Television
Chronolog
(US market, 1 hour sci-fi detective procedural)
Full pilot script
For the first time in the history of Forensic Chronology--a time traveling cold case major crime unit with UN oversight--two of its investigators are inserted into the timeline before the crime itself.
Average Dad
Adam is a man who wishes to grow into the role of responsible, attentive father, devoted employee, and regular utiliser of confident eye contact.
He hopes to find a new career after a long bout of unemployment, mend bridges with his frosty mother in law, and regain the respect of his wife, who has taken on the sole burden of supporting the family with full time work.
At least, he hopes to want those things very soon.
He had kind of just assumed the pieces would fall into place once the baby was present. That instinct people talk about. It should kick in, he reasoned, at least by the time the second one arrived.
But subtle are the motivational tendrils that bind Adam—the best mate still living with his parents and siblings at 30, a very comforting weed habit, with harder substances always at arm’s reach; no real career prospects or willingness to engage, and the meta awareness that he can skate by in life doing just enough, which felt at first like freedom, but increasingly is its own kind of purgatory.
Adam’s enthusiasm and attention are poured into a creative side project that may help him begin to remedy the situation long term, but he has the foreboding sense of his emotional and financial runway evaporating, with no safety net or backup plan, and a forced dissonance necessary to tune it all out—ever present, crushing in at the edges of his once blissful existence.
Dick Moove: Detective At Law
Dick Moove: Detective At Law is a Melbourne-based private detective who specialises in wealthy cheating spouses, thanks to a long run of referrals, after falling ass backwards into it the first time while simply trying to film his neighbours having some intercourse.
His dearth of any other detective experience and lack of a detection license is offset by finely-tuned instincts—a natural tendency toward voyeurism, and an engrained obsession with sniffing out the places and scenarios where any kind of sexual activity may be likely to occur.
Employment
When four housemates are visited by Nutz, an oracle who can prognosticate on just about any combination of hallucinogens, their world is turned upside down!
Not literally of course. That would be crazy. This is a very small scale production, and it wouldn't fit a lot of the scripts, I would guess that most people would just always be talking about the world being upside down, a lot of the jokes wouldn't land.
The Substrate
Pilot script
A software engineer specialising in VR user experience is hired to debug design elements in a virtual reality environment known as the Substrate.
The Substrate is accessible by tuning to the level of consciousness between theta and gamma, attained by stimulating both sides of the mind magnetically to resonate with each frequency, creating a lucid dream like state.
The Substrate itself is a shared virtual environment built by programmers, housed on "quantum cloud" servers, populated with developers, plugged in beta testers and AI. Visually, its scenery and inhabitants range from Fight Club to Tron. The Substrate world is identified by its varying styles of rotoscope animation, like a strange dream, the effect of digital data being reproduced and rendered via the subconscious.
Because the Substrate has not yet gone live, its maps (some built to ape real world locations while others are green screen scifi/fantasy worlds) are mostly empty, giving the entire world an abandoned, too quiet feel.
In creating the Substrate, its designers have begun to weave together an internet of thought, where human and AI minds can interact, on servers spliced into the quantum fabric of spacetime. As he explores this world, the engineer begins to suspect that the mental dimension being populated by this new digital infrastructure may have existed prior to the Substrate, and appears to be occupied by another form of mind, not human or AI.
Voyeur
A guy is at first perturbed, then enthralled by a newfound ability to see though things.
Epoch
On the verge of graduating with his engineering degree, a young man is called back to his small mountain town by his father, the head of a world first scientific project to drill deep into the Earth using a vertical network of natural caverns.
While flying in, he sees a large explosion, originating from the drill site. On arrival he and the pilot find most of the town decimated, encountering pockets of citizens who tell them that something came out of the hole before the explosion.
Venturing into the crater, they encounter beings who tell the pair that they originate from a civilisation with a claim on the Earth that predates mankind’s.
They warn them to leave, seal up the hole, and tell others never to return.