David & Toby expand upon the mood board approach by using imagery as the ‘opening scene’ to tease out story ideas.
Location Board 1
Use images to imagine the opening shot of a movie. What is happening here?
Shipyard Breaker. Gutted tankers. Mickey in ruins. Trash Island. Forbidden City.
When was the first time you went to Disneyland?
Euro Disney appalling work conditions. Not enough housing for workers, had to live off the park and take the shuttle bus from one of the tiny villages nearby; could take 5 hours to get home, so you only had a few hours before the morning pickup for your next shift.
Not enough cafeteria space for ‘cast’. Had to do shifts; overlapping; no time to eat. Wasn’t enough food for visitors either resulting in mini riots; lacked security.
Sounds like slave labor or living in an open-air prison. You have to entertain the people who are stuck there when you’re stuck there, too.
Sneaking into the Anaheim park.
Massive surveillance operation to ensure kids don’t go missing or get kidnapped.
Future generations won’t look at Mickey in the same way, perhaps? Symbol of oppression.
Wheelchair buddies (fake family) to skip the queue.
Amusement parks run like cities. Graduates can go and run other municipalities. Proto-fascist training ground?
Mecha-Mickey, “Have a Nice Day. Oh Boy! I can’t wait to taser you.”
Will future generations after the collapse of humanity look at the “Mayan” ruins of Epcot and wonder what all of it meant?
Planet of the Apes, finding the Statue of Liberty at the end. Does Disney buy a planet and set itself up there, giving themselves all the powers they need?
Disney Moon. Because we’ve got the org skills to do it! They create their own terraformed planet. Just as States are desperate to get Disney to come, interplanetary competitions do the same. Disney has the rights to build a nuclear power plant in Florida. A new entertainment planet, using all of their knowledge and know-how of world-building. House of Mouse is the intergalactic pioneer.
Tourists are intermittently eaten by alligators in Florida, as they roam golf courses and hotel pools. Same thing might happen at Disney Moon.
Something Dangerous lives there, too.
Security guards sent to club birds to death so they wouldn’t crap on the fixtures; turned out to be endangered species.
Ideal Society or Living Hell?
Entire planet is a franchise.
Earth is destroyed. Survivors on Disney Moon have to live with what they have. The only guide they have is the Disney Employees Handbook. Over the centuries, it turns into something wonderfully weird. They had to become self-sufficient and build new technologies. All they had was the braintrust of the Employees and visitors who were stranded there.
The visitors expect to be treated special and become the aristocracy. The staff must entertain them. Becomes a caste system handed down from generation to generation. Use your science magic to make us happy.
Timberland. Algae run-off? Reduce majestic forests into wood floating in fetid water. Beautiful from a distance.
Koyasnisqatsi - “Life out of balance”. Beautiful Decay. We go from one perspective to another.
Modern life keeps abstracting and abstracting that we remove ourselves from what matters. Too many intermediaries. Too much distance. “Why Nothing Works”, by Marvin Harris. Responsibilities keep getting outsourced to others so that they cannot care. You buy a brand new jacket and the button pops off. Imagine that happening in the Eskimo world? Buttons coming off means death of the hunter and no food for the family. No more pride in craftsmanship because we are too removed from each other.
Financialization of everything is another level of abstraction. Removes us from what is humane, and real, and authentic.
Do goober celebrity arrives to do tour of the Amazon. They’ve shut down temporarily. Government inspector. Government employee who hasn’t received their bribe. Pay up! They arrive but everyone’s gone, or dead. What happened? Pandemic? War? Eerie. Just left as it was a day ago.
The forest taking back what belongs to it. Humanity as a parasite. Pestilence.
Zombie-ant fungus. Fungus that gets into ants’ brains and controls them. Turns them into zombies. Their heads explode to infect the colony. Ophiocordyceps Unilateralis.
Purge, Amazon style. The natives fed us the fungus and it’s an apocalypse.
Simon McBurney’s, “The Encounter”
Salvager Gold Rush
Severed Tanker. Action set-piece. Rush to salvage something from it that was hidden behind and it’s crawling with pirates that are looking for it, too.
Refugees are displaced and aren’t let in by host countries. Become nationless. What if they live on a deserted boat like this in the harbor or at least just in international waters so they are just out of arm’s reach? Just like the ship, they are marooned, stuck in place. Indeterminate status. They create their own nation.
Scientists of Fortune
When you find something in the ocean, you get salvager’s rights. New Yorker article long ago about a crack team of professional treasure hunters that specialize in historic research to locate sunken wrecks with treasure that they go and salvage. Have to work fast because it attracts others, including government agents from nearby land. They have to protect themselves with mercenaries. Multidisciplinary team of soldiers and scientists.
“One man’s trash is another man’s treasure”
Treasure hunters of another kind. The truth behind recycling. You put your bottles in the correct bin and this is where it ends up and what happens to it.
Future archaeologists will find this. It must have been special and precious because it was kept in one place and preserved. Excavation site in the past found ancient wine. It was in the Middle East, where there is desert today. It had a huge wine operation. Traders from all over came to buy it. They found a massive aviary for pigeons to harvest their poop as fertilizer. The pots that the wine was shipped in was its signature. What would people make of our bottles and the logos on them. Different religious groups? Seven-Up and Coca-Cola were special factions or sects, or offerings to the Gods. Good product placement. Who was this Dr Pepper? He must have been very important because there’s a lot of offerings to him. Were they for medicinal purposes?
Because we abolished plastic, it’s becomes a rare treasure in the future. Could become more valuable than gold is today. There is no plastic in the future and thus very valuable. We’ve exhausted all the petroleum. Rather than strip-mining for minerals, we strip-mine dumpsites in the future for rarities. If we go ‘kablooey’, future generations would have a harder time of it because we’ve used up all the low-hanging fruit resources, although we’ll leave behind amazing trash.
The way we consume things currently is linear, cradle to grave, and we need to create a circular pattern of recycling. Circular thinking. Take it as far as we can. Renewables.
Trash Pirates
You can make good money from cardboard in Italy, so there are cardboard thieves. Rubbish thieves who take your garbage and prevent it from going to the recycler. Paper is good because you can’t fingerprint it.
Covanta burns trash for energy. Don’t just burn it! It can be re-used for all sorts of other things 
We might look upon trash burning as a terrible waste.
Imagine a society where everything is circular. Even human life. Renewable and not linear.
EverLife fictitious ads. “What a senseless waste of human life”.
We run out of space for people, so we move residents from the top to the bottom floors and fill those floors with earth.
- Also attached a photo that I feel represents the poem
