothermal sources.  There is a constant haze above the city topside, due to rising water vapors.

Around this point in time the elders give the shoggoths added powers:  increased intelligence, the language, and the ability to travel on land.  The shoggoths murder the entire population, characteristically sucking off the elders’ heads and leaving them slime covered.  The shoggoths claim the city as their own and continue to carve new tunnels inside the plateau.  The caves are also occupied by an otherwise extinct species of six-foot tall, blind, albino penguins, which fear the shoggoths.

2.  Lovecraft’s version:  The 14 elders discovered underground
Around the time of the war of resubjugation, 120 million years ago, a party of 14 elders were attacked by a shoggoth.  Six were killed, eight were largely uninjured, but left for dead in an underground cave.  It is possible that they were trapped in a cave-in, which saved them from decapitation.

They must have gone into hibernation...  They are reawakened when human explorers bring them out into the sunlight -- suggesting that the cold kept them unconscious.  [Note that it wouldn’t have been cold 120 million years ago, and they wouldn’t have tried to return to the city, which was built 50 million years ago.]  If in fact these elders were trapped only 50 million years ago, then the question remains how they got into the cave...  Were they exploring the cave, and were found by a renegade shoggoth?  Based on their elegant, non-“decadent” handwriting, we know that they are from a period before the city folk’s art truly began to decline and before the migration underground.

So, look at the three possible time periods:  120 million years ago (war of subjugation), 40-50 million years ago (city built, but elders still non-decadent), 50,000 - 30 million years ago (migration into the depths of the plateau)...  None of these options seems to make sense.  Also, it’s hard to figure out what these elders were doing when they ran into tragedy...  If they were engaged in the war of resubjugation, one might expect weapons.  The same holds true if they were hunters out killing animals to eat.  If they were explorers they might be unencumbered (since they can see in the dark)...  But what they have with them is a collection of green soapstone stars with dots on them, which we are given to understand is money.  The only explanation that comes to mind for why they’d be carrying money is if they were traders going to or coming from another city.

So, as you see, I’m left baffled as to what this party of elders were doing when they met tragedy...  And I’m similarly flummoxed when I try to figure out what the back story of the shoggoth that attacked them is...  And how precisely they all came to be down in a cave.  Given that the elders are from a period earlier than the shoggoths’ genocide, I also have to wonder how it is that their going missing was ignored?  Was this shoggoth attack am isolated incident?  An unsolved mystery?  Was the shoggoth that got them found and destroyed -- but their bodies were never discovered?  Or did the shoggoth manage to live on in secrecy for several million years, never striking again, and forever avoiding detection?

Was this shoggoth acting alone, living in isolation from any other member of its species?  Was it perhaps a lone survivor after the war of resubjugation?  Was it living underwater in the caves?  Did the shoggoths have the ability to come above ground into the air at this point -- thus making it possible that the shoggoth snuck up and snagged the elders -- or is it purely a water beast at this point, meaning that the elders must have been in an underground river when the attack occurred.  Are all of the dead animals found underground water animals, or are some of them land animals -- indicating that the shoggoth was amphibious?

If the shoggoth is living underground, possibly millions of years at a time, what was the ecology?  What did it eat?  Did it reproduce?  Could there have been a whole population of shoggoths living down there for some time without the elders knowing of it?

3.  The runaway slave scenario
Here’s a possibility I hadn’t considered before...  Maybe the elders were quite aware of this one lone renegade shoggoth...  And the elders we find down in the cave are members of a party sent to recapture a runaway slave.  The elders, as they live so very long, care a great deal about their dead...  So it seems that they would have made some efforts to recover the dead bodies and give them proper burials (under star shaped mounds).

The idea of the shoggoth as a desperate runaway slave is full of drama...  And it’s interesting to think that if 18 elders were incapacitated, then ultimately slaying the shoggoth (if it didn’t manage to escape out to sea) may have required 30, 40, or 50 elders in the effort.  Of course, once again, it appears that the elders were unarmed...

Was the idea to rehypnotise it?  We never find out how the hypnosis process works -- whether it’s aided by mechanical devices (contrary to most of the elders’ society) -- or whether it’s a telepathic thing.  ...Certainly given that the shoggoth only has eyes intermittently, it’s not going to be hypnosis of any variety that we’re familiar with.  Again, the idea of dozens of unarmed elders combining their mental power to re-hypnotize a shoggoth is pretty dramatic...  However, let us recall that during the war of resubjugation, they simply killed off a lot of the escapees -- so maybe this concept doesn’t match their modus operandi.

Maybe the murders were a hit-and-run thing...  I haven’t asked previously:  where does the underground river that begins at the mountains of madness ultimately terminate?  Perhaps it flows underground all the way out to the ocean.  If so, then a shoggoth escaping from the city of Leng might be able to make it to freedom...  And if it’s on the run, it might not bother to make sure that all of its victims are fully dead.

If the river doesn’t go to the ocean, but instead goes to some sort of underground sea...  Well, I don’t know.  I don’t see that that opens up any particularly interesting avenues.  We could hypothesize a massive community of renegade shoggoths living underground -- but I don’t really see what that accomplishes.

Oh, perhaps there’s a way to explain the money found with the elders...  Maybe the shoggoth was living in the city when it suddenly made a break for it -- so on the way out, it killed its personal master, or killed the elder that was selling it to someone.

4.  How shoggoths fit into the elders’ society.
There’s no discussion at all of how shoggoths fit into the economy, or to what extent they’re viewed as personal property.  I’m a little fuzzy now...  I seem to recall that the elders are a socialist society -- but then, I might be confusing this point with the yith (?) in “Shadow Out of Time.”  What is the ratio of shoggoths to elders?

Does every elder have their own personal shoggoth servant?  Does each “family” have one?  Are they owned by small village units?  Does the city as a whole have a small herd of shoggoths, which it keeps on hand for tasks in the same way that Portland has a collection of snow plows and city busses?  Whose responsibility is it to manage the shoggoths?  Can any individual elder issue commands to a shoggoth -- or is there a shoggoth wrangler, who has authority over use of the shoggoths?  Are the shoggoths allowed into the elders’ living spaces?  (I could double-check the size of doors, which was mentioned, since we know that the shoggoths are 15’ dia. sphereoids.)  Are the shoggoths allowed on the streets?  Are they viewed as vulgar things, and thus kept out of sight?

How do elders feel about shoggoths?  Of course they created the shoggoths themselves -- but that doesn’t necessarily mean that they don’t feel disgust or hatred toward them...  Particularly after the war of resubjugation, there might be an attitude that you can’t keep your eye off a shoggoth.

What kind of work are the shoggoths used for?  They’re big and strong -- it seems like they’d be most useful for construction purposes, moving stones to build the cities.  There’s no discussion of how the stone for the cities was quarried...  Given that in the penultimate chapter of ATMOM we see tunnels which appear to be new, it appears that perhaps shoggoths are able to tunnel through stone -- perhaps using some form of acid (which would be interesting, story-wise).

The shoggoths seem best suited to heavy labor, such as moving giant stones...  It’s hard to imagine them doing tasks that require fine motor skills...  And yet, in that penultimate chapter, I think what Lovecraft implies is that the palimpsest on the tunnel walls was carved by the shoggoths themselves.  Similarly, the dot writing on the wall was perhaps made by a shoggoth too -- implying that the intelligent shoggoths have not only spoken language, but also written language and artistic skills!  That’s certainly a host of humanizing traits; peculiar that Lovecraft has managed to “morally rehabilitate” the elders, largely though appreciation of their arts -- and yet, the shoggoths remain things that humans ought never think about?

The shoggoth’s eternal hatred of the elders can be rationalized...  But the shoggoth at the end of ATMOM that pursues Dyer and Danforth like a locomotive...  The reaction doesn’t seem clearly motivated.  The penguins fear the shoggoths -- but they also are cave dwellers who must live to an extent in peace with the shoggoths...  Unless the penguins are a frequent food source for the shoggoths?  To what extent do the shoggoths keep the penguins around for snacks?  Perhaps even actively cultivating penguin herds, practicing animal husbandry, etc?  If they can write and make art, why not?

In the early earth history of the shoggoths, I seem to recall that some cities were above water, and some below.  Does this mean that the above water cities had no shoggoths in them?  We know that pterodactyls of an unknown species were used in constructing some cities...  So the elders weren’t wholly dependent on shoggoths.  What was the ratio of shoggoths to other slave species?  Perhaps the shoggoths were fairly uncommon, being used only for special purposes...  And it was their special powers that raised them above all other animals, being the first intelligent species native to earth!

5.  Shoggoths as humans’ close relatives
It’s a curious thought to view the shoggoths as humankind’s brothers.  After all, both their species and ours were fathered by the elders...  They’re not alien to this world -- they originated here, just as we did. Albeit, we were more accidental children...  Bastards as opposed to the legitimate children, the shoggoths.  Given that shoggoths arose on earth earlier than we did, we might view them as our older siblings.

The elders were not a predominantly technological race -- but they did originally have wisdom that allowed them to create new species from nothing, and to engage in space flight.  One has to wonder, if the shoggoths are living in the elders’ city (cities?), what might they have learned that humankind knows nothing of?

6.  Changes I’ve made:  the elders’ physical form
There are a bunch of changes that I’ve made in the form of the elders -- some by necessity, some for personal aesthetic reasons.

Things that I’ve kept intact:  The elders are five-sided.  They have five legs, five arms, and five arms.  The “head” is roughly proportioned like a starfish, and the body is “barrel-like.”

Changes made by necessity:  I tried and tried, but I couldn’t create or manage arms that terminate in 125 tendrils.  Instead, I went with long snakey arms, each with just two fingers at the ends.  While there was a possibility that I could use a “hair” effect to create the cilia on the head, it was more than I could deal with -- so it was omitted.  Wings that furl and unfurl are also overly problematic in the cave setting I chose.

Simplifications:  I need simple models, both to make things easier for me in modeling and animating -- and to make the elders’ forms easy to read and compelling.  I eliminated the triangular feet in favor of snake-like legs.  There are supposed to be gills at the neck, and a similar sort of neck at the base of the creature -- I eliminated both.  In the grooves between the elder’s five sides, there are supposed to be mouths, intestines, and dangling tubes for excretion.  I decided to eliminate these and instead assume that there is a single mouth slit hidden between the eye stalks.

Aesthetic choices:  Given the luminescent blue of the cave interior, I felt it was better to make the elders a dramatic black, rather than gray.  Given the process of over-saturation I use to get the color of the caves, the only way to keep the elders at a determined hue was to have them be colorless...  Pure gray looks wrong in a colorful setting -- the absence of colored reflections is noticeable.  This is less a problem when they’re black.  I also switched the color of the eyes from red to green.  This was because red didn’t look right to me in the blue cave, and because I wanted to do color-coding for the aliens...  Everything related to the elders is an alien green -- everything related to the shoggoths is a blood red.

I put some extra effort into making the bodies of the elders seem to be built from organic shapes, rather than disjointed parts.  I decided that I wanted their torsos to be more like urns than cigars.  I decided the legs needed to be more muscular than ATMOM describes...  And for the sake of the horror, I felt they should have longer, reaching arms -- which makes things easier for me as a character animator.

7.  Scenes from the war
I just went on a walk up and around the hill, just to keep my blood flowing.  On the way I saw a small group of sparrows (?) dart by overhead...  And I thought, “Ah -- it would be neat to see the elder things moving swiftly like that...  Not flapping hard, just throwing their wings back once and speeding forward...  Small groups of fighters, whose arcs overlap and cross in interesting ways.”

Another image I’ve been contemplating...  Initially I felt that the elders should use lightning guns, which forms a technological continuity with the distress beacon.  However, I’ve been growing attached to the idea that their weapons -- tridents, essentially -- shoot beams of rings...  Just like the stun beam that the stormtroopers use on Princess Leia at the beginning of Star Wars - A New Hope.

In order to accomplish this ring-beam effect, I think I could use the “radio waves” tool in AfterEffects.  The expanding concentric rings can be pointed in different directions, a basic 3D rendering effect...  This leads me to a vision of an elder shooting their weapon outward from the screen, sort of into the audience.  The depth that this implies is exciting -- but now that I think about it, it might contradict the “wide flat” pictorial space I’ve been contemplating for my “Anasazi frog” illustrations.

If laser tridents are going to be an element in the film, then another question comes up:  what do they do to the things that they hit?  When the beams hit the spawn of Cthulhu, do the creatures explode into bits -- and then slowly re-coagulate?  Do the spawn explode in chunks -- or do they atomize?  Do they simply fade out of existence, perhaps being banished to another dimension?  Are they consumed by flames?

Presumably these tridents are the weapons that the elders used during the war of resubjugation, simply wiping out many of the free-roaming shoggoths.  Maybe the weapons only work in wide-open spaces?  That would give a rationale for why the elders can’t use the weapons when the shoggoths attack them in their underground city.

Interesting to note:  If the war of resubjugation happened when I think it did, then the shoggoths were still a water-only species...  So we have to imagine the elders not flying through the skies, or hunting in parties on the ground...  They were swooping through the oceans in hunting parties, shooting the shoggoths with beams that travel through the water.  This would suggest to me that the beams must neither be electrical nor heat-based in nature -- it has to be some sort of plasma or magnetism or extra-dimensional energy that’s being shot, which can travel through the water without incinerating / electrocuting the elders along with their prey.

If the weapons can’t be used in enclosed spaces, this also sets us up for a scene that I envisioned during yesterday’s writing session:  the shoggoths being used as a last line of defense, when the spawn actually come down and invade the city itself.  Seeing a shoggoth barrel into a spawn, possibly enveloping it, tearing off its head...  That would be neat to see.

It seems like a balance of powers between the elders and shoggoths is beginning to emerge.  Elders can fly, shoggoths can’t.  Elders have beam weapons -- but they can only be used in open spaces.  Shoggoths are able to engulf / decapitate their opponents in close quarters.  Thus, you never want to allow shoggoths into your midst in the city, unless you’re sure that you’ve got hypnotic control of them.

8.  My condensed version of ATMOM
Here’s my version of ATMOM, condensed for the sake of succinct story-telling -- and completely re-written in some places, in order to make the elders more active protagonists.

The elders evolved on an ocean planet in another galaxy (but within our universe) 3-4 billion years ago.  Their relationship with existence in the cosmos is based on the belief that they should spread out like the universe’s own sensory probes, exploring and experiencing all that exists.  Thus, they have established an empire that spans several galaxies -- not for the sake of conquest, but out of a sense of curiosity that is rationalized as an obligation.

The elders are aware of other pan-galactic species, in particular the “spawn.”  Among the spawn who have come to earth, Cthulhu is the largest, and acts as a sort of commander -- but given the breadth of this species’ territory, it would be foolishly terracentric to think that he is the king of all spawn, or that earth is somehow at the heart of the spawn’s plans.

The spawn are motivated by the desire to bring the universe’s existence to a closure.  This is not done out of malevolence, but out of a sense of religious duty which is incomprehensible to humans.  The means to ending the universe is subtle:  it involves re-aligning stars and black holes in order to create a web of gravitational fields and circuits of solar radiation, all of which creates a sort of galactic machine / casts a spell which will collapse our dimensions back to the original singularity that existed at the time of the big bang and before.

Meanwhile, there are things even more primordial and powerful than the spawn that live in our universe.  The “ultimate gods” live within the core of the earth (and within other planets), and span several dimensions and levels of reality.

The elders, the spawn, and the ultimate gods are the cast of actors that most matter in this background story...

The elders arrived on earth first  (Both they and the spawn are attracted to earth because it is covered with water -- both species originated on water worlds.)  When the elders arrived, Pangaea the super-continent existed.  They circled down slowly from the skies, setting down gently at the south pole.  (They have senses that we don’t, and so were naturally attracted to a magnetic pole.)  The place where they set down -- on land -- became the elder’s primary city, which lasted one billion years, right up until the present day.

[Imagine the first elder’s foot tentacle descending and touching the ground for the first time.]

The elders’ first act upon arriving was to create life forms which they could use as servants.  (They fed upon fish, plankton, and the like, which was already present on the planet.)  The servants they created were the shoggoths, which they controlled purely by telepathic programming.  It generally takes a group of elders to instill a control program in a shoggoth -- but after that, any individual elder can issue verbal commands.  As time passed, the shoggoths became increasingly intelligent, and more prone to rebellion -- requiring larger groups of elders to track them down for telepathic reprogramming.

The shoggoths built cities for the elders -- all on land masses.  For a time, the elders prospered.

***

Then the spawn came to earth.  Commander/prince Cthulhu rose up over the moon, almost as big as the planet itself, and from behind him a swarm of spawn flew toward earth like a swarm of hornets.

The spawn made the first strike.  Taken unawares, the elders were unable to defend themselves immediately, and several cities fell.  The towers toppled down, and the elders inside were crushed.  The spawn attack using the brute force of their bodies alone (?), smashing into the masonry.  When we look at a map of the prehistoric earth again, we see that several cities have winked out.

Now the elders retaliate.  Armies of the elders go out of the Antarctic city, onto a plain, and line up in regiments.  When the elders landed on earth, their wings retracted and were re-absorbed into their bodies.  As the army stands ready, they produce “flying pills” from their...  pockets?  ...raise them up to their mouths, and drop them in.  The wings sprout again, and the creatures become lighter than air.  With a gentle push, they lift off from the earth’s surface and accelerate into the air...  Not flapping except in order to maneuver -- single fast strokes with the wings are enough to give a great deal of propulsion.

We see the army rise to a gathering point in the sky.  A cloud of spawn gathers to oppose them; a moment of tense stand off.  The elders race take the initiative and fly quickly into the fray.  They have with them tridents (which they must have also had on the ground), and begin shooting ring beams which cause the spawn to explode in chunks.

The battle rages, the spawn attacking as if they are clawing demons, the elders like sparrows, shooting their ring guns in ever direction.

A group of spawn break away from the rest and head down toward the first citidel, the stronghold of the elders’ power.  The spawn enter into the tunnels of the city...  But there are a few elders left behind, who give the telepathic command to the shoggoths to attack.  (Perhaps another use for the “radio waves” effect -- mind waves coming from the elder’s five-lobed brain?)  The shoggoths barrel through the tunnel and knock down the invading spawn, enveloping them and decapitating them.

The battles continues...  Meanwhile, up in a commanding tower of the citadel, a small group of elders (three?) prepare to take a desperate action.  Gathered around some sort of beacon device (??), they let loose a terrifying beam in order to summon the ultimate gods.  The ultimate gods, know the spawn (being multi-dimensional themselves); they are essentially indifferent to the elders, but by no means appreciate being disturbed.  Calling these primal forces is essentially the elders’ doomsday weapon.

The sky tears open, and a black cloud pours out.  Tendrils of soot or lightning strokes shoot out, demolishing the spawn in their wake -- but also destroying swaths of the elders, too.  The city is somewhat damaged, though not destroyed...  The three elders who invoked these forces are automatically destroyed -- their tower being shattered, the pieces and their bodies falling down hundreds of feet.

Earlier, as the battle was heating up, Cthulhu’s great city of R’lyeh came to rest on the ocean’s surface.  The city is perched atop a great orb, with rings about it -- a small planetoid which can be used like a space ship, although the entire thing is built from stone.  It uses peculiar anti-gravity drives, drawing upon the spawn’s affinity with gravitational forces -- not metal/electricity based technologies as we understand them.  The city is Cthulhu’s mobile base of operations in his quest to secure this part of the galaxy for his species.

[The city is massive -- but this concept still contradicts the image of Cthulhu himself being almost as big as the moon.]

The ultimate gods, quickly decimates the spawn army...  Which perhaps fall out of the sky like thousands of dead bats.  The black cloud forms a circling maelstrom above R’lyeh, and as Cthulhu struggles to free himself, the city sinks down into the ocean.  He splashes, and is finally frozen in his crypt.  ...Although, this is merely a temporary solution.  The ultimate gods have frozen Cthulhu in timelessness -- but the greatest among the spawn may yet be able to undo this spell by realigning the stars themselves.  It will take time, but the stars will be set on paths which will ultimately arrive at the proper pattern for release...  In the time of humans.

A few weary elders survey the carnage -- fields of the dead, both elders and spawn littering the ground as far as the eye can see.

***

The war leaves the elders greatly weakened.  They have only one city now, have lost their ability to produce flying pills, have lost the cloning pools necessary to replenish their numbers.  They are much more dependent on the help of the shoggoths merely to keep society running.  They have not given the hideous blobs more power out of decadence -- but rather out of necessity.

[Perhaps the cloning pools are an element that needs to be revealed in the earliest part of the “deep history”...  A group of a hundred or so elders first came to earth.  They constructed nutritive pools, into which they sent spores from their own bodies, and thus reproduced.  How the progenitor elders were able to construct such things from nothing is a bit of a mystery...  Perhaps they brought some crucial starter-upper tools with them in the beginning -- but how they carried them through space is an awkward issue.  I’ve considered the idea of a space ship that dropped them off in this solar system and then continued on...  I’ve considered a colonizing spaceship (a sphere or splinter) which first landed in Antarctica...  But having spaceships of any king really undermines the fundamental coolness of seeing the elders first spiral down to earth from outer space.]

The elders use the shoggoths to rebuild their main city, but don’t spread out across the earth again.  We pan across the half-rebuilt citadel.  An elder issues vocal commands to a shoggoth carrying a great stone; it refuses to obey.  The elder sends out telepathic radio waves from its mind; the shoggoth shudders, but still refuses.  The elder uses its trident to inflict a wracking electrical bolt of pain.

We pull back and see that this scene is being viewed by other shoggoths as well.  The elder continues to torture the shoggoth...  And is attacked from behind by another.  Elsewhere the shoggoths rise up and begin striking down their masters.  We see elders, few in numbers, begin to flee from the city, being chased by the shoggoths.

***

How did the survivors in the cave with the beacon come to this resting place?  Perhaps they were just lucky.

At this point it seems to me that radio messages are sent out to other cities...  [Uh oh -- I’ve already destroyed all the other cities...]  Or a message is sent into outer space warning any elders who might come visiting in the future that this planet has been lost, that the shoggoths have become overwhelmingly powerful, and are striking down their masters -- their own creators.  Perhaps as evidence, the survivors include a recording of a message that the shoggoths themselves have sent out...  Stating that the elders don’t deserve to live -- that for creating a species simply to be slaves, they will be hated until the end of time, and will be hunted to the last.

How far away from the city is the “bomb shelter” cave?  I’ve suggested previously that the cave was once a mine where the shoggoths hewed out stone...  Although, if that’s the case, then I might have to illustrate the mining work on screen.  The idea is that the shoggoths hate their former place of work, and will remain in the citadel, taking what once belonged to the elders for their own.  If so, though, it doesn’t seem like the shoggoths are trying very hard to hunt down their former masters.

9.  Problems with the beacon:  why is it waiting in the cave?
The crucial flaw in this last sequence is probably the beacon itself.  It solved one problem for me, but created another.

Originally I was going to have the explorers bring down doom upon themselves by patting a massive, 20-foot-tall guardian elder, which would in turn wake up the whole hive.  I wound up hating that idea, just about as much as the original joke-ending of accidentally stepping on an elder’s leg tentacle...  Accompanied by a squeaky rubber duck / dog’s chew toy sound effect.

Terrible...  And now that I’ve put in five years on this project, I can’t abide the thought of ending the film with such a crass gag.  I increasingly want to tell a story that is true to the original ATMOM outline -- but there are certainly limits to the extent to which this is possible...  Both because of choices I made early on that I’m now committed to, and due to the prohibitively panoramic scope of the deep history.

So, as I was saying, the beacon solved some problems...  It gave the explorers a midpoint in the hive to arrive at, something significant to interact with, and a means for me to convey the history of the elders in this room...

But it’s also extremely anomalous.  Why is the beacon there?  Is it a relic from the elders’ first days on earth?  Has it been kept here as an emergency transmitter?  Is it a means for communicating with the emperor of the empire, only to be activated every million years?  Regardless of what it is, why would it be underground?  I can almost wrap my head around the idea that this cave is somehow sacred ground, related to the first arrival on earth...  Maybe it’s placed there in order to make best use of the earth’s magnetic pole?

10.  Alternate back-story:  the beacon was hidden in advance by a visionary leader
But I’m not really convinced.  So, if the beacon hasn’t been waiting here for millions of years, then it must have been transported here some time in the (relatively) recent past.  Salvaging it from the city is a risky adventure which becomes something that needs to be told onscreen.  [Elders carrying it as a group on their shoulders is intriguing, but hard to render.  Having it levitate using anti-grav could be plausible -- but doesn’t seem to mesh with any of the elders’ other technology.]

The beacon could also have been deposited in the cave in advance by a forward-thinking elder politician.  It would have to be someone in power, someone with access to this rare and valuable devise.  It would have to be someone who has followers to help with the physical transport.

This begins to suggest a back-story, where there’s one elder of vision on the city’s council, who feels the shoggoths are becoming too powerful, but who is dismissed by his peers...  Perhaps -- and I don’t quite know why this seems so natural -- perhaps he has a loyal son who leads the mission to deposit the ancient, sacred transmitter at a secret location 50-100 miles away...  The “old man,” despite his foresight dies in the uprising -- but his son (a prince?) leads a small group of loyal families away into the hills at the critical moment...  We feel that the mantle of “good leadership” has passed from one generation to the next, but in a tragic moment, all there’s left to do is wait out the aeons in hope that friendly rescuers will arrive.

11.  Another beacon problem:  the transmission beam
Here’s yet another problem with the beacon...  If sending off its transmission beam immediately brings shoggoths to the scene, then what good is it?  I had a scenario I was exploring at one point where the shoggoths are rising up in many cities at once, and so there are many beacons around the globe shooting off distress messages -- but one by one they wink off.

So this group of elders has managed to survive because they saw what was happening in time, and they managed to shut their beam off before transmitting a message.  Maybe they recorded the message, but knew from the start that they couldn’t safely send it...  So it was more like recording a final diary entry -- which is all the more tragic, knowing full well that it can never be safely sent.

If I went in that direction, it would have to be explained explicitly:  “We record this message knowing full well that we can never send it, or else we will bring down doom upon ourselves.  We know that we are lost, and go now into the great sleep without illusion of hope.”  Nicely tragic -- but also wordy.

I suppose I haven’t really explored this option, before, though...  The idea that the distress beacon isn’t a warning to others so much as a time capsule -- one which must never be activated.

Perhaps there’s a way to slip in some poignant (potentially cheesy) last line...  “We who were once gods...  Let us sleep...  Don’t wake us, or we will know our final judgment, and be damned.”

Plausible...  But I’m not enthusiastic.

12.  Troubles of length
How the heck long is this act II?  Just describing the spawn vs. elders war, when I get into the details, I see how I’ve got forty or fifty shots.  Ouch.  If we assume each shot is, say, four seconds long, that’s potentially 3min 20 seconds right there...  And the war has little to do with the point of act II:  setting up the shoggoths.

It would be really interesting to do the whole story in the roughest style I can, just to see how it really plays...  That’s at least two days, maybe three days work, though.  Must keep working with text.

Part of the trouble with the Anasazi Frog concept is that by going into a sort of mythological space, it’s actually harder to do a montage.  When I was planning to use 3D images, the story was disjointed -- but at least I could blur through issues.

13.  Reviewing my options for act II
So, to review, when I left off work on act II in August (?), my approach was to have the time frame of act II constrained to a present tense account of emergency.  During the past day or two of writing I’ve been revisiting the idea of having the timeframe be “deep history” again -- as it was my original idea for the beacon’s message at the beginning of 2007.  I did a very rough animatic, whose best feature was that I had a greek chorus of three voices telling the story.  It bothered me, though, because there was a section where the elders conveniently become “decadent” that was hard to portray pictorially, and really didn’t make much sense story-wise to me.

Options for act II’s timeframe:
	(a) present tense state of emergency
	(b) a telling of the entire history of the elders

Options for recounting events:
	(a) blow-by-blow account of everything that happened
	(b) montage of the significant moments or key images

Options for voice-over’s POV:
	(a) the elders
	(b) the shoggoths
	(c) the explorers
	(d) the beacon itself, a sentient computer
	(e) images without voice-over

Primacy of voice-over vs. images:
	(a) images have primacy, the voice explains what’s on screen
	(b) voice-over is primary, images connect brief visual impressions with the words.

Visual style - animated options:
	(a) anasazi frog - stylized line drawings...  created as 2D CG in LightWave
	(b) rough brush and ink...  “squigglemation”
	(c) 3D CG and PhotoShopped backgrounds

Visual style - storytelling space:
	(a) traditional cinematic cuts between different camera angles
	(b) wide and flat - as if the story is all told on one piece of paper
	(c) deep - like a tunnel book, which the camera travels through

14.  Explorers’ point of view
Suppose I had images from the elders history appearing on screen, but instead of the elders explaining what had happened, I had the explorers confusedly trying to explain what it is that they’re seeing...  They’d ask questions, probably with a lot of echo and reverb, so it’s as if these are the voices in their own heads.

Or, I could have the explorers tell the history of the elders as they understand it.  It would be a straight-forward telling -- it would just be that the explorers narrate what it is that they have come to know -- in that instant of telepathic contact with the machine.

No, I don’t like either of these options...  If I have to have a voice-over, then I want it to be the aliens speaking.  The aliens are the main characters of the story -- the humans are incidental.

15.  Refocus on the elders/shoggoth relationship
I’ve told the story from the elder’s POV -- now try focusing only on the points that deal directly with the shoggoths, or with the elders/shoggoths relationship.  Nothing else belongs in the story.

There are two ways to do this.  I could go back over the big timeline, as I’ve now laid it out, and ask myself for each significant event:  “and what was happening with the shoggoths at that point in time?”  Or, I could go back over the story and tell it as if I’m a shoggoth -- a shoggoth’s-eye-view of the elders’ history.

16.  The breaking point for the shoggoths’ rebellion?
I do want to point out before I launch into this, though, that there are still significant points of ambiguity in my “Big Timeline.”  In particular, look at the moment of the shoggoths’ uprising.  

(a)  In one telling, I have them helping with reconstruction of the citadel, and it’s the weakened elders’ use of torture that “breaks the camel’s back.”

(b)  In another telling (where the beacon is placed in the cave ahead of time), the elders are getting increasingly lazy, and a few far-sighted individuals see the catastrophe coming...  It’s only a matter of time before the shoggoths realize that they can get the better of their masters.

(c)  In some of yesterday’s work, I had a concept evolving where there were “free-range shoggoths” evolving in secrecy after the war of resubjugations -- shoggoths that the elders failed to find and eradicate...  Meanwhile the city shoggoths were increasingly intelligent -- but few, and potentially subject to the being hypnotically recaptured when the elders are concentrated in one place.  The smart shoggoths discover the free-range shoggoths, and begin to organize the revolution...  Perhaps they’re allowed to leave the city to do the elders’ hunting for them, since the elders want to stay warm.

(d)  In my “scenes from the war” segment above, I had the idea that maybe the shoggoths were always a double-edged sword...  The elders have supremacy when they’ve got their tridents and are in the air -- but in an enclosed space, the shoggoths have the upper-hand...  So, when the elders moved underground, they were backing themselves into a corner.  ...I guess, actually, I’ve also established a second power for the elders at this point -- the telepathic hypno-control -- which may require multiple elders, if you’re trying to wrangle a rampaging shoggoth.

So, looking at these four possibilities, I think the critical question is how spur-of-the-moment was the uprising?  Was it a spontaneous revolt?  A small riot, which turned into something bigger -- like the Stonewall Riots?  A “straw that broke the camel’s back” scenario?

Or was the revolution planned?  Was the big day planned for years?  If so, what decided the day on which it would occur?  What elements did the shoggoths need to accumulate in order to ensure success?  How patient were they in waiting for the perfect conditions...?  Or, perhaps there were several seemingly innocent accidents which finally made the big event come together?

I’m imagining, for instance, that the city shoggoths might not have been able to overwhelm the elders alone (due to telepathic hypno-wrangling) -- but then the city shoggoths discovered the underground river out to the ocean...  They found the gibbering free-range shoggoths -- and by slowly rallying those forces, were ultimately able to pull together forces for a true blood bath...

In both the “deep history animatic” and the “emergency distress call” montage, I assume that the massacres happened in the streets...  However, in the book, it’s pretty clear that the final genocide happened deep underground.  I imagine hordes of shoggoths pouring in from the tunnels...  No exits for the elders to get through -- and far, far too many shoggoths to wrangle all at once.  Like a stampede of locomotive-sized leeches all flooding into one enclosed space...  Death is innevitable.

In terms of “accidents,” perhaps a lone city shoggoth got accidentally swept out to sea while hunting.  Perhaps there were cave-ins that helpfully blocked passages out of the underground city.  Perhaps being forced to clean up cave-ins lead to the discovery of an underground river to the sea, which a particularly clever shoggoth decided to explore.  Perhaps this “savior shoggoth” went out exploring farther and farther each day -- or perhaps it saw its opportunity and ran, a runaway slave that never came back...  But who organized free-range shoggoths on the outside, knowing it could lead the final assault single-handedly...  Or maybe it lived on the outside, but snuck back to the city from time to time to coordinate with the city shoggoths.

17.  “The Last Days of Leng”
This is a digression...  But given the episodes that I’m working out, I could see actually writing a novella from either the elders’ POV -- or the shoggoths’ -- or both -- which retells the ATMOM story from the aliens’ point of view.  ...Fan fiction, do I really want to go there?

18.  What does it feel like to be a shoggoth hypno-slave?
What does it feel like to be under the hypno-control of the elders?  Perhaps it sets up compulsions -- but with an act of will, you can stretch your freedom a little bit.  You can’t help but turn back and return to the city, but with practice and determination to overcome the voices in your head (which probably sound like your own voice -- not that of the masters), you manage to go a bit farther out each time...  Habituating yourself to your own rebellion.

It seems like occasionally there might be an isolated incident where the control over a shoggoth simply snaps.  Either the programming just suddenly turns off, and you take the opportunity to run-away, like a runaway slave...  Or you simply go crazy, and go into a besertk rage smashing anger -- you lose what little sense of sentience you have, and anger -- that sense that others have crossed into your boundaries, in this case into your very mind -- leads to an irrational urge to push everything away...  To kill everything in sight, because you can’t determine where your enemies are -- the threat seems to be all around you.

Or maybe when the hypno-programming breaks down, the emotions are more about fear...  An all-consuming panic, realizing that you are your own person -- but having not the faintest idea how to help yourself in this situation...  Or maybe the experience makes you feel like a terrified small child, and you quiver in a corner, petrified...  Maybe this is the shoggoth equivalent of going into a catatonic state -- it’s not about going berserk, you simply stop, and can’t figure out how to move...  Gently rocking and staring into space, mentally “gone.”

19.  The elder/shoggoth relationship:  elders’ POV - creating the shoggoths
In the beginning, there wasn’t much to work with on earth.  There were oceans.  There were minerals.  There were volcanic heat vents.  How do you take these things and turn them into life?

How do you find food during those first days?  During the journey through space, one’s metabolism goes into a very low state...  It’s like you’re in a deep hibernation -- with just some small part of your mind awake and aware for navigation.  Remember, elders have five-lobed brains!  You take some nourishment from solar radiation...  Perhaps when you arrive on earth, there are days of simply sitting on naked rocks next to the water, absorbing solar radiation.  Meat is best for an active metabolism -- but there is a secondary metabolism which allows using sunlight alone.  Remember, the elders’ metabolisms seem to Lake partly plant-like.

In my telling of the story, there are “flying pills.”  The elders eat the pills, and then they sprout wings (there could be a viagra analogy here).  Do they need to take a second pill in order to re-absorb the wings?  If the journey through space began with taking certain pills -- perhaps both a flying pill and some sort of psycho-active hibernation pill, which helps put you into a deep trance -- perhaps the elders were able to transport other sorts of pills with them.  We know that the elders found technology to be “unfulfilling”...  But perhaps this means that they are master herbalists?  Herbalists / chemists?

Human science (as I recall from Carl Sagan’s cosmos) believes that life on earth began with the creation of amino acids from chemicals that are readily available in the environment.  I also recall hearing at some point that there are now theories that place the origin of life not in environments that we could survive in, but rather in hot springs and oceanic heat vents.  It makes sense to me that chemical reactions happen more quickly in the presence of heat -- these are good candidates for where life began...  And there’s no reason why the elders couldn’t survive in those environments and make use of them.

Maybe they only needed to bring a few extra pills along with them in order to start life on earth.  Maybe they’ve got “life starter,” like you have starter for sour dough bread...  Something simple like yeast.  It’s not much of a stretch to imagine that the elders have something like a pocket or a pouch somewhere on their body...  Maybe a spare stomach...  Or, since they vivisect a human and a dog at Lake’s camp, we know that they have medical knowledge -- perhaps they slice themselves open and put some of the mission critical pills and elements inside their own bodies before the trip.

So, imagine standing over a heat vent in the ocean, you’ve got your sourdough starter mix pill, maybe a few useful chemicals that you’ve distilled from ocean water within your own body...  You mix the ingredients...  Perhaps in a glass sphere of some sort.  It’s an interesting image to think of the elders creating some glassware from silica they find here on earth -- using the same technologies that humans first used while inventing such basics as the kiln...  I’m not quite sure where they’d find fuel for the fire in a kiln.  Maybe, if there were landmasses, they could find an active volcano and make their glassware out of actual obsidian.  Creating things like metal tubes for glass-blowing, that requires refining iron and metal-working, though.

Maybe there is a period of life on earth that is significantly different from the years that follow...  Maybe during the first 3-10 years on earth the elders have to depend upon solar radiation to survive, and so every day they spend hours with their wings outstretched, absorbing solar radiation.  Maybe it takes them a number of years, but then they go through all the stages of technological development:  from stone, to bronze, to iron...  I’m intrigued by the image of an elder using a hammer to pound on glowing metal, blacksmithing.  The lack of plants during this period poses significant problems though...  Unless there are some basic plant seeds that they bring along.

So, by the time you finally have a glass container in which to begin the chemical reactions which create life, you’ve already spent years in preparation.  Pulling out the life-starter pill is essentially a holy moment -- full of expectancy for even the aeon-wise pioneers.  ...And then, in a magical moment, the heat and the chemicals and the starter cells come together -- and they begin to grow.

At this point, it seems to me that the elders’ extra sensory powers may come into play.  I suspect that they are able to see the creatures that exist all around us which are described in “from beyond.”  I think that using a combination of psionics and mind altering drugs, the elders might be able to step “sideways” into a different layer of reality...  Perhaps one where time acts much differently...  And so, by taking the sourdough shoggoth into this realm, they’re able to greatly speed up its evolution -- fast-forwarding time.  Perhaps in this mystical other realm, psionics can also be used to shape the living substance.

This might help explain how the knowledge was lost.  It’s not something that involves machines, it’s largely a psionic act, which requires a high level of mastery of esoteric meditations.  There wouldn’t be very many individuals who bother to acquire this skill...  There’d be some -- and because the elders are very long-lived, that would be enough.  The original gurus would be around almost eternally...  Until they are lost through war or accident.  At that point, after the masters and their small order (5-7 disciples?) are gone, the entire species is just screwed.

I’m beginning to see that the original colonizing pioneers must have been held in extremely high esteem by the rest of the terran population of elders.  A dozen or a hundred or a thousand elders that actually set out from another solar system or even another galaxy, perhaps a full billion years ago.  Even to other elders they’re a bit god-like.  And even if there aren’t family units per se, and you come from spores rather than child-birth, you still have to look upon that generation (the “great elders”?) as your parents.

See, and I’m also beginning to discern individual characters amongst the elder’s society.  The individual who first managed to create new life on earth -- they’re remarkable by any standard.  And, if I went with the “dissenting voice on the elder’s high council” concept, that individual is differentiated from the mass of other aliens.

[Heh...  I suggested that he has a princely son -- that’s ridiculous, now that I think about it, since the elders come from spores.  However, the elder who leads the survivor’s clutch to the bomb shelter, he could be a protégé.  Perhaps the elder who sees the end coming (the shoggoth rebellion) is the last (or one of the last) elders from that first group of pioneers a billion years ago.  If I made the narrator in a hypothetical “the last days of leng” book “the world’s oldest man,” who had seen the entire history on earth from the very beginning, seeing his death would certainly have a big emotional impact -- a sense of finality, that yes, the end really has arrived if that old timer is going down.]

20.  Too much detail?
I’m noticing myself generating a wealth of detail that could only be used in a book -- never in a film.  It makes me feel a little uncomfortable, feeling that maybe I’m wasting time...  But I’m reassuring myself that the goal here is to know my universe inside out.  Only by going down all these seemingly irrelevant alleys will I be able to tell a story in a world that I truly know by heart.  It’s more important in a book in many ways, but I would like to think that by giving such attention and respect to what I’m creating, I’ll make something that is of higher quality -- even if people can’t tell why.  [And hey, it’s good practice for if/when I do try to write a full-blown novel, and genuinely need every ounce of detailed insight that I can muster.]