ELYSIAN FIELDS
ARTIE & THENA.
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PRESENTATION OUTLINE
ELYSIAN FIELDS
BY KATE KUGLER AND CRYSTAL BOYD
This is a story about two adult sisters who travel East across the Former United States of America in order to find “home” on their own terms. When their father intercepts their journey, they must choose between the comfort of blind loyalty or the pain of change.
THE SISTERS:
Thena- A WRITER. Clever, charming, emotionally distant. She’s a whiz with technology and a wordsmith. Thena fears being overlooked and longs for purpose. She hides in her intelligence and keeps people at arm’s length.
Artie- A HUNTER. Competitive, wild, stubborn. Gifted with athletic prowess and part of a subversive, underground hunting crew back home. Her Achilles heel is her pride. A wildcard who longs for freedom over everything.
Photo by danoStL
“There is no America. There is no democracy. There is only IBM, and ITT, and AT&T, and DuPont, Dow, Union Carbide, and Exxon. Those are the nations of the world today...”
-Network, 1976
Photo by lisa cee (Lisa Campeau)
WHAT YOU'LL SEE
It is 2044 and adult half-sisters Artie and Thena have fled the corporate dystopia of Coke Town, formerly Los Angeles. After years of heavy drought and the exodus of the nation’s 100 wealthiest families for better lands, large-scale riots raged across the country, burning the government to the ground. The former USA is now a disjointed, rotting carcass where Coke and Amex and Nike have swooped down to pick at the remains....
Disconnected from their parents and disillusioned by Coke Town, Thena and Artie are currently crossing the halfway point to a rumored free-city out East, Elysian Fields. American refugees. A phone call from their long-disappeared father interrupts their journey, and the sisters struggle to remain on course when he requests them to come back to Coke. Despite old sibling rivalries, family secrets, and pangs of loyalty, they steady each other to remain on course and keep going.
STYLE
The intimacy and “moment to moment” emotional journey of "Room," meets the sci-fi innovation of BBC's, "Black Mirror." A story about sisters. We are rooted in a future just out of our grasp.
Photo by scotbot
THE INSPIRATION
We were discussing recently the interesting dynamic of adult sibling relationships, and how we've both grown closer to our siblings as we've embraced adulthood, yet still have triggers that can launch us into unhealed rivalries and wounds under the surface. In fact, the process of aging can awaken perspective on issues with the very siblings that we now have learned to value and cherish as adults. This film focuses on adult inter-sibling relationships and their complex relation to a dormant parental structure. It is a family drama set in a corporate dystopia and the collapse of the American empire. A collapse teetering realistically in our near future, with the very real collective apprehension of where the country is going with Trump, mass shootings, the refugee crisis, and global terror threats.
BUDGET AND LOCATIONS
We see this 10 minute film being shot in one location, a forest that is close to a body of water. The sci-fi elements of a hologram map and outer calf tattoo logos of Coke Town
will be rendered by a post-production effects specialist that we have secured, in the following aesthetic:
http://raphaelrogers.com/vfx/
Photo by skoeber
