I wrote this below in response to another thread while talking about the horror movie Candyman and decided it would be great to place it here. I was actually going to write out my entire outline for this thread when I finish ...and still might.
Below is just a
scratchpad / backdrop for the premise and first story arc for the science fiction project I'm currently working on.
(Think of the following as development notes/drafts more than anything)
Watching the movies "After Earth"(Will Smith) and "Book of Eli"(Denzel Washington) I mentally placed the events depicted in the same world ...afterwards I thought about using black scifi characters & events from various movies to generate one big grand story. Below is the current state / first arc of that story.
State of the world when the science fiction story begins at book/arc 1:
The home world had a serious but manageable biological outbreak. In a bid to create the cure, a major lab accident lead to the majority of the planets population being wiped out; while other lifeforms became increasingly hostile. Decades after those events an existing A.I. platform originally used to model global weather & traffic navigation was extended and repurposed to foresee, manage, and suggest courses of action to all global threats. As a result of those A.I. suggestions...
1. The predictive virtual world used by the A.I. for modeling & projecting the future was opened to the public so that work could be carried out remotely/virtually without face 2 face contact.
2. Automatons were produced to assist the remaining population with manual labor and shield them from possible biological contaminates.
3. Healthy populations where sent to the moon and seed colonies in the solar system so that no one outbreak can effect the entire population.
4. An experimental multi use research vessel was commissioned to be placed in orbit where work could be carried out, away from any planetary populations.
(The failure of that research vessel leads to a string of events that ultimately threatens the remaining survivors of that world)
(Below is the opening setup for this part of the story- book/arc 1)
I've actually been rewatching candyman
(and other "black" scifi/horror films) for a story I'm writing. I'm using certain character archetypes and narrative events while discarding/swaping other non relevant aspects. I've replaced the cabrini-green projects with a semi dilapidated research spaceship that reappeared in orbit
(I'm stuck between using a Venus or Mars archetype ...mars is kinda over used). The two students in the movie candyman have been swapped for two researchers from the colony planetside. After going to the orbiting ship they find survivors and an intact ship's A.I.. The researchers then mistakenly let a "threat" down to the colony along with the evacuating survivors. Candyman as shown in the movie has been swapped out for that "threat". Instead of being supernatural in nature the "threat" is the result of the ships A.I. unsuccessfully trying to commission an automaton to stop the original, now dead crew from unknowingly dropping a weapon down to their home world.
(A lot of the events and motivations are the same. It's just that the locations and relationships have been changed)
(The story I'm working on actually takes events/character archetypes from a couple "black" movies ...namely)
Got carried away there for a minute
Anyway it's a 6 or 7 arc story and the above is either going to be arc 1 or 2. Depending on if I want to detail the events that caused the ships A.I. to attack it's original crew.
If I go that rout I'm using events from the following movies as an entry point for both characters and events...
QUICK & DIRTY EXAMPLE:
Dire state of affairs on the home world causes a need for further sensitive experiments in orbit.
(Reference: "Cloverfield Paradox" & Interstellar) These experiments by the crew result in the creation of a possible threat to the home world that the ships A.I. predicts and attempts to stop.
(Reference: Life) In their ultimate failure the threat escapes to their home world surface,
(Reference: Pacific Rim) while the research ship vanishes; appearing sometime later above one of the colony planets.
(See: next book/arc)