The First Week of Training

The Setting

NSA training center, 4 years before the crew left for the ISS

The crew meet for the first time with two exceptions, Jora and Elliot. They both are more likely to be late additions to the mission. Jora due to political pressure from Russia to install certain secret pieces of equipment. Elliot as a paying tourist will not go through the same length of training.

Individually each of the crew members have been informed that they are going to space 1 or 2 years prior to this meeting. All their preparation to date has been individual.

The crew is meeting for the first week of their training for their mission. Training typically takes between 3 and 5 years. 4 years has been chosen as this mission will have an added complication, a yet to be named tourist. Each crew member will be 4 years younger than in Chapter 1 and full of ambition and excitement.

A typical mission first week would cover the following subjects:

• Introductions and icebreakers
• Mission overview and Expectations
• Training schedule and logistics
• Team building
• Medical and Psychological screening
• Open discussion and Feedback
• Setting Goals and establishing team norms

The Content of the Co-create

The co-create would be a group of writers exploring the inner thoughts of each of the astronauts at the end of each day, for the first week. One writer per astronaut. Each writer would create a diary entry for their crew member (individually, not through collaboration as this is the inner thoughts of the crew member) describing their day. Each diary entry would be 200 words long. The writers would explore some of the following (but not limited to) types of events and emotions:

• What happened,
• What went well
• Where did they fall short
• What personal struggles impacted their performance and progression
• Any doubts and concerns.
• Any feelings about the other members of the crew.
• Any change to hopes and ambitions

The focus of the co-create would be on their character’s reaction to the day.

The Structure of the Week

A Senior Trainer from NASA would act as narrator and would provide the structure to the week. The narrator would briefly describe the events of the day as a note to NASA. That note would describe the exercise that the group went through each day (from the list of activities above). The narrator would provide brief details of any conflict or incidents that may have happened each day.

The daily diary entry from each Astronaut would be something personal that is not shared with NASA or other crew members. Totally secret, however required by NASA as part of their training. It is NASA’s way to get the crew to reflect on their training and their personal reactions to the training. It gives the audience a chance to understand the mind of the new astronaut.

The Co-creates

There would be co-creators for:

• Alma
• Grace
• Marcus
• Grisha
• Az
• The narrator (this may be written by the team to control direction if preferred)

There may also be a co-create for the artwork for each Astronaut, 4 years younger than in Chapter 1.

Each actor would voice the character that they are playing. A voice actor co-create would be available for the NASA Senior Trainer.

The Production

In total the co-creates will be over 5,000 words so the Flashback is likely too long for a single release. The Flashback could be released over a week in real time, one new diary entry per crew member per day. 200 words from each character will take roughly 1 minute 15 seconds to 1 minute 30 seconds. 5 Astronauts and the Trainer will make each day’s release between 7 minutes 30 seconds and 9 minutes plus intro and outro music etc.

Influencing Co-create Story Direction

There are several ways for the overall Story Architect or team to influence the co-creators’ writing:

• Provide a cliff notes summary of what training or event was completed that day.
• Provide each writer with a secret about their character that the character would know but the audience does not yet know (or may never explicitly know)
• Provide details of a conflict or incident that happened between two or more of the crew on a particular day. All of the writers would know of the incident and could deal with it from the point of view of their particular member of the crew. For example;
  • someone fails a physical test,
  • a team building goes awry as a couple of the crew clash or one individual has an emotional outburst during the days’ events.
  • The narrator would describe the incident in their report. Each writer would contribute their thoughts on the event and any impact on them personally and emotionally.

Character Backgrounds

Once the backgrounds for each of those on board have been developed the co-creators will have to have access to all the backgrounds to give them an idea of the character for which they are documenting their thoughts.

This submission is for multiple writers, an artist and a voice actor. I would like to write the NASA Senior Trainer (narrator) role. The writers for each astronaut could either be the writers of each astronaut’s background story or another writer from the community.