Help with the next toki pona movie

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Delphij
Posts: 27
Joined: Thu Dec 08, 2011 4:59 pm
Location: ma Wensa (ma Lowasi)

Help with the next toki pona movie

Post by Delphij »

For half a year I have been wanting to make a new Toki Pona movie, but this time I want to make a good one, one with a manuscript that takes more than 10 minutes to write. I have been thinking about a lot of different stories, but I never really feel like I have came up with the ultimate idea.
I thought I could maybe ask you guys for some help – after all, you are the target audience.
Here are some of my suggestions. If something seems interesting and you would like to watch it as a finished product, please let me know. If not, I'll just have to keep thinking until I come up with something better. I imagine a 5-15 minutes long movie. The shorter, the faster we can make it and the better quality it will have (and you can squeeze in a lot of story tightly in a movie without making it hard to watch). Erhm yeah:


The battle between Lojbanistan and Tokiponia (Sapir-whorf hypothesis propaganda)

The tokiponians once lived in peace in their country, but then the lojbananas came and colonized their country. Their customs and language were taken from them and they all had to learn lojban.
Now the resistance has grown and something happens and more stuff happens.
The leader of the tokiponians stand in front of the lojbanic leaders. Before he kills them they have a debate, and the tokiponian soon realises that they would not have been able to plan this plot in their vague mother's tongue and that the colonialism might have been for the good in some aspects. He then argues that they should at least have their customs and personal freedom back, and that tokiponia should be a ceremonial language. They agree and they all live happily ever after, but the resistance group think their leader has betrayed them and they kill him/her in a super-epic dramatic ending scene as he walks out of the lojbo embassy.

pona: It's a little uncommon story.
pona: It's a movie about language, that most of us watching the movie have in common.
pona: It will be both a lojban and toki pona movie :D LET'S UNITE AS FRIENDS!
ike: I think it gives a pro-colonialism and almost Nazi impression.
ike: It might be hard to film all this, it will require more than two actors and that's pakala annoying.


Yet another escape from society movie (Misanthropy and nihilism)

Some dude has been dumped and is now really pissed off. He hates society, people, the world and most of all he hates himself. He leaves it all behind him and flees to the forest to live a life as a misanthropic eremite. Here we follow him and get to know why everything in the world is totally worthless and hear about his hate towards everything.
Then probably some stuff happens and he most likely dies in the end (I don't know if I have survived in any movie actually).

pona: It's easy to make. Requires few actors...
pona: We already have experience of this type of stories, but this time we might just make it decent and actually express some thoughts.
ike: We have done this three times before. (once in Swedish)
ike: It's weird.


The quest to kill God (All thoughts about life I have ever thought hidden in a weird story)

Exla the necrophiliac witch and Aron the panties-thief meet each-other by coincidence. They share the belief that the world is wrong and that God is evil, so they set out to kill Her. Somehow they get their hands on the dice of chaos, which is the only thing in this world connected to the parallel universe were true chaos exists. When they use this dice to plan their path it is impossible for the almost all-knowing gods to predict what they are going to do. They trick the god of death who gets really upset when they refuse to die, and he/she reports to the highest God who decides to investigate this further.
They find each-other and Exla and Aron tell about their plan to kill her. She thinks they are spoiled and stupid brats and involves Satan. Now have God and Satan united their forces in order to kill them two, but they being killed instead. In the end Aron and Exla does not know what to do now, but they agree that this has been the most happiest time of their lives as they have at least had a goal in life, so they break the dice and enter the world of chaos to destroy whatever hierarchy they can find in there.

pona: I have been wanting to do this movie for ages. It's my favourite movie concept and involves a lot of themes and thoughts I want to express.
pona: It's a little different than what you usually see.
ike: It'll be a pure HELL translating this to easy-parsable Toki Pona.
ike: I'm not sure if you like this kind of stories and think it's just wicked and scary shit. I don't want to make a movie that you think gives toki pona a bad name or something.
ike: It will take some time to film this and it will be a pretty big project.

A regular morning (Just everyday thoughts

We follow a dude in his morning process and hear all he is thinking in the meantime.

He thinks about some stuff I have not came up with yet as he puts some bread in the toaster. He soon stops think and says:
“PAKALA! PAN MI! “
The bread is burnt and black, just as his soul. Even if you scrape away the outer layer it's still....disgusting on the inside.
He mournfully eats his bread.
Suddenly he sees something outside the window and cries out:
“A! meli pona “
He looks at a girl going out with her dog through his telescope.
“mi wile sona e ni: ona li pona ala pona lukin? Tenpo ala la ona li lukin tawa ni”
She turns around and he immediately hides.
He writes down the time he saw her in a little book. He thinks she's early to-day.
And some more stuff like this happens.

Pona: It is really easy to film this. Requires 2-3 actors.
Pona: I think it can be quite funny actually.
Pona: It's so stupid.
Ike: Maybe it's not the best for the toki pona community?
Ike: It's weird.

The thief (Morals and hope for the humanity)

There's a man who is traveling around the country. He goes to a farmer and offers him a cheap [insert some nice tool for farming here, a shovel?], but he tells him that it is stolen from another man far away. The farmer is suspicious at first, but buys it even though it's someone other's property.
The man then sneaks in to is farm at night and steals some other item from the farmer. He then continues his journey, and will continue to steal from those who lack enough moral not to buy a stolen item from this thief until one day he can't find anyone blah alb.
Then one day he gets caught by the city-guards. They want to kill him, but he explains what he is doing and that some of the other guards/other respect person has bought stuff from him. Then they debate a little, the buyer denies blah blah. I have not yet decided if he gets killed or if they let him go.

pona: It's a cool concept I think.
Pona: It might be hard to translate “theft”.
Ike: It's a little hard to film maybe.


I have some more ideas, but it takes some time to write them all down xD
So is anything usable at all? Should I keep thinking? Do you have any suggestions yourselves?
Are my ideas too silly? Stupid? Is it too controversial to kill god? :(
Maybe you don't want no more movies and want me to focus on music instead?


By the way, how is it with a Toki Pona con-world? Has anyone been working on one? It would be cool to have something “semi-official” (like sitelen suwi) to play with in the movie. I might just make something up myself, but I do not want the community to be dissatisfied with my opinions xD
I imagine sitelen suwi as the official script, minimalism and optimism as the philosophy (I might throw in some daoism and setianism) and some customs. I think they have two or four holidays (minimalism), one for each season/half-year.
Kuti
Posts: 358
Joined: Sun Feb 28, 2010 3:48 pm

Re: Help with the next toki pona movie

Post by Kuti »

There are interesting ideas. If you need help for the text, don't hesitate to ask.
I loved your previous movies :P
janPo
Posts: 1
Joined: Sat Jul 13, 2013 5:56 am

Re: Help with the next toki pona movie

Post by janPo »

If it's workable for you, you can use the pilot episode of a kid's show I wrote a while ago: https://docs.google.com/document/pub?id ... b6uAB8tL2Y

It's in three acts, each intended to run for about 10 minutes.

It's licenced under Creative Commons, so you can pretty much do what you want with it :-)
janKipo
Posts: 3064
Joined: Fri Oct 09, 2009 2:20 pm

Re: Help with the next toki pona movie

Post by janKipo »

Well, the ones so far don't suck, even if they need work. As for the ideas, too many of them are ideas, not really plots but philosophical povs on which to build a story. As they used to say in Hollywood, "If you want to send a message, call Western Union" (it was a long time ago). Get an action plot: backstory, build up (conflict), development, climax and denouement. Then you can build in angst and nihilism and whatever else you fancy by the way.
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janAetherStar
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Re: Help with the next toki pona movie

Post by janAetherStar »

Remember to post here and tell us all when you're done! :D
Those are some pretty good plot ideas!
Here's another small one:
Some people (speaking who knows what language) get shipwrecked on an island (or someplace - to be honest I don't know where you are or how you'd film a shipwreck, but just some form of people-get-stranded-somewhere-somehow). They all speak foreign languages, but there's a tribe on the island who do most of the speaking (or like 50% of it) in - yay, hooray - toki pona! It's definitely not a full idea. If you use editing software of some sort, you could make some sort of an obelisk that zaps lightning into the sky and some form of chaos on the island, some plot, i don't know... It's all just coming to me and is very, VERY unfinished.
pona: display toki pona as a universal kind of easy language
ike: not full plot
ike: idk how you'd be able to demonstrate some kind of a shipwreck filming-wise, or a plane crash, unless you take a gif or something from a movie.
ike: may be hard to film and get actors

Actually yeah, maybe it's not such a good idea for that reason...
Oh well. Good luck with the idea you choose!
ale li pona. :)
sina o sona e ni.
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