Close, but no cigar.

Waking Up got the Official Selection in the Cinema Out Of Your Backpack film festival. In other words, it got nominated, but won no price. But hey! I still have a lot to learn as a director, and this is my first science fiction film scene, so I am happy. And if it wasn’t for the Cinema Out Of Your Backpack, I probably wouldn’t have made this scene at all.

I have always been very interested in science fiction, and had the idea for a film about a positive future for years, wondering why almost all science fiction movies (and books) are about doom and gloom. I strongly believe that we are creating our future, but we need to have a vision to go for. Something that we can believe in, and something that is working for everyone.

My film idea was pretty vague for many years, and since I wasn’t a film maker (I was a composer and music producer) I didn’t really envision that I would ever get to make that film. Still, my life has changed, and not too many years ago I started in film. Not too many years after that I heard about The Zeitgeist Movement and The Venus Project, who’s designs and visions of a positive future aligned a great deal with my own vision. It had never occurred to me, though, that we could actually live totally without money and property, and simply share everything.

This was and idea that spoke to me like nothing else, and I couldn’t get it out of my head, and I still can’t. I searched the internet for a resource based economy, but couldn’t find much. I felt the need to discuss this new possibility with others online. The Zeitgeist Movement’s forum was well and good, but not focussed only on a resource based economy. This led me to start the website www.theresourcebasedeconomy.com to have an unbiased place to talk about this and envision this possible future.

I realized that The Venus Project had had plans to make a movie for many years. I contacted Roxanne Meadows and offered my help, also suggesting they invited people from The Zeitgeist Movement to collaborate in writing the film. The answer I got was that they wanted to hire a professional scriptwriter in writing the script for their movie, not wanting to share any ideas that they had with the community.

I had an idea that I presented for TVP, but later I got another, even better idea (I thought), which is what has led to the Waking Up forest scene. The idea was that we can show this future through the eyes of a person from this time, waking up in the future time through cryogenic preservation. That way we can ‘adjust’ that future several years back and forth and show a future quite far ahead in development. And that was exactly what I wanted. In the vision I have had for years, I see two people flying in an sleekly designed anti gravity vehicle. In this future, technology is totally integrated into our lives, and it simply works. No downloads of updates, no crashes, no pollution, everything works, for everyone.

Then the Cinema Out Of Your Backpack festival came around, inviting us to enter a 3-4 minute scene from a yet-to-be-made film. I thought that, ‘one scene, that I can do from this film of mine’. Of course, my limited resources made me ‘think out of the box’ in terms of computer animations and such. I had no one to help me, but I had equipment and knowledge enough to film actors and and edit the scene.

I started thinking about what this scene could be like, and I thought that playing it out in a forest would be practical, since we then didn’t have to show any buildings or cars in the background. And since this film was about a positive future, forests would still exist. Ok, so I had the location, then I needed some dialogue. I pictured Ben just getting out of the hospital and drawing in fresh air for almost the first time in this new world, together with his guide, Aweena, and as I closed my eyes, their dialogue came quite naturally to me, forming a script that was within the limitations that I had. I then had a script, but I needed to find actors.

I posted about this on the Swedish portal www.filmcafe.se and I got 26 replies in a matter of days! I had auditions over the phone as I was physically remote from where all the actors was. Sara and Katene came into this together as they knew each other and was at the time of the audition was in the same room. There were other good actors, but these two grasped the plot immediately, with no explanation. Great. They came to my town and we did the scene in the forest not to far from my place. We almost froze to death over two days, but made it. I edited the scene, uploaded it to the COOYB website, and voila, that’s how this scene came about.

At that point I hadn’t decided what to do next with this film. But, because of my lacking experience of making full length narrative science fiction films I decided that this film, this has got to be open source. I needed others on this team with me. After all, this film was about a positive future for humanity, and I could think of nothing better than humanity collaborating in writing it. I started this website and posted it to a few groups on Facebook, and the response has been overwhelming ever since with many people collaborating and inputting on the script, the world and the story itself.

It has given me hope that we can actually make this film. Now, I only hope that the story and the script for the film will be an awesome one with high quality dialogue and meaningful action. I am twisting and broadening my mind every day to accomplish this, studying films, scripts and screenwriting, writing down new scenes, and try to think of the plot and story in general.

How can we show this world in the best way possible?

How can we at the same time tell a compelling story?

This is our goal. This is our mission now.

When that is accomplished, the actual making of the film can begin…