Month: November 2015

avrillives:

one of my favorite ideas I’ve ever had that I really just need to write is an alternate reality documentary entitled Doggone set in a world where on Tuesday, June 3, 2003, at 4:52:31.83 GMT, all domestic dogs ceased to exist

the documentary itself would be set around 30 years later, so that people who remember dogs are approaching being middle aged or older; basically, it’d just be a series of interviews with older people about their memories of dogs interspersed with interviews with younger people who grew up in a dogless world. there’d also be a variety of interviews with people whose lives and careers intersect heavily with the disappearance of the dogs: an expert on the environmental impact, a handful of conspiracy theorists (the government did it, aliens did it, dogs are a collective memory of something that never actually existed), a cable executive who made the decision to permanently buy the television rights to the film All Dogs Go to Heaven and broadcast it on a new channel nonstop for 16 years, a dog breeder, a religious leader, and a 24-year-old who has just begun working on a PhD in Dog Studies despite never having seen a dog in real life ever

despite the absurdity of the premise, this wouldn’t be a comedy at all. thematically it would mostly deal with the way our culture records information, and how the rise in digital photography and video recording has made it so that our records of dogs existing in the event of such a catastrophe (or any other similar event) would be fundamentally completely different than they would’ve been a decade or two decades ago. even the fact that the time of the event is known to a tenth of a second is because a huge number of different CCTV cameras caught the event, and even though their frame rates aren’t that precise, it was possible to extrapolate the precise time by looking at how many hundredths of a second off of the start of each second each 30th frame of a number of cameras that were synced to atomic clocks were. on the other hand, most regular people in this world who had dogs don’t typically have more than one or two photos of those dogs, and maybe a couple minutes of video

the film would probably end with a longer sequence about a conglomerate of dozens of researchers at various universities and private facilities who have been trying to recreate dogs through selective breeding of their closest genetic relatives who are still around. naturally, of course, the “dogs” are under 24/7 video surveillance, and all this video is permanently archived online free for anyone to access, along with hundreds of thousands of hours of recordings of actual dogs donated to the public domain after the event