by Shelton Bumgarner
@bumgarls
For years, I’ve been fascinated by First Contact. I’ve dwell deeply and at great length about how one might not only move huge numbers of humans off the planet but how you would organize that group of humans once you did. It’s something of an impossible scenario.
There just is so much to weigh in your mind. I have struggled to figure out how you might unite humanity if you worked on the assumption that — essentially — all human life is valued equally regardless of where you’re from. This is significantly more difficult to figure out than you might think.
Anyway, I may have figured out a strong enough concept to move forward with it. The movie would written with the expectation that it would be a tent-pole summer blockbuster but with smarts and a heart. I like screenplays as an art form because they’re collaborative and as the screenwriter all you have to do is give some guidance to the director as to what is supposed to happen. But, as I keep saying, I am saving my money for a professional camera so it will probably be later this year before I can afford to buy Final Draft so I can actually begin writing the screenplay.
In the meantime, I may sketch the concept out as a short story or novella or even a novel. I guess I want to prove to myself that I’m not only serious about this concept but that it’s strong enough that it’s worth attempting to be serious about in the first place. The camera is the most important thing to buy in the near term because it has a practical way of being able to change my life.
But I’m generally a creative person and I love to tell stories. And just recently I found myself figuring out the outlines of a plot for this concept I’ve been mulling for years. So, we’ll see. Maybe nothing will come of this. I might get bored and move on to the next thing, but if it holds up, I may very well start writing a screenplay about First Contact soon.
The movie concept I have in my head has elements of Contact, Close Encounters of The Third Kind and….in some ways it’s so unique it defies comparison. I’m coming at this problem in a really rather unconventional manner. I find telling stories relaxing just in general, so I may wake up and discover I’ve written a screenplay without realizing.
