glitch.com

The Glitch

Treatment by Greg Wessman

TAGLINE: The future of Virtual Reality is coming, and it's not pretty...

GENRE: Live Action, Sci-fi, Thriller

INTRO: Imagine you die violently as a test pilot during the early 1960's in an X-15 catastrophic crash. But, instead of going to heaven by "seeing the white light" at the end of some tunnel and meeting your dearly departed relatives, you suddenly awaken as if you've just had some sort of extremely lucid dream. You are then greeted by a number of your colleagues and friends casually gathered around you exclaiming, "Wasn't that just totally awesome?!" - Having intact memories of the experience, you shake it off and realize, that what you thought you were undergoing, and living your whole life as some exquisite and prolific character, was nothing more than an extremely realistic and completely fantastic totally immersive simulation. Like something from the movies "The Matrix", "Total Recall" or "Vanilla Sky".

THE PITCH: Computer gaming and immersive technology in the near future will enable you to experience anything life has to offer via a true immersive virtual reality. By purchasing a "scenario" you can plug-in, tune-out, and embark on a wild cyberdelic adventure that is as real as one can possibly imagine. You can virtually live through an entirety of a character's life over the span of a couple of weeks, retain the memories, and be whoever you've always wanted to be – a jet fighter pilot, a secret agent, a movie star, a rock star, leader of a country, an astronaut, a flamboyant lover, a superhero – anyone. This new totally immersive virtual reality experience becomes the ultimate drug of the future and is so highly-addictive, as being nearly impossible to tell what is just merely a "simulation" and what is "real life".

SYNOPSIS: You are the CEO and Founder of a tech company consisting of genius PhDs and top-tiered engineers who have just perfected a completely immersive virtual reality machine that makes "VR simulations" completely indistinguishable from "actual reality" and by throwing a switch in either of two positions, enables its users an option for a canned simulation, or a shear "true-to-life experience". With the switch thrown in the ‘normal' position, you are completely aware that you are experiencing an extremely-detailed virtual scenario – where you know "you are you", having total control of all your actions that can affect any aspect of the situation within the environment of an immersive VR video game. However, with the switch thrown in the ‘enhanced' position, you now have absolutely no idea that your experience will be a simulation, and you totally believe it is "real life", where you "actually are the character" living and acting-out within the scenario, having absolutely no recollection of your real life. Meanwhile, in this mode you have a bizarre déjà vu, and feel as though you have been there before. In actuality, you have, because in any typical video game, you play through the levels over-and-over-again until some adversary is defeated, or challenging puzzles are solved. This bizarre déjà vu is the "glitch" in the system's software, and ultimately the only possible clue you would ever have, to realize that this experience isn't real at all. That is, until it's fixed . . .

CONCEPT: This, "Inception" meets "eXistenZ", is a quasi-metafictional psychological techno-thriller that follows the history of Virtual Reality through – from what we are presently experiencing today with the latest of high-tech immersive VR headsets, 3D surround sound, and motion simulation – to that of a far-flung future where "just living normal daily life" is not that of what we know of today. As the main character and against your will, you are thrown into this "Slaughter House Five-esque" journey through a disorienting set of sequences, losing all sense of reality, past, present, and future. While only remembering some vague notion in your mind about a "glitch" that is somehow, somewhere, being fixed – you must grasp onto what's real, and ignore that which is not. Questioning the fabric of life itself, you are totally lost within a convoluted möbius plot of alternate realities of total mystery, intrigue and corporate espionage. Can you capture the truth? Are you the one actually fixing the glitch? And if successful, will you ever be able to completely get back to your own true reality?

SUMMARY: As either a feature film, or more appropriate, a "VR Short Film", my vision for this concept of the "The Glitch" is essentially: The main character being a well-known leader in the VR industry thirty-something years from now, like today's Magic Leap CEO or the Oculus VR company's founder. In this future, ‘Holodeck' technology is commonplace. Think a prequell to "Ready Player One". Quickly sliding through his company's history of immersive virtual reality as the back-story, we now find corporate espionage consuming the main character's company's newfound ability of having users become completely unaware and possibly losing total grip of their own true existence, for a "store-bought" virtual reality scenario. After hiding the new technology within a scenario, our main character is pursued by his arch-rival, purposely thrown into a Quantum Leap like situation where everything is at stake; his project, company, the empire he built, his marriage to his true love, his family, faith, and ultimately – his life.

U.S Copyright Reg. No: Pau 3-862-944 | WGAW Reg. No: 1898875

To download a printable copy, click here: TheGlitch-Treatment.pdf

For inquiries, click here: GregWessman@Undisclosed.Enterprises