David, Marcus and Toby craft a story nugget by arranging a bunch of random elements into a satire involving a school trip to the Museum of Mass Extinction.
Nugget Jam
Title: Head Trip
Genre: Satire
Tagline: Save the world one penguin at a time / “Participation is Mandatory’
Dramatic Question: What if a professor took his class on a VR tour of the Museum of Mass Extinction and blew their minds?
Premise: The road to Hell is paved with good intentions
Logline: an unassuming, middle-school teacher takes his class on a shamanic (and, possibly, shambolic) journey that changes them forever.
Characters: Shaman, Balloon Artist, Bartender
Genre: Satire
Location: Aquarium
Set Piece: Hangliding in Lebanon
Complication: Loss of Sensory
Paraplegic balloon artist - new version of “My Left Foot”. Drowned in an aquarium being watched by a cluster of school children gathering around the glass. Fish bait. Fish go missing. Who is stealing the fish? Turned out to be the pacific octopus who went down the hall to go fishing. Octopus vs. Shark video. An octopus balloon artist.
A bartender who can’t taste anything but is nevertheless a cocktail designer.
Bad stuff can happen when you feed the animals at the zoo or in the aquarium. The kids are witness to something bad. An otter grabbed a 2yr old and dragged him down.
Living museums. Actors pretend to be primitives living in a cave from a prehistoric period. George Saunders, “Pastoralia”. Living Tableau. Living Exhibit. What would be the equivalent nowadays? Slaughterhouse Five - the humans are in the alien zoo. PBS, “Asian Americans” - Igorot Village. What would we showcase in a World’s Fair today? What contemporary cultural things might we turn into an exhibit that would lead to embarrassment in the not-to-distant future?
Kids in a school trip are taken to the Mass Extinction Museum in order to scare them into taking climate change seriously. You become part of the performance art. Like the Model UN, “I am the emperor penguin”. Kids are given an acid tab to go on a journey. Professor is the shaman. Goat footed balloon man. Life without you. Life without me.
Kids are made to feel the climate change and what extinction is like. You are the penguin, “You have no food!”
Virtual Reality used to help us confront new experiences, be assaulted. VR Trip. Avant Garde performance. Assault on two senses: visual and auditory (and nothing else).
People collectively put on headsets and go on shamanic journey. David Cronenberg’s, “ExistenZ”.
Teacher takes a completely unsuspecting mediocre class on a journey that changes them forever. History Class? Semiotics? His girlfriend dumps him (she is a shaman) and he takes the class to her workplace to get her back. The teacher wants to save the world. Puts this on the class. It’s your job to save the world because we F’ed up. You are the exhibit. Participation is mandatory.