A film from the future

One of the more interesting and humbling aspects of getting older is seeing things you have imagined come to pass, or not. No doubt this is true for everyone, but such moments perhaps carry an extra charge when you imagine possibilities for a living.

Sometimes it's a matter of provocative notions materialising sooner than expected. In 02006 Jake Dunagan and I featured corporate candidates running for public office as part of our continued growth scenario for 'Hawaii 2050'. We were taken aback when a public relations company called Murray Hill Inc announced its plans in early 02010 to run for Congress in Maryland. Apparently they were making a satirical point in the wake of a recent Supreme Court majority decision which seemed to pave the way for corporate voting in elections. Our scenario had played in the same satirical territory 3 1/2 years before – only set 44 years into the future. Too far, perhaps?

An even more striking example of the future arriving early came with a project called Coral Cross, a 'serious game' about a flu pandemic, which I was directing for the Hawaii Department of Health. (The CDC was funding it as an early experiment in using games to engage the public for serious health promoting purposes.) Just weeks before the game's scheduled launch date, the game's hypothetical near-future scenario was pre-empted by an actual pandemic – H1N1 swine flu. To this day it's still a little bit hard to believe that actually happened. The project went ahead, incidentally: we turned on a dime and redesigned it from the ground up to make what we dubbed an Emergent Reality Game as opposed to an Alternate Reality Game.

Sometimes, the opposite occurs. A thing you expected doesn't happen, or happens otherwise than anticipated. We could perhaps file the following story under that heading.

Back in April 02007 when I was in grad school, a number of us in the Dept of Political Science at UH-Manoa made a short film for a 48-hour film comp in Honolulu called 'Showdown in Chinatown'. The way these things work is that certain creative constraints are provided at the start of the period, which both helps to inspire projects and to verify that submissions are authentically tailor-made for the occasion. You then run around like headless chooks for two days trying to make a short film using those parameters.

Readers will be unsurprised to learn that I was interested in making a film from the future. (On which theme more in another post soon, but meanwhile anyone keen to understand where I'm coming from may begin here.)

The given constraints called for referencing the topic 'addiction', using the line 'that's it', and incorporating an apple and a pencil as props. During our Thursday afternoon beer-and-brainstorm session, Ashley Lukens (now Dr. Lukens) made the outlandish and frankly inspired suggestion that the addiction in question could be someone 'addicted to being a dog'. The film pretty much made itself from there.

Why do I blog this now? It's not that it was an especially serious bit of forecasting or rigorous future-date-selecting, but when I edited the short together, the excerpt from our fictitious news magazine show Aloha Tonight happened to be post-dated seven years: April 14, 02014.

Which is – holy crap – today. Time flies when you're meddling with it.

Related:
> On Death of a President, and other films from the future
> Hawaii 2050 kicks off

> Coral Cross is coming

> This is not a game
> Coral Cross concludes
> Hawaiian shorts