Tuesday, October 2, 2012

Most Amazing Essay Written As Part of An Exam

I promised the world, a few posts back, that I would post my Intro to STAC essay when I got it back. Well, I got it back. To give you the idea of the prompt, it's something like this:

"A producer wants to finance a suspense/action/horror film and must choose a concept A or B. Your job is to recommend A or B. Explain why your choice would make a better film. Include a general storyline." I chose A: The world is being overrun by self-propelled, self-directed machines - robots. They are fast, strong and violent. They reproduce by scavenging materials from the world around them and building more versions of themselves."

Here is my essay that is 100% original. DO NOT STEAL IT. Even though, I can totally see why you would want to - because it's awesome...and amazing. 


Think “Aliens” meets “I am Legend” meets “I-Robot.” That’s my pitch for a suspense/action/ terrifying horror film. Robots reproducing by scavenging materials, violently attacking everyday people, going to war against our human armies and eventually taking over the world, because after all, they don’t need sleep and food to keep them alive, only humans do.
            While a non-visual source of terror usually does instill more fear within the audience, we humans still have a great aversion and fear about nonhuman beings taking control over our world. We like to fantasize that aliens would ‘come in peace’ and robots would just be servants. But since the birth of the automaton, robots have been the source of inspiration for suspenseful films, novels and play’s, like Rossum’s Universal Robot’s.
            Although a virus infecting the digital network is really non-visual to the audience, it’s also an abstract image that would need to be represented in some visual way and that just wouldn’t appear as visually frightening in any way that an ultra-strong, vicious, unintelligent ‘mechanical beast’ would appear. This is primarily due to the fact that human fears are related to the unknown and to things that look like us, act like us, but would really prefer to kill off the human race instead of living within our world harmoniously.
            To really give the audience a jolt, a great move for such a film would be to take a rather pessimistic outlook on the situation. Humans love when humans conquer other worldly invaders (think ‘Marvel’s The Avenger’s’) and hate when humans appear to be the inferior race. This is precisely why we have more superhero action films than human’s are the losers films. So, the film would end with the entire human population massacred and heartless, fearless robots living all over Earth. That will surely have the audience leaving the theatre without warm fuzzies, and an intense fear toward beings that mimic some of our more negative qualities, physically and mentally. And it may be thought only subconsciously, but even the ruthless robots that dominate the film do share similarities, mentally, with that of psychologically disturbed human beings.
            By taking a wholly negative outlook at robots multiplying by scavenging, an act humans view as barbaric, and destroying humanity, a suspenseful horror film is born. Nothing is more terrifying and worse than seeing your own kind being destroyed.


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