LSGL BRAINSTORM - STORY DEVELOPMENT
Sa 01.26.08

Premise:  Trying to focus in on what the beacon’s message is.

1.  Guiding question
I wonder if each act can have a guiding question?  Maybe that only really works for acts that have dialogue?  For instance, I’m trying to figure out what the gist of act II is supposed to be.

What if that’s phrased as a question rather than a summarizing declaration?  For instance:  What is the history of the elder things?  How did the elder things come to be in this cave?  What are these creatures that we’re seeing in the hive?  What is this beacon?  How far back into the cave do these elders go?  What are these aliens hiding / guarding?  How did the shoggoths become so powerful?  How did a great species such as the elders come to this?  What was the event immediately precipitating hiding in this refuge?  What are these elder things waiting for?  What is the purpose of the beacon?  How did the shoggoths successfully murder the elders?

Right now, the two questions I’m most interested in:
	(1)  How did the shoggoths become so powerful?
	(2)  What are the elders in the cave waiting for?

I like how focusing in on how the shoggoths became powerful, how they managed to stage their coup, seems to raise more questions -- ones which will be answered in act III.  I’ve been worried about undercutting act III...  But by talking about the shoggoths without showing them in person, we raise the question “where are they now?” -- which allows me to create a spectacular conclusion:  just outside, waiting for a sign that would bring them down upon you.

“What are the elders waiting for?”  Also feels productive...  Waiting powerlessly for rescuers that they know full well may never come has felt overly passive.  If they’ve somehow telepathically sent someone into “the beyond” to bring something back, then this raises a question:  “will they get back in time?”  ...There’s a tension that’s created -- the expectancy of a possible savior -- versus the threat of the unseen shoggoths.  Which will arrive first?

Act III, thus is not merely an innevitable conclusion.  Although I’ve already done a great deal of work on Act III, and it’s close to completion, perhaps the work I’m doing on act II can yet influence the finale?  Perhaps I can have some shots of earth from outer space...  Perhaps the beacon’s job is to yank the guru back to earth?

This is a new possibility:  the beacon is not beckoning someone from the galaxy core...  Someone has already left from earth, and is on his way back...  Maybe help, in a physical form, actually is on its way -- there is a flock of elders somewhere out in space flying toward earth right now -- and we just don’t know who’s going to reach the cave first...  Them or the shoggoths.

The rescue party is being led back by the mind of the “navigator,” the only elder capable of making such a great telepathic journey...  Maybe we even hear a voice say something like “I’m coming” -- which could be either the navigator or the shoggoth.

2.  What do the elders intend to do when help arrives?
What do the elders think will happen if they finally do receive help?  What kind of assistance do they need?  Do they just need weapons, so that they could eradicate shoggoths and start over on earth?  Do they want to retreat from this planet, and need flying pills so they can get away?  Asking for physical rescue seems absurdly selfish.  How could the elders ask others of their species to make a several million year flight through space to lend a helping hand?  It seems like the cost is so high, they’d simply sacrifice themselves, accept their fate.  No 100 elders, as individuals are worth such an expenditure.

Perhaps the message they’re sending isn’t going as far as the galactic core.  Maybe there are elders who live closer, like in the Alpha Centauri system...  It wouldn’t be asking for as big of a favor to make a call to them.  I’ve explored the possibility of there being elders on Titan...  It doesn’t seem like it would take millions of years for the Titanians to arrive, though...  But I have been building up this sense that the elders are widespread -- that almost any planet with oceans is going to have an elder population.

Really?  Is that true?  That on every oceanic planet in the galaxy, the elders have established a colony?  Well, there’s going to be an ongoing conflict with the spawn...  Any planet with an ocean is going to be desirable to both species...  But then there are other life forms, too -- the “ultimate gods” from beyond our universe, and the “primal god” that live in the molten core of the earth...  The “great race” (yith?) which have traveled from planet to planet and the snake men...  Can I in good conscience say that the elders are more common and more powerful than all anthropoid aliens except for Cthulhu?

Refocus on the elders’ plans...  Their options:  (1) Evacuate the planet.  (2) Put down the shoggoths and re-start the colony.  (3) Eliminate all life on the planet, and start the colonization process from scratch.  (4) Air lift from the planet some valuable resource -- a person of importance, or a crystal -- which is so precious that it is worth saving.  (5) Contact some cosmic force, other than their own species, to come and wipe out the shoggoths for them.  (6) Essentially die, but leave a warning message for any elders who might wander by in the future.

Of these options, the idea of restarting the colony seems most plausible.  But what do they need in order to restart the colony?  First they need to wipe out the threat of the shoggoths.  The shoggoths have won a major battle, pushing the elders to the point of defeat -- but the war is never over, and the elders -- even in their weakened, degenerate state -- are capable of initiating a strategy which will again resubjugate the shoggoths...

3.  Do the elders feel remorse?
Although, this time, they wouldn’t be nearly as forgiving.  During the first war of subjugation, there was a sense that the shoggoths had gotten out of control...  Perhaps there were skirmishes where elders were killed...  Perhaps it only took the death of one elder to instigate the first war.  But in the shoggoths’ second uprising, they managed almost drive the terran elders to the brink of extinction.  There’s no “forgiving” that (as if the elders forgave the first conflict!) -- there’s going to be commitment to genocide...  When adequate forces arrive, the elders are going to want to wipe out every shoggoth -- viewing it as a corrupt life form -- and then perhaps wipe out a host of other species too, just to be on the safe side.

There’s a change here from how I’ve previously viewed the elders’ emotions.  In the animatic and the test montage that I did last year, the elders had some awareness of their crimes...  Seeing that they had crossed a moral line when they gave the shoggoths intelligence, thus elevating them from biological robots to sentient slaves.  But is this self-awareness actually out of character?

Perhaps when I have the elders talk with remorse, I’m putting too much of myself into them -- even if they recognize that the shoggoths became slaves, perhaps they have no problem with this.  They might have self-recriminations, and anger at the ungratefulness of their inferiors...  But not sorrow.  If I want my audience to see that it was morally wrong to elevate mindless robots into sentient slaves, then it’s going to be my tough job to show the audience what the elders cannot themselves see.

4.  What is the balance between grief and desire for revenge?
Interesting how this question automatically invokes images of 9/11 in my mind.  I don’t particularly want to make LSGL a metaphor for the US’s involvement with the middle east...  But it would be a pretty cheap and easy visual to make the citadel’s toppling towers look like the twin towers in New York.

Do the elders have personal names?  In envisioning the great massacre, I’ve imagined streets lined with fallen bodies, nameless...  But you could also have a recitation of names, a litany of the fallen...  With photographs of those individuals who have been lost...  Except that, given the way I’ve created the visual representation of the elders, it’s impossible to tell them apart.

What do the shoggoths do with the bodies after they’ve killed everyone in the city?  Do they create mass graves and bury the elders?  The elders care a great deal about their dead and giving them proper burials...  I don’t think the shoggoths eat them -- but perhaps they do something intentionally disrespectful, like throwing the headless corpses into an underground river, to be washed out to sea.

I have a hard time trying to figure out how to convey a mood that is simultaneously vindictive and grieving.  There’s an initial reaction of shock, which can be a combination of disbelief and taking stock of who’s been lost and fantasizing striking back -- but it’s difficult to imagine the state of shock lasting millions of years, and being the first thing that comes to the elders’ minds, when we telepathically get a glimpse into what they’re thinking about.

5.  How do the elders in the cave know what happened back in the city?
(a)  If the elders in the cave flee there from the city, taking secret passages and slipping past their assailants at great risk, then they could have been eye witnesses, peeking out from behind corners.  However, the tragedy of the city was that the shoggoths blocked all exits, flooded in, and overwhelmed everyone.  There ought to be no survivors, no eye-witnesses.  [This is going with my increasing conviction -- which is in accordance with ATMOM -- that in the final days the elders were living underground, not on the surface.]

(b)  Radio messages...  At one point I had the notion that there was a global uprising, and that the outer cities fell first -- giving the main citadel a little forewarning, and those who were prepared a chance to get out to the prepared fall-back position.  However, lately I’m gravitating to the notion that Leng is the first city to fall...  The other cities are a mop-up job for the shoggoths.

The difficulty with this is that if the capitol city got any warning from the outlying cities, then it ought to have been better able to defend itself...  Guns would have been distributed -- which might have led to an exciting battle...  Which the shoggoths were only able to win through sheer numbers.

Actually, that’s not a bad scenario -- obliterated shoggoth bodies finally smothering the defending elders...  But another facet of the story is how the shoggoths were able to orchestrate their great revolution.  I’ve been thinking that the revolution has to begin at the capitol and spread outward because the Che Guavara of the shoggoths was only able to secretly teach free-range shoggoths language who were in the Antarctic vicinity.

However, possibly Che was able to recruit lieutenants in the capitol city, who were sent out with battalions of free-range shoggoths to the other cities...  So the uprising actually did all take place on one day.  It wasn’t either (1) a spontaneous riot, nor (2) signaled by radio/telepathy -- it was (3) an appointed hour.  Yet, because the organizers all come from the capitol city, that may mean that their followers wound up being pitted against shoggoths who remained loyal to the elders.  In the outlying cities, rebel shoggoths may have had to fight against city shoggoths, too.

A nice vignette...  For Che to train his lieutenants, he would have had to sneak them away from their duties...  In order to do this, he may have arranged for the low-brow rebel shoggoths to take their places for periods...  Given that the shoggoths are constantly shape-shifting, there’s no way to tell one from another (perhaps a point of irritation for the shoggoths?) -- but the rebels are mute, which makes you wonder if they’ll get away with the sham, or get caught.

(c)  Telepathy...  Given that the elders aren’t technologically-oriented, it hardly seems right that there would be radio or video contact between cities...  But, knowing that there’s some sort of telepathy involved in controlling the shoggoths, I can extrapolate that there are some elders with greater abilities than others.  Perhaps it’s only the first generation of elders who had telepathy with a range that could span continents...

And, here’s an interesting point:  If there are multiple cities, then the pioneer elders -- who are most valued amongst their people -- must be divided between the different locations.  I could see the guru who lives at the “mountain of first life” (where life was first created) receiving mental transmissions from his friends in the various cities, as the attack occurs...  The mental distress caused by a brain that’s connected to yours winking out...  The horror, trying to warn the others, but seeing your friends -- whom you’ve known for a billion years -- one-by-one perish.

Even during the war with the spawn, only a third of the pioneers perished...  But the spawn attacked from the outside -- the shoggoths came from the inside.  Well, that might be a glitch...  There’s an underground river that leads into Leng...  How have the shoggoths infiltrated the other cities?  Perhaps they only needed to capture a few servants in each location and replace them with rebels, so the gates could be flung open at the appropriate moment?  Perhaps, since preparations were being made for hundreds of years in advance, there was time to carve out caves beneath the other cities, so that the rebel shoggoths could come up through the floors.

6.  The telepathic link to the beacon
So, in exploring the idea of the elders tracking down a runaway as a group of 40-50, I came up with the notion that the elders’ weak telepathic powers can be combined to create a more powerful force.  This led to the idea that the elders in the bomb shelter / monastery at “the mountain of life” are perhaps contributing their telepathic power to the beacon in an active way.  They are not merely (a) hibernating, they are in (b) a trance.

The humans who enter the cave are like mosquitoes...  They’re hardly worthy of notice, and wouldn’t rouse the elders with their presence.  Disrupting the beacon -- that would probably arouse the elders, though...  So, it’s curious that it’s only the battle cry of the shoggoth entering the cave that fully rouses them to consciousness.  They wake suddenly when the sound occurs -- as if they’ve heard that cry before, and fear it...  As if they were eye-witnesses to the massacre at the city, and know that doom is now upon them.  If, for even a moment, they believed that that sound might be their rescuers -- then perhaps they would run toward the shoggoth rather than away from it...

But I didn’t film it like that.  So I’ve got a problem.  The elders in the cave shouldn’t know for sure that it’s a shoggoth coming to get them...  Unless what the shoggoth says is something like “I’ve found you, and I’m going to kill you now.

Once possibility is that I could layer in more information on top of what I filmed this fall.  I’m imagining establishing in act II that when the elders use their telepathic abilities, there are expanding circles of radio waves that leave their heads.  Perhaps when they wake up, we see the radio waves move in reverse, shooting backwards into their heads, suggesting that their minds have just returned into their bodies.  I’m wary about super-imposing lines like this -- it could look really cheesy...  But some indicator that the elders minds are returning from the dreaming to their bodies might make sense.

What is it like when you’re connected to the beacon?  I imagine that it’s like being in a large dark room full of echoing voices, where other people’s thoughts and your own aren’t quite separable.  Sort of like having schizophrenia -- but you know that the other voices actually are other people.

I wonder:  If the shoggoths are receptive enough to telepathy to be hypnotized, is there any chance that they could “hear” the beacon’s message and understand it?

7.  What is the nature of the beacon’s beam?
What precautions have the elders taken to avoid being detected by the shoggoths?  It seems that if they shoot off the beacon’s beam, that the shoggoths will become aware of their location.

If you can’t shoot off the beam without calling the shoggoths, then it must be an accident that the beam is being shot off...  The elders recorded a message, and decided that it couldn’t be sent.

But here’s another option...  The message is not (a) pre-recorded -- it’s (b) active, present-tense thought.  The explorers aren’t listening to something that was recorded millions of years ago -- they’re tapping into what the elders are thinking/dreaming right now.  I think, given that they’re in a trance state, it’s forgivable that their thoughts might be ones of pre-occupation...  Or the story is holographic -- I’m giving a linear narration of ideas that are understood in an instant...

But the explanation of why a beam shoots forth is still not obvious.

I’ve been exploring how the beacon might be related to one of the pioneer elders, a master of telepathy who teaches a school of ascetics here on this holy ground...  Perhaps the purpose of the machine is to amplify the thoughts of the elders in the hive, assisting them in sending their thoughts across thousands of light years.  Perhaps the machine is actually a brain jar for the guru -- and his five-lobed mind actually exists inside of it in a physical form.  (Rather like the navigators in Dune.)

Perhaps, knowing that a signal laser must not be sent, the master of telepathy embarked upon a great quest through the astral plane to reach fellow minds on Alpha Centari...  Perhaps he discovered a similar tragedy of shoggoth rebellion there, and was forced to continue on...

It could either be that he embarked on his travels as a means to not use the machine -- it’s an emergency beacon only to be activated if he doesn’t come back.  Perhaps the machine is the only thing that tethers him to earth...

Maybe by interrupting the trance, the elders’ concentration is broken, and the master is lost in space...  We hear him crying for help, and the other elders trying to grasp at him with their many minds as he flies into oblivion...  The laser beam is some sort of visual indication that his life-line has broken.

What is that damned laser?

Perhaps the machine was captured from the spawn, and somehow is calling to them...  Enemy of my enemy?  Or it’s a doomsday device calling to the ultimate gods or the primal gods?  ...What if it’s not calling to other elders, but to someone else?

8.  What do the explorers do to the beacon?
When the explorers touch the beacon, they’re seeing some sort of nebula of green energy on the screen...  Sort of like a screen saver....  Perhaps an alien sort of interface which is difficult for humans to understand, but which can be manipulated if you know how...

Are the humans simply waking up the machine?  It seems to be giving them the message which it intended to send long ago...

Or are they suddenly in contact with the mind of the hive, and they receive the message that’s being sent in an instant...  It appears that Andrew takes a step backward from the screen...  Is Carl the only one who gets the full telepathic experience?  When we cut to act II, are we essentially stepping backward in time by 60 seconds, to the moment when Carl touched the screen and everything flooded through his mind?  In act I, do we ever get to see Carl pulling away from the screen -- or might he still be getting the message as we cut to act II?  Does this mean that Andrew is completely ignorant about the history of the place he’s in -- and the reasons why he’s about to die?

When Carl’s mind comes in contact with the hive, is there any communication between him and the elders?  Might we hear his voice occasionally shouting out in confusion while they tell the story?  Do the elders respond to him at all, perhaps along the lines of “Danger!  There is a presence!  Something has invaded the hive!  We must send for help!”

So, if the elders are somehow aware of Carl, would that mean that they wake up any faster?  Is the time lag between Carl pulling away from the beacon and the elders waking up simply a matter of grogginess?  And yet, it seems like they snap to alertness when they hear the shoggoth coming...

I keep on acting as if the laser being shot off is purely an accident...  Could it be something that is triggered intentionally by the sleeping elders?  Could it be a thing to scare off the humans?  Could it be creating a force field of some sort around the cave -- which is too late, because the shoggoth is already within the perimeter?

Could the beacon be some sort of weapon?  Some sort of cannon, even bigger than the ring guns, which was used during the war with the spawn?  Could it be a weapon which is meant to be used against space invaders -- which is why it’s pointed out into space?  Could it be that we saw machines like this used during the deep history -- as warning flares, or as cannons against space invaders?

What if the beacon makes a supersonic sound that’s supposed to keep away the shoggoths?  Sort of like a hypersonic dog fence...  A sound which only shoggoths can hear, which is painful to them...  If so, then why doesn’t it work?

Where exactly is the beacon pointed?  Titan?  Alpha Centauri?  It’s such a tight beam, it seems it would have to be pointed somewhere specific in order to do any good at all...  Which contributes to the notion that it was set off by accident, since the chance that it’s pointed in the right direction at this particular moment is highly unlikely.

Could we pull back even farther from the mountain and see that something happens to the beam high up in the sky?  Like maybe it spreads out into a curtain which falls down around the mountain in a bubble?  (Here I’m thinking of the Gungan force fields that we saw in Star Wars - The Phantom Menace...  Which is bad, because I hated that concept.)

9.  Scenes from a shoggoth-centric deep history
OK, suppose the beacon’s message is a meditation on “how did the shoggoths overcome us?”  Here are some scenes that seem relevant...

A runaway shoggoth slave, and the hunting party of 40-50 elders who use their telepathy to re-capture it.

Giving shoggoths language...  Some sort of ritual where the shoggoths are transformed from bio-robots into slaves...  Perhaps showing a “radio waves” telepathy bubble encompassing the first shoggoth...  And it stops writhing, and somehow turns to look at its masters.

A shoggoth discovering an underground river that leads out to the sea...  Where it manages to find a massive colony of renegade shoggoths.

A city shoggoth teaching the ocean shoggoths how to use language...  Perhaps instead of having “radio waves,” represent shoggoth speech as radiating rays?

The war of resubjugation:  flying elders (who eat wing-pills) using their ring-guns to obliterate stray shoggoths.  [Problem:  is this underwater, or above ground?]

The shoggoths pouring into the city...  The elders perhaps trying to use their telepathy to control the shoggoths -- perhaps using their ring guns -- but either way, being utterly overwelmed by the sheer numbers of shoggoths.

The elders moving from their city above ground, down into the underground caverns.

Possibly the elders creating life in the first place, in a cavern beneath the mountain that we’re inside right now.

I’m seeing a potential sequence here...  I wouldn’t get to have the shoggoths coming down to earth from outer space...  But I would get to see them flying.  Note that Cthulhu and the spawn are completely absent from this telling -- it’s narrowly focused on the role of the shoggoths in elder history.

The first scene might be of the runaway slave...  The hunt is a very good beginning to the drama -- setting up a “the hunters become the hunted” dynamic.  It also shows us right from the start that the elders are telepathic.  Perhaps the voice-over explains that the shoggoths -- “the servants?” -- which were merely flesh robots, would occasionally break down...  The hypnotic programming would fail, and a party would go to retrieve them.

Next:  And yet, enough did manage to escape, that we saw fit to do something about their proliferation...  Perhaps show the shoggoths lounging in groups together?  Perhaps show one murdering an elder, tearing off its head.

See the elders rise up and fly about, hunting the shoggoths down, shooting running herds of them with guns.

Hm.  Perhaps before I can get to that, I have to show the shoggoths cutting stones and building a city, show that most of the shoggoths -- most of the time -- functioned without any problem.

Perhaps, since we’ve seen distrust of the shoggoths during the war of re-subjugation, we now need something that develops trust again -- for instance, the shoggoths being used as a last line of defense when the spawn attack.  This could establish that “they were effective during war, unbeatable in closed spaces.”

Next, we have to see it getting colder...  A climate change which compels the elders to give the shoggoths speech.  ...So, perhaps the war of resubjugation happens underwater....  The elders leave the ocean, and thus leave it as a breeding ground for the ocean shoggoths.  In establishing a land-based city, they must bring shoggoths with them, giving them the ability to move on land -- however, it would be better if we could give the shoggoths the ability to travel on land specifically to fight off the spawn...  Otherwise, it seems like the war with the spawn must happen underwater...  Which seems awkward.

So, then we see the shoggoths being given intelligence in order to hunt for the shoggoths...  Establishing that the shoggoths are being trained to be killers...  Showing the elders gradually retreating into the lower caves...  Show elders moving down staircases, down into a subterranean realm...

The story from the point of the city shoggoth discovering the ocean shoggoths to the point of the massacre in the city is fairly clear in my mind.

But what about this outpost?  I don’t seem to have said anything about why there is a surviving outpost here, or about their reaction to the massacres, or the attempt to bring help...  Nothing of the emotional hatred... Or the sense of ingratitude, that the shoggoths were given the gift of sentience and yet strike down their creators -- who should be revered as gods.

10.  Scenes from a guru-centric history.
The elders in the cave are disciples of a master who has telepathically traveled away from the planet to bring help, as the ability to fly has been lost.  To an extent, this is a story of how the elders lost the ability to fly?  The ability to leave the planet for help themselves?

This starts with the elders flying down to earth, a group of pioneers.  An image of them sitting on the shore with their wings outstretched.  An image of the first shoggoth being created in a glass orb at a heat vent.

The guru becomes aware of primal forces in the earth...  When the spawn attack earth, he’s one of a small group who summons the ultimate gods to defeat cthulhu, and in the process is greatly injured...  As a city’s tower comes crashing down.  Consequently he’s turned into the “bionic man” -- in this case, a brain in a jar.  He’s saved.  [Ugh...  This brings up the whole war with Cthulhu story, which I outlined and found to be far too involved to use in the film]

Few elders have strong telepathic powers, the powers must be exercised in groups to be effective.  The master sits in the high council...  But gradually becomes concerned that the mental forces of the species are weakening...  So he sets off to create a monastery at the mountain of life where he can train selected acolytes.

Or, perhaps he is living in a jar simply because he is old...  So, we start with the beacon itself, explaining that it contains the oldest elder in the world.  We move from here back in time, briefly, showing that he was one of the first to arrive on the planet, and had a hand in creating the very first shoggoths.

Now, fast forward to how he sat on the council, revered for thousands and thousands of years...  He was the one who cried out in pain, hearing from other cities that the shoggoths were attacking...  The loyal, fearing for his life, secreted him away from the city as fast as they could -- sacrificing everyone else in the caves in the process.

The master has gone away, telepathically, to the stars to bring back help...  But he was confused, almost mad from the trauma of the other pioneers winking out of existence -- and so whether or not he can find any to help, is very much in doubt.  Perhaps there’s some intimation that he might bring back the doomsday forces of the ultimate gods, and so perhaps it’s to be wished that he is lost...  Or perhaps the elders in the hive must all concentrate their will to keep the maddened master from contacting the doomsday forces...

This is a curious inversion:  To suggest that the beacon’s normal position is on -- but only by a supreme act of concentration can the hive keep it in the off position.  Perhaps it was a constant line of contact with the stars for millions of years -- but if it were allowed to be on, the shoggoths would find this location...  Distraction is deadly...  Or perhaps it has to be forcibly kept off, because otherwise elders on other planets will come investigating.

What if the beacon were actually built by the shoggoths?  The elders spurn technology -- but maybe the shoggoths are so intelligent, so advanced, that this machine is of their doing...  And so what function does it serve for them?  It’s something that will bring intelligence to shoggoths world-wide?  It was a beacon that would help trigger the great revolution?  It’s merely a beacon, which locates fro the shoggoths the places where they must attack?

I’m generally not happy with this direction, where I’m putting emphasis on the master elder telepath -- it feels like too big of a digression from ATMOM.  I’m not merely filling in gaps -- I’m inventing whole new territories.

Yet, the history of the shoggoths, leading up to their revolution is pretty lengthy...  Probably not much less complex than the Spawn War scenario...  Although it involves fewer players.  No ultimate gods have to come in and upstage everyone else.