Sinking In The Fire
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Sinking In The Fire is an old movie project of mine that I was trying to make when I was about 14-15 years old. It's a story about a girl who meets an alien boy. And they go on an adventure together.
Project history
I don't know the correct dates for everything. So I will speculate a lot. If you see an error in my speculation, please use the form below to tell me about it. Thank you.
It has to be 2011 or 2012 where my mother came to Israel. The idea for the movie didn't come to me before that. I was born in summer of 1997. I was 14 when I left the Jewish Yeshiva. And it was roughly a month ( maybe two ) before that, that I got the ideas for Sinking In The Fire. I remember, when running away from the Yeshiva that it was night and that I wore a t-shit. And on top of that an unbuttoned shirt. So it was not winter. I also roughly remember that I was 14 for only a little bit during the Yeshiva. So you can say it was Summer time just after my birthday. Which simplifies the math. So it should have been 2011 after all.
Anyway. I remember sneaking out of bed during one night and using mom's laptop to watch Steven Spielberg's War Of The Worlds. I even remember seeing a part of the movie in a toilet since I was so emerged in the story that I didn't want to press pause.
We lived near this building. I just found a picture of it on somebodies blog. You can not see it from this angle, but on the left, the building is connected to the land with a bridge. There is a drop of at least 10 stories between the land and the building itself. Of course there is another entrance at the bottom of the building. But they also did the bridge to enter conveniently from the heel itself. In that town ( Tzfat ) they do that all the time. Though this particular bridge looked one million times more epic than other bridges. It was surrounded with awe and epic sense of creepiness. The bridge had one leg in the center of it for support. That's all.
After seeing the movie War Of The Worlds I went walking around that area because I wanted to look more at that bridge. It was in the middle of the night and the area was surrounded with a creepy feeling. It felt like this backdrop could be nice for an almost horror film. I didn't want to do "Saw". I wanted to do something like War Of The Worlds. Something that was realistic and yet something to do with extra terrestrials. I was looking at that bridge and thinking of the shock that the people could experience watching a movie where this bridge is collapsing. I was trying to sell residents of that building a nightmare of entering it. Aliens could blow it up, or destroy it or destabilize it somehow that will make it fall. I just needed to write it.
Still in the Yeshiva I drew the picture that you see on the top of this article. I was already 14 at that time. I drew that using a technique of first sketching in pencil and then drawing over it with a black gel pen. Then erase the pencil. I remember that I took a photograph of it. I think I did it in my mother's house on her Cannon PowerShot camera. Then I opened the picture in GIMP and did all the coloring that you can see in the final version. I hope I can find the original version of this drawing somewhere.
The name "Sinking In The Fire" and the image that you can see made a strong impression on me. I knew that big art films usually have something like this in them. I failed to understand that the symbolic images like this one should carry meaning. I just thought that image being thought provoking, or having and interesting duality, would work on it's own. And maybe this particular picture ( with good writing ) could potentially work someday. I don't know.
Later I connected the two ideas together. The boy in the picture later became a shape shifting alien.
When I got out of the Yeshiva, I had a Nokia Express Music smartphone. I didn't have a computer. And my mother wasn't giving me her computer that often. I was staying mostly at my dad's house. I knew that writing a movie script could be done without a computer, but I was afraid that doing it on paper would not be an option, since I could make mistakes. And on paper fixing a word or two would be to rewrite the whole thing. So I installed a text editor app on the Nokia and tried writing a draft on this. The first draft was written in Russian and it was cringe and brutal.
In 2012 ( this is definite because I remember listening to The All American Rejects album "Kids In The Street" which came out in 2012 and thinking how cool it was that I was listening to the music that just came out ) I started trying to make the movie sets on the computer. It was also the time when Blender Animation Studio were developing their film Tears Of Steel. I was obviously following the production of the film religiously. But most importantly I was hoping that their workflow could be replicated by me to make a grand epic alien movie.
I knew a couple of people living in the building with the bridge. I thought that it should be the place where the main character lives. And where she sees the alien for the first time. But I imagined the apartment completely differently than the real apartments in that building. And I've written the first few scenes with my altered planning of the apartment in mind. Instead of trying to re-write the scene to fit the apartment ( that I could get by asking my friends ) I decided that since this apartment does not exist, I will do it on the computer. I'm still cringing from this decision.
Those are a few surviving renders that I was able to make on my mom's laptop. As you can see on the second render, there are two doors that are parallel to each other. The idea would be that if the girl ( living in the room on the right ) goes to the toilet or something, we will see the other door. And once she would see that the other door is open or something. She would wander in and see an alien ship in the window with her mom going into the beam of light. I scrapped this idea later since it was not mysterious enough.
I did a few rewrites to the movie. And never actually got into filming it. I did a few storyboards of the little part that I just described. I realized that it doesn't work and was not sure how to make a good film. So I knew that I needed a test project. A short film that could go wrong, that I can do. So I could learn how not to screw this movie up. That project came in the from of Wrong Hate.
Short summary of plot ideas that I have so far
The girl should be Jewish religious. She has a very fanatical orthodox mother which is impossible to live with. One night she sees a strange boy sitting on the bench below her window. It's raining and he seems to not care about the rain. In the morning, when she goes to school she sees him still sitting there. He moves so little that a bird comes to sit on him. This makes her afraid and wonder.
At school a new character appears. A girl which is not very religious. Her father, perhaps, told her to pretend to be religious to be accepted into that school, because they need to blend-in. Perhaps her father is trying to run away from something.
Next night our first girl sneaks out of the house to meet that boy that is still sitting down on the bench. She finds that in his neck, from behind, there is a strange dart of some kind. She takes it out and the boy starts moving. He freaks out and starts running away.
This boy is being hunted by an alien. Because he himself is an alien. He can shape-shift into this boy look because of an experiment gone wrong with a boy that they have abducted, that looks exactly the same as this "boy" shape. The other alien gone mad. He was the one to put the dart into him. But he was ultimately unable to reach him. Until now.
The other girl from school is a daughter of an ex-mafia member. He is trying to hide himself and his daughter by disguising themselves as religious Jews. But this doesn't go well. The father gets killed and the girl escapes by a miracle. Until the girl brings the mafia after her into the woods where by chance they meet the first girl and the alien.
The association with the alien and the cool girl teaches the religious girl about all kinds of science and philosophy unknown to her because of her overly-orthodox mother. Which results in a character ark.
At some point during the movie, there has to be a scene with a locked door with a small window in it. From one side there should be a water leakage filling the whole room with water. And on the other side there should be fire. Therefor - Sinking In The Fire.
I don't have a good enough ending for this movie yet. There were couple of ideas. One which ends with a movie set where Sheiny ( from Sheiny The Hacker ) comes and tells the main character that it's all fake and that she is in a movie.
Sheiny directing Sinking In The Fire
In my book Sheiny The Hacker I mention that Sheiny writes and then directs a movie called "Sinking In The Fire". This idea of a character named Sheiny writing and then directing it was with me for more than 5 years already. Originally I planned to do a trilogy of films. "Sinking In the Fire", "Sheiny The Hacker" and "Half Heart". The third directed by Chloe ( a character from Sheiny The Hacker ) and is about a semi-magical alien artifact with a shape of a heart that was broken into two pieces. And those owning those pieces have superpowers. Like for example an ability to drive a car on a building.
The idea would be that in Sheiny The Hacker I would tell a story of how those two girls got into directing and made those two other films. And the two girls in Sinking In The Fire would be played by the same actresses who would play Sheiny and Chloe. Of course if you read the book, it seems rather un-doable at this point. But perhaps I can make the movie on it's own.
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