So, for a few years now, I’ve had this video series idea in mind which requires me to do a kind of mock review of movies about the future. Without getting too detailed, a critical part of the premise is to publish the video in the same year, or even on the same date, the movie or show is supposed to take place in.
So, for example, SeaQest DSV takes place in 2018. For my premise to work, I would have needed to publish that video back in 2018. Last year I could have made a video about Soylent Green, since that movie takes place in 2022. You get the idea.
At one point, I had this huge list, as you can see.
But the time to make those movies got away from from me. And I’m only getting to this premise now. The ironic problem is…I can’t find anything that takes place in 2023.
Like, we do have stuff that came out recently, like Avengers: Endgame and all the MCU stuff that follows. The Purge: Anarchy also takes place in 2023. But these films are too recent to work with my overall premise. A big part of the fun of my idea is using older films and their crazy (or not so crazy) depictions of the year we’re actually in.
So, I’d love to get started on this this year and not have to wait until 2024 to do Highlander II: The Quickening, but I have had no luck finding anything. I was wondering if anyone could remember any older films (and yes, if they’re terrible, that is a HUGE plus), that depicts 2023 that they can remember. If so, I will be your friend until the memory loss kicks in.
I think we’re still in the throes of Long 2020, so anything of the past three years should be fine.
And perhaps there are also films that don’t set a specific date but are in the general 2020s, though I think narrow generalities are more for films set in the past (such as A Christmas Story which takes place in a kind of 1940s but the details don’t quite add up - which is fine for that movie because it’s an older man reminiscing about his childhood).
Fun idea, maybe just do a few movies set in the 2020’s in general to start. Maybe start with SeaQuest and find stuff set in 2018 onwards?
Sometimes if you look up old trailers, you’ll find some cheesy specific proclamations like “67 years into our future!” on stuff.
I bet if it a fun video, probably you’ll get reccommendations of movies you might never thought of to look at.
Either way you go about it, sounds like a fun idea.
Perhaps your review show itself is from the future!
So you can do Zardoz and say things like “wow they really thought we’d still be using floating giant head technology in this year of 2293. Joke’s on them, as we’ve been using nano processors to allow for floating medium-sized heads for nearly 30 years now!”
I didn’t want to put the full premise in the initial post to avoid padding it out. But it’s basically, this:
They’re going to be 1930’s style newsreels. I’ll be doing the old style Transatlantic accent as a voice over, and I’ll cover the events of the movie as if they actually happened just recently.
So far, I’ve got almost all the assets in place. Found the right music. Figured out how to make even HD video look old and damaged. Next I’m working on a title card and experiment with making the audio sound old.
So that’s why the stuff happening in the video works better if it looks like I’m reporting on something recent. It’s the meta of it all.
For old sounding audio I think you’ll want to EQ out the low and high ends and just keep the middle. Or maybe it’s knock out the middle and keep the ends. I’m not in front of audio software right now so I can’t run a test for you.
Proper old audio is also a bit distorted (so you could up the volume to the point of clipping then bring it down again), but there’s a point where realism meets annoyance so you might let that go. Though a trick I have used when I had a badly distorted audio file was to EQ the hell out of it to get something nice and clear (but it loses most all of the body), then mixing in the original distorted audio much more quietly to get the body back but not be painful to listen to. I suppose you can do sometime similar on purpose. So have your regular audio, slam up the volume to really distort it, then mix that distortion in quietly under your good audio to give a little flavor of distortion.
In the olden days, for my music. I’d use the Radio 1 filter on my voice and became so enamored of it that I used it all the time, as backing, on instruments, or even as the primary vox.
I think, at first, I tried several tricks of the trade, but radio 1 made it easy peasy. But I don’t know, it’s been a while since I was doing the music thing, is anyone still using that these days, or has it been replaced?
And this sounds like a fun project. Good luck with it.
Oh yeah. I remember Surrogates. I never did get around to seeing that.
I did manage to find this movie called “Recon 2023: The Gauda Prime Conspiracy”, which is apparently the third in a franchise. It appears to be multiple levels of “huh?”
Did a test audio today using a little bit of some tutorials I found, and some ideas of my own. I think it sounds pretty authentic. Just have to train my voice to that transatlantic sounds a little bit more. Ran it by a friend of mine, and he says it’s peaking too much.
