{"id":8119,"date":"2020-05-31T19:03:04","date_gmt":"2020-05-31T19:03:04","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/mariamolinapeiro.com\/?page_id=8119"},"modified":"2020-11-20T17:08:31","modified_gmt":"2020-11-20T17:08:31","slug":"treatment-here-be-dragons","status":"publish","type":"page","link":"https:\/\/mariamolinapeiro.com\/?page_id=8119","title":{"rendered":"TREATMENT HERE BE DRAGONS"},"content":{"rendered":"<div  class=\"tatsu-Hk-AYJKWhI tatsu-section    tatsu-clearfix\" data-title=\"\"  data-headerscheme=\"background--dark\"><div class='tatsu-section-pad clearfix' data-padding='{\"d\":\"90px 0px 90px 0px\"}' data-padding-top='90px'><div class=\"tatsu-row-wrap  tatsu-wrap tatsu-row-one-col tatsu-row-has-one-cols tatsu-medium-gutter tatsu-reg-cols  tatsu-clearfix tatsu-BklRY1tZ28\" ><div  class=\"tatsu-row \" ><div  class=\"tatsu-column  tatsu-column-no-bg tatsu-one-col tatsu-column-image-none tatsu-column-effect-none  tatsu-S1CFJF-2U\" data-animation=\"fadeIn\"   data-parallax-speed=\"0\" style=\"\"><div class=\"tatsu-column-inner \" ><div class=\"tatsu-column-pad-wrap\"><div class=\"tatsu-column-pad\" ><div  class=\"tatsu-module tatsu-text-block-wrap tatsu-BytvvOB9D  \"><div class=\"tatsu-text-inner tatsu-align-center  clearfix\" data-animation=\"fadeIn\"  ><style>.tatsu-BytvvOB9D.tatsu-text-block-wrap .tatsu-text-inner{width: 100%;text-align: left;}.tatsu-BytvvOB9D.tatsu-text-block-wrap{margin: 0px 0px 0px 0px;}<\/style>\n<p>NARRATIVE STRUCTURE. DIAGRAM<\/p>\n<\/div><\/div><div  class=\"tatsu-single-image tatsu-module tatsu-image-lazyload tatsu-external-image tatsu-BJTEvOB9D  \" data-animation=\"fadeIn\"  ><div class=\"tatsu-single-image-inner \" style=\"\" ><div class = \"tatsu-single-image-padding-wrap\" style = \"\" ><\/div><img class = \"tatsu-gradient-border\" data-src = \"https:\/\/mariamolinapeiro.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/ESQUEMA-NARRATIVO.jpg\" alt =\" \"  src =\"data:image\/png;base64,iVBORw0KGgoAAAANSUhEUgAAAAEAAAABCAQAAAC1HAwCAAAAC0lEQVR42mNkYAAAAAYAAjCB0C8AAAAASUVORK5CYII=\"  \/><\/div><style>.tatsu-BJTEvOB9D .tatsu-single-image-inner{border-style: solid;max-width: 100%;}.tatsu-BJTEvOB9D.tatsu-single-image{transform: translate3d(0px,0px, 0);}<\/style><\/div><div  class=\"tatsu-module tatsu-text-block-wrap tatsu-H1mcJKW38  \"><div class=\"tatsu-text-inner tatsu-align-center  clearfix\" data-animation=\"fadeIn\"  ><style>.tatsu-H1mcJKW38.tatsu-text-block-wrap .tatsu-text-inner{width: 81%;text-align: left;}<\/style>\n<p>\u00a0<\/p>\n<p class=\"p1\" style=\"text-align: justify;\"><span class=\"s1\" style=\"font-size: 12pt;\">*This is an old version of the film treatment. I\u00b4m now working in a new one, but if your curiosity want to know more about the project, it can give you a better impression of the film as a whole.<\/span><\/p>\n<h3 class=\"p1\" style=\"text-align: justify;\"><span class=\"s1\" style=\"font-size: 24pt;\"><span style=\"font-size: 18pt;\">TREATMENT <\/span>\u00a0<\/span><\/h3>\n<p class=\"p1\" style=\"text-align: justify;\"><span class=\"s1\" style=\"font-size: 12pt;\">An AI remote robot scrutinises a red landscape that reminds of Mars. The built-in camera tries to focus, zooming in and out, violently changing the frame, scrutinising the landscape, just as Curiosity does on Mars. Its erratic movements seem like an effort to try to understand and recognise what it is seeing. Finally, it manages to fix its sight on something that has caught its attention, a puddle of red water. The soil shakes, the water trembles, blurring the mountains reflected on the puddle.<\/span><\/p>\n<p class=\"p1\" style=\"text-align: justify;\"><span class=\"s1\" style=\"font-size: 12pt;\">Fernando, an old man, searches for a station in the radio in his house, until he finds one in which a flamenco singer can be heard. He is a miner from R\u00edo Tinto, a historical mining area. He looks out through the windows towards the landscape. Far off an explosion can be heard, the window\u2019s glass shakes, but Fernando continues looking towards the landscape unfazed. He lies down on his sofa and slowly falls asleep. <\/span><\/p>\n<p class=\"p1\" style=\"text-align: justify;\"><span class=\"s1\" style=\"font-size: 12pt;\">In the darkness microscopic points of light emerge. They move timidly, like microorganisms seen through a microscope. Slowly we move closer to the points of light until their true nature is revealed: we are in an open air mine in the middle of the night. An alien-like atmosphere where man appears to be a mere extension of machines. The intermittent lights of the trucks go back and forth, moving the soil from one place to another, repeating an infinite cycle of loading and unloading. <\/span><span class=\"s1\" style=\"font-size: 12pt;\">The shadow of the excavator\u00b4s head projected over the soil, it seems like a dragon devouring the mountains.<span class=\"Apple-converted-space\">\u00a0<\/span><\/span><span class=\"s1\" style=\"font-size: 12pt;\">Suddenly we discover the profile of one of the mountains in the mine, illuminated by a full Moon, or is it the Earth? <\/span><\/p>\n<p class=\"p1\" style=\"text-align: justify;\"><span class=\"s1\" style=\"font-size: 12pt;\">In this dreamy atmosphere, another storyline unfolds. At night, men with headlights attached to their helmets extract stone samples and red water in test tubes. They look like miners but in fact they are astrobiologists that have arrived to R\u00edo Tinto attracted by its river, a unique body of red water whose ecosystem is considered analogous to Mars on Earth. Hands covered with gloves work in a laboratory, applying laser and fluorescent light with different waves lengths over rocks samples. They are studying the dark biosphere that lies in the underground strata of R\u00edo Tinto, thousands of years below.<\/span><\/p>\n<p class=\"p1\" style=\"text-align: justify;\"><span class=\"s1\" style=\"font-size: 12pt;\">In the background, we hear an astrobiologist tell the story of the first person who speculated about the existence of life deep below our feet, a Jesuit from the XV century called Atanasio Kircher. He explains how in his book <i>Mundus Subterraneus<\/i> Kircher is ahead of his time by developing the concept of \u2018Geocosmos\u2019 and conceiving Earth as a living being. Kircher elaborated a concept of Nature closer to how we understand it today: as an endless entanglements of circuits of which we are a part. Just as history is no longer conceived as linear but more like a circuit full of branches joining from many directions, we also start to see ourselves differently. More as multi-species beings that are part of time scales much more complex than the linear story we were told.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n<p class=\"p1\" style=\"text-align: justify;\"><span class=\"s1\" style=\"font-size: 12pt;\">At sunset, Fernando is having a stroll, accompanied by another old man, his friend Jes\u00fas. They arrive to a huge open air mine. We see them reduced to two tiny dots pointing to different directions in the middle of that wide landscape. In the background, we hear them talking. They seem to be trying to put together a mental and spatial reconstruction of a village. But what village? Where is it? Little by little we discover that the village they are talking about is buried there, below the mountains of mineral waste from the mine. They are the last two inhabitants of the historic old village of R\u00edo Tinto, a neuralgic centre of the Industrial Revolution.<\/span><\/p>\n<p class=\"p1\" style=\"text-align: justify;\"><span class=\"s1\" style=\"font-size: 12pt;\">Fernando and Jes\u00fas try to reconstruct the village with their imagination. They are clearly up to something but we don\u2019t know exactly what. The unbearable sound of the trucks unloading the mineral waste buries their conversation. We hear their conversation in waves, fragmented. Throughout their reconstruction, anecdotes emerge that timidly reveal the history of the old R\u00edo Tinto village, a history of ferocious colonial industrialisation, in which R\u00edo Tinto became yet another island of the British empire. They miss not just the village but also the landscape devoured by the mine. They miss specific hills from their childhood, where they used to play, stroll, or, like Jes\u00fas, hide to cry about the death of his father. <\/span><\/p>\n<p class=\"p1\" style=\"text-align: justify;\"><span class=\"s1\" style=\"font-size: 12pt;\">A drone flies above Fernando and Jesus through the mine, studying and mapping the area to compile the mine\u00b4s aerial data. The standard image from the drone alternates on and off with the topographic LIDAR image from the aerial survey. The drone begins to descend vertically, through the mine\u00b4s strata, where we start to travel in time through the mountains and historical strata of R\u00edo Tinto. It is a trip of great sensorial intensity, in which archived images of the historical town and its mines blend into the abstraction of the soil. The sounds of the machines in the mine are slowly distorted until they become reminiscent of a flamenco \u2018quej\u00edo\u2019 (scream).<\/span><\/p>\n<p class=\"p1\" style=\"text-align: justify;\"><span class=\"s1\" style=\"font-size: 12pt;\">After traveling through the historical strata of R\u00edo Tinto we discover we have gone back 5000 years in time. Ironically, only a kilometre and a half away from Jes\u00fas and Fernando, in the same open air mine, a team of archaeologists is digging up another village, a 5000-years old Roman and Tartessian village. In macro shots, ants march over Roman coins and Tartessian tools spread throughout the ground. We continue descending through the strata of the mine until we reach the R\u00edo Tinto\u2019s extremophiles that live deep below its surface, in the dark biosphere. Within the darkness we eventually discover that we are looking at a stone through a microscope. With each adjustment of the microscope, the mineral mutates closer to something organic. We only manage to see part of something that moves, it would seem some kind of living being. But we only recognise two strange alien-like eyes. <\/span><\/p>\n<p class=\"p1\" style=\"text-align: justify;\"><span class=\"s1\" style=\"font-size: 12pt;\">In the laboratory, an astrobiologist looks at a stone through the microscope. Behind him on the wall we see beautiful old illustrations of the interior of the Earth populated with monsters and dragons. They are illustrations from <i>Mundus Subterraneus<\/i>, Kirchner\u00b4s book. The astrobiologist continues talking about how Kircher, curiously, writes in his book about \u2018Panspermia\u2019, one of the hypotheses of the origin of life, which involves extremophiles. <\/span><\/p>\n<p class=\"p1\" style=\"text-align: justify;\"><span class=\"s1\" style=\"font-size: 12pt;\">In the same laboratory, other astrobiologists test the resistance of R\u00edo Tinto\u00b4s extremophiles to Martian conditions on a Mars simulator machine. The extremophiles are not just responsible for the red water of the R\u00edo Tinto river but also the mineral wealth of the area. One astrobiologist is researching how extremophiles could be used for space mining in asteroids. Another astrobiologist is researching the role of extremophiles in the colonisation of other planets, specifically in the process of Terraformation. <\/span><\/p>\n<p class=\"p1\" style=\"text-align: justify;\"><span class=\"s1\" style=\"font-size: 12pt;\">An astrobiologist pours a drop of red water from R\u00edo Tinto in a microscope. We see a liquid universe full of the extremophile fauna of R\u00edo Tinto that slowly turns into subaquatic images of the river. From inside the water we hear indiscernible voices from people that are at the shore of the river. A stick enters violently into the red water, making the water spiral. We discover a child playing with the water, spinning the yellow pigments of the sulphur over the red river with a stick. He is mesmerised seeing the spiral of colour over the river, it seems like a galaxy. <\/span><\/p>\n<p class=\"p1\" style=\"text-align: justify;\"><span class=\"s1\" style=\"font-size: 12pt;\">We then start a voyage through the alien river of R\u00edo Tinto that becomes a physical and mental experience, transporting the spectator to a state of flotation. A sensorial trip, as if we were carried by the river\u00b4s stream, observing its surroundings through its alien gaze. Daily scenes and myths from R\u00edo Tinto are reflected into its red water. The voyage begins in its birth, close to the mine, ending in the river\u2019s mouth, a lagoon where the Tartessos civilization believed lied the entrance to the underworld.<\/span><\/p>\n<p class=\"p1\" style=\"text-align: justify;\"><span class=\"s1\"><span style=\"font-size: 12pt;\">In the sunset, ships gets into the water. Behind them there is an imposing statue of Columbus pointing to the American lands and 1:1 replicas of the three ships in which Columbus departed to his first trip to the new world. Inside one of the ships we see a 1:1 replica of Columbus seated in front of a table looking to a map. It was from this same lagoon of the underworld that the Age of Discovery was born<\/span>.<\/span><\/p>\n<p class=\"p1\" style=\"text-align: justify;\"><span class=\"s1\" style=\"font-size: 12pt;\">A 3D animation campaign from Space X shows its Crew Dragon spaceship arriving on Mars. Autonomous robots drill the terrain to get the resources needed to build the foundations of the colony. Happy faces stroll through futuristic buildings and see the marvellous technology that will make this dream possible. Into the laboratory an astrobiologist is looking to the Space-X commercial on a screen computer. The commercial ends with the real images of the launching of the rocket Falcon 9 on 30th May 2020, that has put the first private spaceship into orbit, the Crew Dragon.<\/span><\/p>\n<p class=\"p1\" style=\"text-align: justify;\"><span class=\"s1\" style=\"font-size: 12pt;\">A hand lights the flame of a fire cracker. The rocket takes off until it explodes in the sky. It\u2019s the day of Santa Barbara (the miners\u2019 patron saint) in R\u00edo Tinto. The Virgin has been brought in front of the open-air mine to follow the tradition of explosions and firecrackers in her honour. Jes\u00fas and Fernando are among the villagers. The ritual ends with turning on the lights on the large Santa Barbara\u00b4s cross, a 10 meters high profile that shines on the mountain in front of the mine. Then we follow through the different surrounding mountains the peculiar topographic process R\u00edo Tinto has going through: from high mountains covered with flora and fauna, to sculpted mountains in the mine, until arriving to the dead anthropic mountains that remind of Mars.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n<p class=\"p1\" style=\"text-align: justify;\"><span class=\"s1\" style=\"font-size: 12pt;\">In the middle of these dead mountains, an astronaut roams. Soon we discover that he is one of the astrobiologists that is simulating Mars expeditions and testing autonomous space robots in R\u00edo Tinto. In the background, we hear an astrobiologist talking about the difficulty of recognising signs of life on other planets and how extremophiles remind us of the capacity of life to exist beyond the limits of the imaginable. What can we learn from them? Another astrobiologist struggles between the impulse to explore life on other planets and the need to protect that life. Hundreds of years ago, when Colombus\u2019 expedition arrived to the Americas, it killed multiple indigenous lifeforms through microbial contamination. What right do we have to interfere in the natural cycle of a planet?<\/span><\/p>\n<p class=\"p1\" style=\"text-align: justify;\"><span class=\"s1\" style=\"font-size: 12pt;\">From afar we see the astronaut-astrobiologist roaming. Suddenly, we discover that who is observing the scene is the gaze of the same remote robot we saw at the beginning of the film. Through its cameras we start exploring the terrain that has become a large Mars scale model. The scenery is one of man-made mountains, made with the mineral waste of the Industrial Revolution. Anthropic mountains that have buried entire villages until becoming the perfect context to simulate expeditions to Mars. A place that can actually be considered a living example of a process of Terraformation, but in reverse. A piece of Earth that has become Mars through man\u2019s direct intervention.<\/span><\/p>\n<p class=\"p1\" style=\"text-align: justify;\"><span class=\"s1\" style=\"font-size: 12pt;\">The explorer robot continues surveying the area. A tourist tour train pass very far away with a tour guide explaining the glorious industrial history of the area through a megaphone. The robot gaze continue exploring the red mountains surrounded by industrial ruins, sprinkled by rusty steam engines and trains. The explorer robot looks at the steam machines searching for signs of life, as if recognising itself in them.<\/span><\/p>\n<p class=\"p1\" style=\"text-align: justify;\"><span class=\"s1\" style=\"font-size: 12pt;\">Flamenco still sounds on the radio in the interior of Fernando\u2019s house. Topographic maps and old photos of houses and buildings from the old R\u00edo Tinto village pile up on his table. Fernando, after early retirement from the mine,\u00a0started to gather information, through photographs, maps and documents, to build a large-scale model of his childhood town. He wanted to make visible for his family and new generations what is buried today, just like a cadaver, below the waste mineral mountains in the mine.\u00a0At last, we understand why he was in that huge mine trying to mentally reconstruct his childhood village with his friend Jes\u00fas.<\/span><\/p>\n<p class=\"p1\" style=\"text-align: justify;\"><span class=\"s1\" style=\"font-size: 12pt;\">At sunset, Fernando goes out to his garden and picks up his binoculars to looks at the mines outside. Through the binoculars, we see the mine. Excavator and dum tracks come and go incessantly, extracting copper and rare-earth elements to fuel the technological revolution. They pour the remains of the mineral on the hills, burying Fernando\u00b4s childhood town even deeper below. The intense red of the sunset engulfs the entire scene, it would seem a mine on Mars. Suddenly, framed by the sunset light on the mountain, we see the silhouette of the remote robot relentlessly exploring.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n<p class=\"p1\" style=\"text-align: justify;\"><span class=\"s1\" style=\"font-size: 12pt;\">The trucks, pouring the remains of the minerals waste on the hills, create massive clouds of dust. We follow one of the clouds upwards until it vanishes in the sky. From above, we see a huge hole in the Earth, full of red water, a hole that would appear to have no end. The Flamenco singer continues to sing in the background, a long and deep \u2018quej\u00edo\u2019, until it becomes distorted into the industrial noise of the mine, an indiscernible and unbearable sound.<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div><\/div><div  class=\"tatsu-animated-link tatsu-animated-link-style4  tatsu-HkSZ8sZ2I tatsu-module tatsu-animated-link-align-none  \"><a class = \"tatsu-animated-link-inner \" href = \"https:\/\/mariamolinapeiro.com\/?page_id=6064\"  data-animation=\"fadeIn\"   aria-label = \"Come back to dossier\"><span class = \"tatsu-animated-link-text\"  >Come back to dossier<\/span><span class = \"tatsu-animated-link-arrow\"><svg xmlns=\"http:\/\/www.w3.org\/2000\/svg\" xmlns:xlink=\"http:\/\/www.w3.org\/1999\/xlink\" x=\"0px\" y=\"0px\" width=\"25px\" height=\"15px\" viewBox=\"0 0 30 18\" enable-background=\"new 0 0 30 18\" xml:space=\"preserve\">\n\t\t\t<path class=\"tatsu-svg-arrow-head\" d=\"M20.305,16.212c-0.407,0.409-0.407,1.071,0,1.479s1.068,0.408,1.476,0l7.914-7.952c0.408-0.409,0.408-1.071,0-1.481\n\t\t\t\tl-7.914-7.952c-0.407-0.409-1.068-0.409-1.476,0s-0.407,1.071,0,1.48l7.185,7.221L20.305,16.212z\"><\/path>\n\t\t\t<path class=\"tatsu-svg-arrow-bar\" fill-rule=\"evenodd\" clip-rule=\"evenodd\" d=\"M1,8h28.001c0.551,0,1,0.448,1,1c0,0.553-0.449,1-1,1H1c-0.553,0-1-0.447-1-1\n\t\t\t\tC0,8.448,0.447,8,1,8z\"><\/path>\n\t\t\t<\/svg><\/span><\/a><style>.tatsu-HkSZ8sZ2I .tatsu-animated-link-inner{color: rgba(1,33,252,1) ;}.tatsu-HkSZ8sZ2I .tatsu-animated-link-inner:hover{color: #2293D7 ;}.tatsu-HkSZ8sZ2I .tatsu-animated-link-arrow{color: rgba(0,15,255,1) ;}.tatsu-HkSZ8sZ2I .tatsu-animated-link-inner:hover .tatsu-animated-link-arrow{color: #2293D7 ;}<\/style><\/div><\/div><\/div><div class = \"tatsu-column-bg-image-wrap\"><div class = \"tatsu-column-bg-image\" ><\/div><\/div><\/div><style>.tatsu-row > .tatsu-S1CFJF-2U.tatsu-column{width: 100%;}.tatsu-S1CFJF-2U.tatsu-column > .tatsu-column-inner > .tatsu-column-overlay{mix-blend-mode: none;}.tatsu-S1CFJF-2U > .tatsu-column-inner > .tatsu-top-divider{z-index: 9999;}.tatsu-S1CFJF-2U > .tatsu-column-inner > .tatsu-bottom-divider{z-index: 9999;}.tatsu-S1CFJF-2U > .tatsu-column-inner > .tatsu-left-divider{z-index: 9999;}.tatsu-S1CFJF-2U > .tatsu-column-inner > .tatsu-right-divider{z-index: 9999;}.tatsu-S1CFJF-2U.tatsu-column{transform: translate3d(0px,0px, 0);}@media only screen and (max-width:1377px) {.tatsu-row > .tatsu-S1CFJF-2U.tatsu-column{width: 100%;}}@media only screen and (min-width:768px) and (max-width: 1024px) {.tatsu-row > .tatsu-S1CFJF-2U.tatsu-column{width: 100%;}}@media only screen and (max-width: 767px) {.tatsu-row > .tatsu-S1CFJF-2U.tatsu-column{width: 100%;}}<\/style><\/div><\/div><\/div><\/div><div class=\"tatsu-section-background-wrap\"><div class = \"tatsu-section-background\" ><\/div><\/div><style>.tatsu-Hk-AYJKWhI .tatsu-section-pad{padding: 90px 0px 90px 0px;}.tatsu-Hk-AYJKWhI > .tatsu-bottom-divider{z-index: 9999;}.tatsu-Hk-AYJKWhI > .tatsu-top-divider{z-index: 9999;}<\/style><\/div>\n<p><\/p>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p><a href=\"https:\/\/mariamolinapeiro.com\/?page_id=8119\" class=\"more-link style1-button\">Read More<\/a><\/p>","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"parent":0,"menu_order":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","template":"","meta":{"footnotes":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mariamolinapeiro.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/pages\/8119"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mariamolinapeiro.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/pages"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mariamolinapeiro.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/page"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mariamolinapeiro.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mariamolinapeiro.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=8119"}],"version-history":[{"count":33,"href":"https:\/\/mariamolinapeiro.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/pages\/8119\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":8640,"href":"https:\/\/mariamolinapeiro.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/pages\/8119\/revisions\/8640"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mariamolinapeiro.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=8119"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}