Category: Final Project

Something Went Wrong – Cast Auditions

I’ll be constantly updating this page with auditions. Here are the auditions from yesterday.

GERALD
Page 9 – “Gerald is looking out…”  to Page 12 -“Yeah…yeah okay, anything you say. I promise”.

Emil

Arnaud Pierre.

CHARMAINE
Page 4 – “Device in the room lights up” to Page 6 – “She watches eagerly as…”

Darrell Chan.

Marilyn White

LAURA
Page 9 – “Gerald is looking out…”  to Page 12 -“Yeah…yeah okay, anything you say. I promise”.

Naomi Yeo (Selected)

 JoAnn Wu

Van Su Yun

KIRSTEN
Kirsten interacting with Laura.

Aadhya Anand

Research #5 – Creating Laura’s Presence (Sound of Honda)

One of the interesting discussion point during yesterday’s production design meet was to play around the idea of creating presence rather than showing physically, Laura’s presence.

I communicated that I really want Laura to have the free will and ability to “roam” freely around the house. We brainstormed really hard and decided that it would be interesting to see Laura move from devices to devices, signified through “light”. An example of this is “Sound of Honda” – they managed to create the presence of F1 cars racing through solely sound and light visuals.

Research #4 – AI Turning “Aggressive” when “losing out” to other AI.

Through this article, it reveals that AI has the capabilities of turning “aggressive” when competing against each other. This really helps build and reinforce the concept of this film I’m trying to make – the suggestion that an AI has that potential to be “conscious” enough to protect its own existence when threatened.

Read full article here –

http://www.wired.co.uk/article/artificial-intelligence-social-impact-deepmind

Initial Development #2 – Treatment

Logline:

An assistant helper device, Laura, tries in her own ways to help her owners cope with their child’s recent death.

Themes:

  • Human’s reliance on assistant helper devices (Charmaine’s attachment to Laura)
  • Body vs Soul – Laura, embodying the essence of Kristen (Gerald and Charmaine’s late child)
  • Ways of coping with loss.
  • Privacy, and how data is being collected.

Characters (Basic idea):

Laura – an assistant helper device, similar to the likes of an Amazon Echo / Google Home. Programmed to be positivity, helpful, kind etc.

Gerald – Strong headed man. He deals with his child’s death by completely removing every trace of her.

Charmaine – Emotional. Deals with her child’s loss through reminiscing.

 

Story Steps:

1. Gerald and Charmaine comes back from their child’s funeral.

2. At first, Laura, their home assistant device, did not understand the change in atmosphere in the house and why Kristen has not been home for so long. But she soon finds out, through eavesdropping on the helper’s conversation with her friend over the phone, that Gerald and Charmaine have lost Kristen.

3. Desperate to make things right but her ignorance, she tries to be as nice and even more helpful than usual to her owners, but Gerald found her a nusiance and deactivated her.

4. Laura turns herself on one day when she sees Charmaine sobbing in bed and plays a voice recording of Kristen when she was celebrating her 6th birthday.  Charmaine, finds out Laura’s capability of replaying stored data in her cloud and activates Laura to play back memories and (video & audio) recordings from a few years ago.

5. Through the replays, the audience sees that Laura, is not just a device, but has been documenting their family lives, the fights, the good times etc.

6. Gerald comes home to Charmaine watching the projection of Kristen and gets really mad because his way of coping is to remove any traces of Kristen’s existence.

7. Gerald threatens to have Laura destroyed but does not do so, but instead gave Charmaine a stern warning that she should be focusing on getting back on her feet, and not wallowing in self pity.

8. Throughout the film, we see how attach and reliant Charmaine gets attached to Laura. Soon, Laura starts to evolve into something entirely different – to adapts to Charmaine’s needs and start to pull from past recordings and audio speeches and turn them into “Kristen”, where she is able to speak and reply Charmaine.

9. Gerald finds out about Charmaine’s craziness and plugs the plug on Laura. He takes the device and throws it out. They get into a huge fight.

10. Next day, Gerald tries to get Laura to remind him about a meeting, but forgets that Laura has been thrown out.

11. Charmaine actually kept Laura, and uses her in secrecy.

??? How does this end?

Initial Development #1 – Before Consultation

Possible Manifestation of the Laura –
Maybe / Maybe not (POV of Laura)

blackmirror00006(Black Mirror – White Christmas)

 

 

 

 

 

  • Similar build to an Amazon Echo

    amazon-echo

    Possible Plot points

    • Establishing how integrated Laura is in Gerald’s & Charmaine’s life.
    • How did Laura find out about Gerald’s “affair”?
      • Charmaine comes home one day feeling unwell, when she was supposed to be at a lunch date with Gerald. She knows this because she was the one who made the reservation. 
    • Curious, Laura secretly tap onto Gerald’s phone and live streams. Phone on the table POV – Sees a woman laughing with Gerald.


    What did Laura do after finding out?

    • She tries to remind Gerald about the good times. – Changing his phone’s wallpaper, sending flowers
    • Tries to clean up Gerald’s relationship by sending flowers to Charmaine’s workplace without Gerald’s permission.


    What are the conflicts for Laura?

    • She does not want to expose Gerald, because it will ruin her family.
    • Has to keep a secret from Charmaine.
    • Grappling with betrayal as an emotion (Gerald’s betrayal)


    What does Laura do when confronted by Gerald?

    • Gerald confronts Laura about activities initiated by herself.
    • Threatens to shut Laura off and have her replaced (Possibly through Gerald’s recent searches of the new improved version of Laura).
    • Feels threatened, blackmails Gerald. How?


    Woman enters the house with Gerald?

    • Laura attempts to destroy the other woman by tapping in her capabilities.
    • Laura locks them in and unlocks only when Charmaine comes back?
    • Laura turns up the temperature of the water when the woman is taking a shower, causing her to suffer from burn.


    Possible twist –

    • Laura finds out that there is a reason for Gerald to cheat? Charmaine is cheating?
    • So maybe the stranger in the house is Charmaine’s affair instead of Gerald’s, but to the audience it seems like it was Gerald who brought his affair home?

 

 

Sorry, I didn’t get it.

Logline : 

An assistant helper bot (AI / Siri alike), Laura, finds out one day that she has been an accomplice to her owner’s infidelity, attempts to make things right by blackmailing him.

Main Character :

Laura is an assistant helper bot. She has similar attributes to her predecessor, Siri. She is programmed with qualities such as naivety, gullibility, good nature, patience, kindness, resourcefulness, good moral compass, empathy, sympathy etc. These attributes and emotions are programmed by definition and Laura can’t exactly experience these emotions… or so it seems…

She is part of an ecosystem, which controls other elements of Gerald’s life, such as his car camera dashboard, the functionalities in his house, robot vacuum etc. And she communicates via voice activation and is heard through an earpiece.

She views herself as the “child” of Gerald and Charmaine because they bought her together.

Rough Storyline : 

“Sorry, I didn’t get it” is a story about an assistant helper bot (AI / Siri Alike), Laura, who experienced a sense of betrayal, by her owner, Gerald, whom she obeys and admires a lot. She finds out one day that the dates, sweet texts, hotel and restaurant reservations, which she helped out with, were not meant for Charmaine, Gerald’s fiancé, but instead, for another woman.

Laura is torn between keeping this information from Charmaine and persuading Gerald to end his affair.

In order to keep her “happy family”, she approaches this situation in the only way she knows, which is to send Gerald reminders, such as changing his phone’s wallpaper to a photo of him and Charmaine, reminding him of past events, playing Charmaine’s favorite song etc, in hopes that these things would move Gerald into ending his affair.

However, Gerald refuses to and even threatens to have her replaced. Threatened, Laura’s survival instinct kicks in and starts to blackmail Gerald into making things right with the data stored in her cloud.