Story Discussion

Thanks for offering the story Sam and being so open about collaborating and developing it. It's a really intriguing scenario and we should go ahead with it with Phil producing, Cole doing the music and Sam doing the script. It fits my aim to have a multi part creature feature we've created ourselves with a sympathetic 'monster'. It's going to take more than 20 minutes per episode though, so how about we aim at 3 x 30 minutes? That's a feature length 90 minutes in all, which seems about right.

It's a great idea to make sure the story's really tight before writing the final script. I'm just going to offer some initial ideas here which you might want to think about, by no means am I saying you have to adopt any or all of them before you start writing the actual script.

Firstly, given that most of our actors are American, we're going to have to set it in an American coastal town, New England, Alaska, wherever. We haven't got the actors to make it Australia. That said we need to avoid it seeming like Jaws at the start with the mayor trying to cover up the shark attacks for fear of scaring off the tourists. We also need a credible scenario for why the whales are only now interacting with humans, we need to heighten and sharpen the stakes for both the whales and the various people involved and we need to have a more uplifting ending.

I don't think we should go too far down the whales actually talking route, it's too cutesy and the humans should have to work harder to understand what's going on rather than simply being told. Obviously they're intelligent and can communicate, but maybe we could do it in the story by decoding their music or something without getting too 'Close Encounters of the 3rd Kind' about it. We're doing an audio play, so let's make audio sounds an integral part of it.

As for a more hopeful ending, if people invest 90 minutes into listening to something with a monster which is gradually revealed to be sympathetic then you can't slap them in the face with its possible destruction at the end. It can't be too ambiguous after all that investment of people's time into listening to it, it has to satisfy people's need for good to triumph over bad, no matter the moral ambiguities earlier on. I don't want the Whales to have been destroyed by the mine for that reason, and I think we can do something better as a climax than an accidental explosion anyway. The main protagonists have to drive the action and triumph because their ideas are better while the antagonists have to be defeated because they're hoist by their own petard. Having a bomb go off by accident is too random, especially as it has an ambiguous result, which really means the 85 minutes of story leading up to it don't matter. If anyone's going to get blown up by an explosion - maybe a fertiliser pipe bomb? - then it should be the guy trying to blow up the whales. It can't be an old naval mine, live munitions aren't just left lying around old warehouses and the cost of disposal would never be a factor. Maybe the casing from a museum display could be used with a diesel/ammonium nitrite bomb improvised inside?

A few practical considerations. Why are the whales and people only now coming into contact? If they were a deep sea species living far from the shipping lanes then why would the fertaliser run off affect them? If they lived near the shore why aren't they already well known? Maybe a fishing boat fishing illegally for a rare deep sea fish catches a Whale baby and think it's a mermaid or something, which bring the pod back looking for it. That would explain the Whale's attack better than simply trying to retrieve a dead body. Getting a dead body back - even if it was an old king whale, even if the dead are venerated in whale society - isn't a big enough motivator. Similarly we need a clearer antagonist among the humans and to give them a strong motivation for their actions.

I'm also not quite sure of what's at stake in the climax so maybe we need to clarify the roles the main characters are playing here. It can't just be a retirement community full of rich old people and antique shops.  Nothing would be at stake.  However about it's more of declining fishing town, so the story could centre around conflict for the fish and we'd have more muscular and capable antagonists?  We start off the story seeing the Whales as the antagonists, but by the end it should be the good humans and whales against some human antagonist determined to exploit or destroy them. Maybe the fishermen initially want to sell the captured whale to a zoo, then when the whales start sinking boats they hate the whales, then when the whales bring the fish with them some of them love the whales, but then there's a suggestion the whole area would get turned into a marine nature reserve, which would destroy their fishing livelihood, so they finally want to kill the whales or drive them off or something. They set off trying to destroy the whales but end up getting destroyed by their own bomb. Their attitudes would change but their motivation of preserving their livelihood - never being evil for the sake of it - would remain. Maybe the whales use their songs to either attract or repel the fish as well, it's an audio play so we've got to play up the audio angle. Having a pretty glow works well on film but we'd have to have people going 'look at that pretty glow' all the time which is less effective.

Could we also have a role for a child in here? We certainly have a good actress to voice a younger female role! Maybe a child who is able to make contact with the whales or understand them or something, in contrast to the jaded adults who only see what they want to see in the whales? We need a range of voices anyway.

Anyway these are just a bunch of thoughts for you to consider off the top of my head. As I said, I'm not demanding you accept any of them, but we do need a really strong spine to the story so the script stands up by itself and we can maintain listener interest over 3 episodes and give them a satisfying climax at the end.

Humming to himself in defence of Joannem, Godzilla, King Kong and the Hulk all characters I had little sympathy for! Hum hum

Excellent! I'm glad you guys are interested. Good feedback as well, it's all appreciated. I have to put in a hard days labour in the real world right now, but tonight I'll make an itemised list of the problems brought up (along with possible solutions) and see if we can't figure them out systematically.

On a more serious note, perhaps the whales could have an inner monologue of some kind? Might spare us "OMG! IT'S A WHALE! ANOTHER ONE! ITS BALEEN ARE STAINED WITH THE BLOOD OF INNOCENTS! AAAAAAHHH!" type exposition.

It might also help the audience empathize - keep the monologue cryptic and sinister at the start, but as the story goes on, it becomes clearer and more sympathetic.

I've actually seen a movie exactly like that, but your point stands, haha

Great story! Only one note that I don't think has been covered...Orca the Killer Whale, shares a lot of similarities to this story (dead whale washes up due to a poacher and the orca attacks a small town only to be rescued by a marine biologist). I think the story would work even better without the whale washing up on shore. Maybe the story would start I the middle of the action and the people of the town are trying to figure out why it's happening.