If We Had Known The Power of a Video…

Saturday 9/15/07

Your response to our free video going online has been beyond our wildest dreams — and has formed a turning point in more ways than one!

 

TELL ME AGAIN WHY WE WAITED SO LONG TO DO THIS? 

Honestly… as you can see from reading various threads in our discussion forum, the response to our three-plus-hour, four-part video seminar with Project Camelot has been stunning. If we had known what a huge response this would generate, we would have done one LONG ago.  

 

Many private emails have come in and they all have said similar things. The video has become the de-facto entrance point for newbies into this website’s content. If you’ve been trying to turn on your friends to this wild, far-reaching material, the results are in… send ’em a link to the video and leave it at that.

THE MOMENTUM IS BUILDING

Although my words are often the result of a team effort, to varying degrees of efficiency and clarity, I’m going to stay in first-person perspective for the rest of this piece.  

For people who have never been exposed to “this stuff” before, the “big picture” can be quite a difficult pill to swallow.

When I met Billy Blake two and a half years ago, he had recently seen “What the Bleep Do We Know?” . Like many others, it opened him up to a whole new concept of reality that he had never been exposed to before. Then, under very synchronous circumstances, he ended up attending one of my conferences in LA.

I had no idea we’d end up working on a film together — which will make a huge contribution to breaking the incredible mainstream-media shutdown of very valuable scientific research that seems ongoing. Once Billy saw me speak, he truly ‘got’ that Bleep was like a kindergarten class compared to what I’d discovered about how the Universe really works.

You see, less than two weeks earlier, I finished production on the Science of Peace series, and all the concepts we’d just woven into a beautiful piece of art and music were very fresh in my mind. The talk Billy heard that night was just a condensed version of the amazing range of data featured in the Science of Peace.

 

 

Late last week we hit perhaps the most important milestone of our entire process — a finished first draft of the fifth incarnation of CONVERGENCE, which is undoubtedly much closer to what will actually make it on screen than our prior versions have been.

[Rewrites occur at every stage of the process, even into the editing room after it’s been shot — so you never fully know what you have until it hits the public.]

Each version has had charm and appeal, and any of them would have made a great film — the ‘problem’ has more to do with how the industry is structured.

“Bleep” completely subverted all the normal firewalls built into the industry — privately financed by one individual and produced by two others, only one of whom had a background in film as a cinematographer. It was rife with problems, from the ‘industry’ perspective, guaranteeing it would never reach true mainstream levels of visibility — but also had a quirky charm. 

The information was by no means new — as I’ve said before, most of it was straight out of Gary Zukav’s 1978 tome “The Dancing Wu-Li Masters” — but it still opened people up to concepts that are being discussed in scientific circles that the ‘mainstream’ usually never hears about.

 

IT’S ALL COMING TOGETHER 

In our own case, Billy’s background — the inheritor of his own father and grandfather’s lifetime legacies in film, attending NYU Film School while Scorsese was moving through as the ‘star’ student — insured we would never fall into the trap of a privately-financed film produced outside the shared collective wisdom of Hollywood.

We certainly do not want to adhere to all the conventions — the film we’re trying to do cannot really be pinned to any one specific genre currently out there — but neither do we want to completely reinvent the wheel. If it works, use it.

The key has always been to implement this highly fascinating and complex body of scientific material I’ve put together into a story that is equally as engaging and appealing.

We’ve also designed it in such a way that there are at least three films that build upon each other in terms of their data — but the information itself is so comprehensive it would be total overload to try to cram it all into one film.

Balancing all these factors into a script that “works” for most people is no small feat — and the process of storytelling is actually much more non-linear than the assembly of the scientific data had been.

Personally I would say screenwriting is the most challenging task I’ve ever worked on — assembling vast, complex scientific puzzles together actually seems easier to me by comparison — but thanks to the vast array of ‘readers’ and talent who can feed you new ideas and suggestions, you always have second opinions and new creative blood.

Screenwriting has an enormously complex set of structural guidelines and principles, yet it can be learned by anyone. I’ve now worked through all the most respected teaching tools out there and taken detailed, copious notes.

Learning all its intricacies is one thing — doing it well is something entirely different. A mysterious alchemy needs to occur between script and reader, and if it’s not there then you have nothing.

 

POSITIVE VIBES — KEEP ‘EM COMING!

Though I’ve completed my first stab at manifesting a full script since I assimilated all this new information, I’m already in the process of rethinking substantial segments of it based on initial feedback — which is also from my own Higher Self as well as from our readers.

Apparently I’ve been through such intense initiation experiences in my life that I made some of the hero’s trials a little TOO disturbing for the average person — not in a gratuitous violence sense, but in the psychological sense.

I’ve known real horror, and it doesn’t involve scary monsters or gunfights. My Higher Self was the one to weigh in on that point. This is why you spend so much time crafting the story before you ever commit to a finished script. 

As a result, one major sequence in the latter half of the second act — and a very substantial plot point — will probably be held off until the second film in the series, and it will then undergo modification.

 

EXPOSITION IS NOT THE DEVIL 

Though we’re not shy about putting information into the film, I packed it SO densely in my first hand-crafted version that there was little room left to build the deeper intricacies of character and story that readers expect to see in a drama.

Once I compile these new ideas to the point of my next rewrite, the process is still not going to be over. The way things are looking now, we will probably hire an established professional writer at that point.

The problem is that we are trying to make a ‘hybrid’ film that breaks some of the rules of Hollywood, which no one dares call a ‘formula’.

Most films you see have very little ‘exposition’ —  i.e. the information that is conveyed in lines of dialogue and / or flashbacks and cut-aways — and all the industry hotshots and screenwriting books seem to hiss at it as if they’d just touched the handle of a scalding-hot cast-iron skillet.

Case in point, one of many: Deja Vu with Denzel Washington. The government is using their favorite new toy — a time machine that can only look backwards for a fixed interval — in order to try to stop an atrocity that we witness at the very beginning of the film.

 

 

One or two times, one of the characters mutters something about the device creating an Einstein-Rosen bridge. The ‘explanations’ of this nature are always extremely short, so as not to interfere with the “gun and run” parts of the film, which often take up a majority of the screen time.  

In our case, we are trying to make friends with exposition. One reader said it felt like he was getting a ‘science lecture’ in the film — but we believe we CAN make an entertaining drama with teaching points in it that exceed brief sniper-shots of data, apologetically packed into a few stray lines of dialogue.

Your response to my video is proof that exposition is not the Devil. The key is to present the science in such a fascinating way that it is not only highly welcomed by the time you hear it, but it doesn’t feel like a lecture at all. I chose a more cerebral data point to open with, and in the next rewrite it will be much more organic.

The material itself is so fascinating that it becomes a character in the film, driving the plot forward — much in the way that any musical you will ever see, including the recent award-winner ‘Dreamgirls,’ is constantly looking for new ways to cram musical numbers into the film.

This means your surrounding scenes have to be all the more lean and efficient — getting right to the heart of the character drama and interaction — but it certainly is not impossible. The same push to get music out in a musical is going to get science out in our ‘Scientifical’! 

 

BREAKING NEW GROUND 

So, we’ve reached a turning point in our understanding of what we’re doing. Many films have broken new ground, only to have those innovations become a new part of the lexicon… AFTER it proved to work.

It takes a very special personality to be able to submit your creative process to such intense, undying scrutiny — where something you think is great ends up getting torn to shreds. However, the more you do this, the better it gets.

Nonetheless, just with what we already have, several readers have looked at it so far, and for all but one of them, the euphemisms have included “terrific,” “fantastic,” “amazing,” “groundbreaking,” “intriguing,” et cetera.

So, naturally, we take the most negative feedback and find ways to completely integrate those stumbling blocks until the film is as perfect as we could ever hope for — without compromising our ideals or integrity.

 

WHAT A SYNCHRONICITY! 

I was at the computer, writing, for 18 hours a day, three days in a row, in order to make the deadline I had chosen last week. The preceding 2-3 weeks hadn’t been much better. 

That was just the tail end of a seemingly unending, often frenetic dash to assimilate the basics of screenwriting, and transform our script, that has been going on non-stop since mid-April.

I was extremely relieved that I got it done on time, even though I damn near killed myself and crucified my back doing it.

Billy got up at 5:30 that Wednesday morning… very excited to check the delivery room that his Inbox had become.

The first email was from me, with the new script attached. The last 30 pages had literally been written in one 18-hour period.

The second email was a spontaneous, unprovoked letter from our largest investor to date — TRIPLING his financial commitment to our film!

This investor knew absolutely nothing about the status of the script or how close it was to being finished. The synchronicity was nothing short of staggering — and since Billy is still a skeptic and somewhat “synchronicity challenged,” a manifestation like this was breathtaking.

It was a huge gesture from the Universe showing that we’re doing the right thing, and my outrageous efforts are very well appreciated. This also makes it very much easier to finish out the remainder of our fundraising process — as once you hit certain critical watermarks, other investors realize that where there’s smoke, there’s fire.

 

CONSCIOUSNESS RESEARCH — MANY BREAKTHROUGHS

Consciousness research has made huge strides here in the West — and yet down to the very last man and woman, there seems to be a complete disconnect in these circles with the pioneering discoveries coming out of Russia. That combination alone — East and West — is an extremely powerful one that has completely slipped under the radar of researchers in both camps.

Furthermore, science has ignored the ancient wisdom we’ve inherited from a variety of mystical, spiritual and religious traditions. Again, for the modern skeptic, these events and teachings are either seen as utterly fraudulent or occurring in some parallel netherworld divorced from science and rational thought.

There are so many holographic parallels between what Roman civilization was like prior to the arrival of Jesus and where we are now — with a similar “Messianic return” now involving many millions of people waking up to their Divine potential — that I find it amazing more people don’t talk about it.

 

 

Other than motorized transportation and a few gadgets, we really do have a surprisingly large number of elements in common with that period of time. And yet, a spiritual event that swept through an entire civilization is now increasingly being seen as mythical, metaphorical and archetypal — and / or perverted into the most outrageous excuses for warfare and atrocities. 

The events from Rome actually WERE mythical, metaphorical and archetypal — but you have to keep in mind that our Universe works that way. Myths and archetypes are living templates of information that certainly interface with our dreaming reality — that much is quite clear as soon as you make an earnest study of dreams.

Now, as we move through this mass awakening, the meta-realities of the ‘paranormal’ are increasingly becoming ‘normal’ events in the lives of people who never expected or prepared for such things to happen to them before.

It’s not like drinking a whole bunch of hard liquor and suddenly going from feeling “normal” to being reeling, staggering drunk. The change in consciousness is a subtle one, and most people are so hardened and cynical about their lives here that they consciously and deliberately ignore what is right in front of them.

 

NEW INFORMATION ‘DOWNLOADED’ AFTER DOING THE WRITE 

The breakthroughs I’ve made AFTER finishing my own first draft are revolutionary in their own right. Just when I think I’ve found the ultimate way to use the science to tell a story about who we are, I have yet another realization that makes the case even more profound.

The screenwriting form forces you to get really cunning and efficient, because there simply is not time to say the things you want to say. If you want to make a point, the real art is in how to do it in as few words and concepts as possible.  

My latest discoveries are among the most fantastic thus far, in terms of how they integrate everything we’ve been trying to get the film to say. I’m actually very excited about it, and at this point it only exists in written notes — but before long, the script will incorporate these changes.

Now that I’ve put this together, it’s having a stunning effect on how I’m thinking and moving through my day. The message has always been there in the readings, but I never really could explain it or argue it scientifically like this before. Once I proved it to myself, I was put ‘over the top,’ and it really changed how I see things. 

The important part is that we’re having fun, building momentum and working towards a noble goal… finding the single best way to break through the outrageous mass-media denial of our true nature, and teach people something about themselves so astonishing that the film becomes an incredible tool for self-transformation. 

And with that, back to the process! Thanks again for your support. I have not taken any fees from our production budget this year, despite all the work I’m doing on the script. Plus, the laws say you can’t touch the larger amounts — called Stage 2 and Stage 3 funding — until you lock in the whole budget.

As a result, I am entirely dependent upon your orders to keep the train a’ rolling until we reach our fundraising goals. Thankfully it’s been just enough — and I mean JUST enough — to keep from falling off. It’s a true testament to the power of trust.

If you are relatively new to the site, poke around in “Articles & Books – Free” [I apologize for how under-whelming it looks, considering that it’s the focal point of everything I ever wrote before this year] and the archives of “David’s Blog.” There is a HUGE amount of information ready to dig up there!