Wow, Bruce Willis with hair! Surrogates looks like a nice action sci-fi movie. It kind of seems to fall in the line of movies like I, Robot and Paycheck; not great films, but pretty decent action flicks. Here’s the description:

Set in a futuristic world where humans live in isolation and interact through surrogate robots, a cop is forced to leave his home for the first time in years to investigate the murders of others’ surrogates.

I only think that maybe this trailer gives too much away (I might be wrong though):

Surrogates – Release Date: September 2009

As promised, here is the second part of the interview with Ron D Moore (check out the first post here):

Q: I absolutely love the Caprica pilot, so I was wondering if you could talk about this virtual world. Is this at all kind of similar to the holobands that was introduced on the Caprica pilot?

Ron Moore: I was sort of aware of the similarities between the two. They do have different purposes and different sorts of constructs to them. They both involve putting a set of goggles on your face, so they’re similar in sort of that perspective. In Caprica it’s really much more akin to the Internet where you go out and the virtual spaces are practically infinite and they intersect with one another. On Caprica you can go from the V-Club where we establish in the pilot is sort of a hacked world and then, presumably, there are worlds of war craft type of worlds, etc., etc. It’s all sort of interconnected into their version of the Internet.

In Virtuality we’re looking at something much more discrete, much smaller, much more of a gaming type of environment where an astronaut has a specific virtual reality module that they go into and play whatever game or have whatever experience they want, but there is no expectation that you can cross from one module to another.

Q: Ron, just still following up, if it only lives as a two-hour movie and doesn’t get picked up is there any thought of maybe trying to push to do another two-hour movie where you could tie up some of the thoughts that you wanted to or, as a lot of creators are doing now, maybe taking it into a different media, like a comic book so you could continue to expand on the theme?

Ron Moore: I think all of those are possibilities. We’ve talked about all of those possibilities. It’s just kind of one step at a time. I think it’s really hard to say. It depends on where we go after the broadcast and, A, after the ratings, after they start looking at demographics, after they start looking at word of mouth. Sometimes these things have a bigger life that sort of blossoms a few weeks after the broadcast. There’s a buzz going. People talk and then they start wondering when it’s on DVD … and decisions about where we would go with the underlying properties is just really hard to say where we are right now.

Q: Are you ready in your mind on where exactly you’d want to go if it either stays in the same medium or if it jumps somewhere else?

Ron Moore: Yes. I mean either way I think Mike and I pretty much have an idea of the direction that we would take the show or the book or whatever it would be. We have an idea of where we would take the story after this, yes.

Q: I really love the idea of the virtual worlds and I was wondering what type of virtual worlds could we see in the movie and maybe in the series if that continues.

Ron Moore: You’ll see kind of a range of virtual worlds. Like I said earlier, it opens in the Civil War in an action sort of piece and then there are more pastoral settings. There is a home. There are actually doctor’s offices. There are rock concerts. There is quite a range of areas that we went into, which was a deliberate choice. We wanted to sort of show that we were going to use these worlds in sort of disparate ways and that they would all be sort of tailored to specific characters and what they were interested in going to do, so you’ll see quite a range of virtual worlds when you get in there.

Q: I was reading somewhere that you don’t really reveal the year or what the actual emergency to the earth is. Was that done intentionally?

Ron Moore: Actually, that changed over time. Initially we didn’t really specify those things. We wanted to keep it looser and kind of vague because I just thought it was more interesting than nailing down the specifics on all of that, but as we went through the process we started to nail those things down. We just started to feel like we had to answer certain questions. I think we did; I know you’re going to ask me what year it is and I’m not going to know off the top of my head, so don’t ask; but I think we do refer to the year and we definitely talked more about the nature of the emergency.

Q: Yes. There was something written, a piece of dialogue, where it said, “Dry land is really expensive now,” so I …

Ron Moore: Yes. We expanded on that idea a little bit more.

Q: Okay, so there are just like hints?

Ron Moore: It’s kind of explicit. I mean there is a commercial for the reality show within the show. Within that commercial it kind of lays out some of the broader parameters of the mission, about what’s happening on earth and why the mission has taken on a new urgency. The mission started out as just one of exploration and then something going terribly wrong back home in terms of climate change, in terms of the environment, or so the astronauts are told. That’s kind of where we are.

Q: Okay. Did you look to any other properties for inspiration, like Sunshine or 2001?

Ron Moore: Not specifically. I mean I think we were aware of Sunshine and we sort of wanted to try to not go into it. We had seen it and we were like aware that there were certain similarities to some of it. We then kind of wanted to go out of our way to make sure that ours was different, so we were kind of like in that place.

Q: What is your relationship with reality TV? Are you a fan?

Ron Moore: I started off as a skeptic/hater of it. Now, actually, there are definitely reality programs that I like. I think probably at the top of that list, I’m a very late convert to Deadliest Catch, which I had heard about for a few years. I was even on a panel once with the executive producer and never really watched it. Then this last season finally my wife and I decided to give it a try and I was really taken with it, really drawn into it and impressed with the quality of the production and the seriousness with which they do this reality show that’s really a documentary every week. From there I like Project Runway. I like Top Chef. I’ve been suckered in, as it were.

Q: Thank you. Do you have any closing remarks?

Ron Moore: Well, I do actually. There is a series of Webisodes that were created for Virtuality. Webisodes are not just your traditional here’s an extra piece of story that you didn’t see on the show and here’s another little segment to tease you. The Webisodes for Virtuality are actually segments of the reality show within the show itself, so when you would log onto the Web site what you would see when you tagged on the Webisodes is you would see pieces of the reality show as it was broadcast back to earth, which was in the pitch when we sold it to the network originally. We said, “Everyone is always looking for this sort of interaction between the broadcast show and driving people to the Web site.” It’s always been sort of an uncomfortable marriage and they never seem to quite marry up in an interesting way for the audience. Ours has this really sort of organic way to do that where you could go to the Web site and experience Edge of Never is the name of the show, so you could go see Edge of Never on the Web site.

The concept and the plan would have been if the show went to series that every week you could log in on the Web site and see pieces of the reality show and buried within those pieces of the reality show would be actual information and clues that would not be accessible to the people watching the broadcast of the show. There was going to be a deliberate effort to sort of say, “Really, if you want to get all of the idea of what’s going on and to even crack some of the underlying mysteries to what the series is about, you would have to go and watch these pieces of Edge of Never,” because the idea within the show was that the astronauts may not be aware of how the show itself is being viewed back on earth. They may not understand certain things, but the audience back on earth might understand certain things.

There was this interesting relationship between the Webisodes and the series. My understanding is that right now Fox is going to put them up. There is a Facebook page for Edge of Never and I think in the next few days, if not early next week, certainly by early next week, you can go to the Facebook page and you can start downloading or streaming or however they’re going to make it available to you, these Webisodes, which would sort of build interest in the show and show you chunks of Edge of Never only on Fox. It would have the logos and it would have the astronauts behind the scenes of their reality show, sort of content for viewers to check out. I would encourage people to go and take a look at it, because I think it’s a unique bit of Virtuality.

Virtuality premieres on Friday 26th June at 8.00pm on Fox.

I finally managed to write-up the interview with Ron D Moore from last Thursday. This was the first time ever I participated in such a conference call, so it was exciting to experience it all. Basically anybody was allowed to ask questions, so there was a great mix of different type of topics Moore talked about. I cut out some of the questions that I didn’t find that interesting, but it still turned out to be quite a lengthy interview. So: I’ve cut it in two. Here’s the first part, later today I’ll post the second part:

Q: Ron, one of the biggest questions people keep asking me about Virtuality is how is it different from on Star Trek when you would have holodeck episodes and people would get lost in the holodeck.  How is this different from that sort of scenario?

Ron Moore: Well, it’s a different concept. The holodeck is a physical space that you would go into and three dimensional forms were actually physically created in front of you that you could feel and touch and interact with, etc. The computer would generate them as long as you were in them. This is truly a virtual space, which is much more akin to putting on contemporary, sort of virtual headsets, but sort of taking it to the next level where you do have an experiential sort of ability to touch and sense and taste and smell things in your mind, so it’s different sort of on the mechanical level.

In terms of the story level, we’re not playing the idea that if you die in the virtual space you die in the real space. It’s not … from that sense. It doesn’t have the safety programs like it did in the holodeck where the safety is off and if you get killed in here you get killed. It’s a very different thing.

Q: So in Virtuality if you die inside the virtual headset you don’t die in reality or you do?

Ron Moore: You don’t. No. It’s more like how gaming is now. You go on-line. You play a game and you get killed and you’re kicked out of the program because you’re dead, but you’re not dead in real life.

We’re using these much more psychologically as well. It doesn’t sound like you’ve seen the pilot, but essentially the experience is that the astronauts aboard the Phaeton have, in virtual space, are sort of things that just sort of are psychologically motivated. They go in there and they do things for entertainment and to sort of pass the time of day while they’re on this very, very long-range mission, but you’re learning things about them personally and about where did they want to spend their time and when things go wrong in that space how does it then influence them in the real world. That was the thing I was most interested in.

The concept was how the virtual space impacted the real story that was going on aboard the spacecraft and vice-versa. What’s the sort of interaction between the two?

Q: My question is sort of following up on that, but comparing it to Battlestar. The nature of Battlestar, you had to be very serious dealing with the space ship and everything. Does Virtuality allow you to have a little bit more fun with the concept of people in space?

Ron Moore: Oh, yes. It’s a much less serious situation than Battlestar was dealing with. Battlestar was literally a post-apocalyptic show where the future of humanity rode on their every decision and death was stalking them continuously. So it’s not set up in the same way. The crew aboard Phaeton signed up for what just seemed like a very straight-ahead mission of exploration and they were chosen with that in mind. They were also chosen to participate in this sort of reality show that’s being broadcast back to Earth.

So there was a conscious attempt on the part of the people who put the crew together to sort of have an interesting mix of people. There are debates within the crew themselves who was chosen just for sort of their demographic content and who was legitimately supposed to be there. Now you’ve got a groups of 12 people stuck in a metal tube going in a straight line for a decade or so and that’s going to just sort of produce a lot of tensions and frictions and manipulations and sort of cross problems between the characters. It has a stronger element of fun and suspense and sort of interesting plot terms in terms of what characters will do with one another than did Battlestar. Battlestar was very driven by the internal pressures of the huge weight that was on all of their shoulders from the beginning of the miniseries.

Q: So a little more opportunity for humor maybe?

Ron Moore: Oh, yes. There’s definitely more humor. There’s more humor probably in the first ten minutes of Virtuality than there was in the run of Battlestar, let’s put it that way.

Q: When did you come up with the idea of blending a sci-fi thriller with a reality show element to it?

Ron Moore: It was sort of in stages. When we first started talking about the concept it was about a long-range space mission, which I was intrigued with. Like I said before, I was interested in the idea of what do you do with 12 people in a metal tube for that long. I thought there were interesting dramatic possibilities right there and, okay, what would they realistically need to do. What would NASA or the space confederation do at that point to keep them from going crazy? They’d probably have a really advanced virtual reality program to help them while away the hours and there’s interaction between those two worlds.

Somewhere in those discussions we started talking about when they would be broadcasting pieces back to earth, obviously, like astronauts do today, and hey, what if they made a reality show out of that? Then it all kind of started to come together. You had these three layers of storytelling going on in the show where you had what was happening in the real world on the ship, what was happening in the virtual space and then what was the reality show that was seen back on earth. Were the needs of the reality show starting to impact what was happening on the spacecraft? Were people being manipulated in order to make better drama for the reality show? The astronauts themselves would start to wonder about are they telling us the truth about what’s happening back on earth or is that something to just get us to be upset for the cameras. It did sort of become this really interesting sort of psychological crucible that they would all be put in.

Q: It sounds like there’s a lot going on, because you have the mission to save earth. You have the virtual reality module. You have the virus. Then you have the streaming reality show. When you were writing it were there any major hurdles or blind alleys? Did it get confusing?

Ron Moore: Yes. I mean it was a tough thing to juggle. It’s a very ambitious piece and I think that was the reaction on the part of Fox when they saw it. It’s a very challenging, very complicated piece of work and there are a lot of moving parts. We knew that sort of going in and writing the script wasn’t easy. There was a lot of sort of trying to decide how much time you spend in any one of these three categories and at what point do you shift from the audience’s point of view from one to the other. What’s the language for that? Where are we going to introduce certain characters? How often do you go to the first person confessionals and the reality show, etc., etc.? So there were a lot of just complicated questions. Then those same questions were there in the editing process. When do you go to which piece of material? I think it was a really interesting challenge.

Q: Is all of the VR avatar style characters or is it real looking people?

Ron Moore: The actors play themselves in the virtual space. What we did in production was all of the virtual reality scenes are shot in green screen and all of the sets are green-scene sets, so for instance, the piece opens with an extended sort of piece in a virtual space of the Civil War for the lead character. None of that was shot on location. None of it was a set that we built. It was all done in the computer on a green screen stage. We kept that language for all of the virtual pieces to sort of give all of the virtual reality a sense of continuity so that you always sort of intuitively felt that you were in a virtual space even if the background looked photo reeled, so all of that is done against green.

Q: I was at Comicon last year for TV Guide and I understood that this was originally supposed to be a pilot for a series, right?

Ron Moore: It is a pilot. It’s a pilot for a series and Fox is going to broadcast it as a two-hour movie. It was a two-hour pilot, so they’re broadcasting it as a two-hour movie, but in my mind it’s a pilot. It’s always been a pilot.

Q: So it still can become a series?

Ron Moore: I think you never say never. They haven’t picked it up to date. Their attitude, I think, is kind of wait and see. I think they want to see what the reaction is going to be. What are the critics going to say? Is it going to get word of mouth? Are fans going to gravitate to it or is the science fiction community really going to turn up for it? Is there going to be a certain buzz and excitement? I think right now it doesn’t look like it’s going to series, but I think if enough people watched and enough people got excited about it anything is possible.

Q: Do you think this is a story that can be told in two hours?

Ron Moore: Well, you’ll see. It certainly does not resolve itself in two hours. I mean it sets up for a show, so it’s got some pretty heavy things that go down in it and kind of leaves you going, “Whoa! Where is that going?” by the end of it.

Q: Just going back to the whole reality TV, which you use as a story point in this film, why do you think people have become so obsessed with reality TV? What’s the attraction to it? What made you want to include it in this particular story?

Ron Moore: The first are two kind of complicated questions and I’m not sure what the answers are. At first I think I was certainly one of the skeptics that reality TV was going to be with us for any great period of time. Certainly, that’s been proven wrong. There seems to be a fundamental interest of people watching other real people or at least what they perceive as real people as opposed to watching fictional programming. There’s certainly something. There’s a powerful draw there of us wanting to look in on other people’s lives and seeing them pretty much as they actually exist.

Why we include it in the show was it just felt like it’s become such a staple of pop culture at this point in time. It seemed interesting to then incorporate it into a science fiction setting, which was something that we had never seen before or heard of and thought that’s an interesting sort of spin on it. We’ve all seen video that’s been broadcast back by the astronauts from the Apollo missions to the Space Shuttle, but we’ve never seen it done in a format where it’s trying to be a reality show at the same time. I thought that’s an interesting challenge. It’s kind of a different hook for the audience and it might be kind of a cool angle for the show.

Come back later for Part 2 of this interview.

Virtuality premieres on Friday 26th June at 8.00pm on Fox.

Interesting links for June 16th:

• Picture of the Week: Legal Threat – Wow, some people really don't understand the ways of the internetz.
• For God’s Sake The Problem With The Star Wars Prequels Was Not Green Screen | The Movie Blog – Nope, the problem with the Star Wars prequels was simply bad writing. Don't blame the technology.
• Tube Exits for the London Underground – If I had an iPhone, I would want this app. It shows you where on the tube you have to get in, so that at your exit station you're exactly at the "way out" part.
• Girls on Film: A Desire for Varied Female Protagonists is Not a Political Agenda – Cinematical – Great post and I agree completely with her; why is it so strange to some people that girls would want strong female protagonists in movies?

Episode 116: “I’m a fool to want you”

I loved the Baz Luhrmann/Nicole Kidman ad for Chanel No.5, and this new ad has that same “more than just an ad” feeling. It stars Audrey Tautou (Amelie!) and is directed by Jean Pierre Jeunet:

[Watch the video on MissGeeky.com]

There’s a better quality version at the official website.

This trailer look just weird. Here’s the description from FilmSchoolRejects:

In the near future (stop me if you’ve heard it), the world is experiencing a crisis in the form of oil shortage, and has taken safeguards by connecting all the cities of the world through underground tunnels. When Roger, a lower-level worker, finds out that he’s not in control of his own life, he tries to escape the system with the help of a beautiful woman.

Basically, it’s 1984 with subways. Plus, Roger might be crazy because he hears voices all the time.

I really like the sound of it, but the visual style creeps me out:

[Watch the trailer on MissGeeky.com]

Metropia – Release Date: November 2009

Last Thursday I got to participate in a conference call with Ron D Moore (Battlestar Galactica, Carnivale, Star Trek: Deep Space Nine) about his latest show Virtuality. So far that might be one of the highlights of my blogging career (that and the press conference with Stephen Fry, which btw I still have to blog about), I even managed to ask a question! I haven’t written up that interview yet, but I thought I’d first do a quick introduction post on what Virtuality is about.

Virtuality is a 2 hour long TV movie airing on Friday 26th June, which will serve as (hopefully, if it’s any good) a pilot to an actual series. Fox hasn’t picked it up yet, but I’m guessing they’re waiting to see how the pilot does before taking any action. Here’s the press release from Fox:

Aboard Earth’s first starship, the Phaeton, a crew of 12 astronauts is on the verge of embarking on an epic 10-year journey crucial to the survival of life on Earth. They have reached the “go” or “no go” point, the critical part of the journey where the crew must commit to traveling to a distant solar system millions of miles away. If they “go,” they cannot turn back.

To give the crew a measure of privacy as well as a vital recreational outlet on the long journey, the ship has been equipped with revolutionary virtual reality modules. Each crew member can assume adventurous, avatar-like identities as they explore self-created worlds and scenarios, or simply spend quality down time as themselves in the ultra-life-like simulators. From a war hero to a rock star to secret lovers on an island, these are their psychological lifelines, and each module’s unique setting was chosen by the crew member before departing Earth.

But there is a bug in the system.

As crew members go in and out of reality, they realize that a virus has entered their private world. Questions are raised, and suspicions fanned: Is someone on the crew responsible? When the interloper’s intrusions cross a violent and disturbing line, the ship’s commander makes a difficult decision to shut down the modules. But before he can, a tragic event threatens the mission. Is it an accident or a crime? Real or virtual? Whatever the case, it’s too late to turn back, so the group ventures forth into space, fearing that they may be harboring a person or presence determined to derail their vital mission. Meanwhile, tensions are heightened even further as surveillance cameras capture their every move for a reality series back on Earth.

From what I’ve heard the reality show aspect to it, sounds like a lot of fun. It will also keep the viewer (as in us, not the viewers in the show on that Earth) wondering the entire time whether or not the information the crew get is real, or just a means to make the reality show more interesting.

I love the concept of Virtuality, but because it’s Fox I’m not too sure whether or not to even keep my hopes up that it might be picked up (although they did renew Dollhouse). They’ve put Virtuality in a Friday death slot, and so far I haven’t seen that much marketing for it. There’s not even a trailer out yet and it’s being aired in two weeks time! 

Later this week I’ll post the interview with Ron D Moore here on my blog, plus another blog post introducing all the different characters. What do you think so far of Virtuality?

Ooh, I love these type of posters! Subscribers to Edge (gaming magazine) each received a poster with their latest issue, portraying a city rendered in pixels. Created by illustrator Gary Lucken, it contains tons of references to videogames. Unlike the movie Cryptic Canvas from yesterday though, the references are pretty straightforward (not cryptic). Still there are a lot of references that I don’t get. 

[Click on the image to get a larger version]

It reminds me a lot of the eBoy posters (we’ve got the FooBar poster, although we haven’t found a frame to hang it in our new place), it’s a poster you can stare for at ages and still not have found all the things hidden in it. I wish there was a higher resolution online version available though; there are some references I think I get, but it just too tiny to be sure. 

Via Wonderland

Interesting links for May 14th through June 11th:

• "The Heart of the Female Warrior" – Cool interview with Mary McDonnell about Battlerstar Galactica.
• April 1, 2009: Theodore Wilson’s Last Ride – Funny April Fools prank from one of the writers of Stargate.
• How to Win at Boggle – Great illustration with tips on how to win Boggle. (makes me want to play Boggle now)
• 25 logos with hidden messages – Hmm, some of these aren't really "hidden", but still a nice list to go through.

I’m not exactly a Martin Scorsese fan; I still have to see a lot of his older films and I fell asleep during both The Aviator and The Departed. This trailer of Shutter Island seems great though and much more my type of movie than what he has previously made. 

Shutter Island is based on the like-wise named book by Dennis Lehane, who also wrote the books Gone Baby Gone and Mystic River. It features Leonardo DiCaprio as a federal marshall investigating the mysterious disappearance of a murderess who escaped from the island’s hospital for the criminally insane. Also stars Mark Ruffalo, Ben Kingsley, Michelle Williams, Emily Mortimer, Jackie Earle Haley.

[Watch on MissGeeky]

I really like the look of this movie, even though most of the time I can’t stand Leonardo DiCaprio. But it looks like there’s more to the story than just a “find the bad guy” plot, and my mind is already coming up with possible explanations, twists and theories.

Shutter Island – Release Date: October 2009