# Chapter VIII
## The Film

*The Girl & The Alien*
*by Sheiny Goldberg*

*INT. HOUSE. NIGHT.*

*A place of a religious Jewish child. Not very rich. Everything looks rather cheap. A little girl about nine years old is walking from her room into a toilet. She opens the cabin and walks in.*

*In the cabin she reaches for a little ventilation hole. She opens a little gate protection thing. And reaches into the hole. It looks rather off-putting. The whole ventilation shaft is filled with spiderwebs and pigeon feces. She reaches with her hand under the hole and pulls out of there something. It is revealed to us that this something is a magazine. A magazine with pictures of naked men.*

Sheiny stopped writing for a moment. She thought that what she imagined to go next would be illegal to shoot. It was not her usual films. This one should be able to be shown in a regular cinema and sold in a regular store. She needed a way to imply masturbation of a little girl without implying it. It was dangerous even to imply it.

She alt-tabbed from Emacs to GNU IceCat web browser. It had a page about child pornography laws. She was reading them carefully. The rules didn't make sense at all. The story needed the girl to enjoy herself on the pictures of the men. This would be the catalyst for the next scene, where the girl would have a very dramatic argument with her mother, who believed that she shouldn't do that.

The rules were very strict. As Sheiny understood them, it was not about child nudity. This was rather doable under certain circumstances. Some foreign films did exactly that and got away with it. The problem was, as she understood, the implication of child sexually in any way shape or form. She thought that some movies get away with it easily. If a child is above a certain age, the sensitivity to it lowers down. And people seem to not care. A good example would be Megan Fox appearance in Transformers. Or the whole character of Nicola Peltz in Transformers Age Of Extinction. Something like Natalie Portman in Leon was probably more the direction that she was looking for. But it seemed, something like this would create a huge scandal these days. Sheiny didn't know how to make the scene right.

Wait, she thought, she doesn't need to be masturbating. We need to only show the magazine. It will not be hard to get away with that. 

*She opened it up and as soon she did it, a loud knock on the toilet's door started*

*FEMALE VOICE*
> *Are you there? I need to pee...*

There is no need to show her do anything, Sheiny thought, you just need the mom to come to the toilet at just at the exact moment, when it's most dangerous. But wait. How is it dangerous? She can just put the magazine carefully back in and come out undetected. Not good. She has to be detected.

As she thought about ways to make her mom detect that she was hiding something a question of the name of both the girl and mom came into Sheiny's mind. Maybe, perhaps, they don't have names. I mean, how often do people address other people with a name? She could write the girl as simply the girl and her mom as simply the girl's mom. This could potentially make it so the audience will assert their own names, or names of the people that they know, to those characters. Making the whole thing more personal.

The story that Sheiny had in mind was something along the lines of this. The girl, probably played by Chloe, is a religious Jewish girl. Perhaps from Chabad. She, in secret, reads this magazine that she found some time ago. It excites her. But her mom, being a religious woman, forbids her not even just looking at things like this, but speaking to boys. It's not like the law is the problem for that girl. Simply being a friend to a boy is forbidden to her. The religion is the problem. 

Then she finds a boy. Who in an alien, but looks normal. She thought of Mark from Richie's gang for that role. The boy has a shape shifting quality. He can go between a boy and an alien version by will, or maybe not by will. She was not sure yet. Somebody, more aliens, the government, the whole world is on that boy. And they all want to kill him for some weird ass reasons. He has a space ship that materializes anything you think about. Or maybe it's simply a holographic projection? She was not sure yet.

All the great effects stuff will be done using Blender. It's a very powerful computer generated imagery creation tool. It has functions from drawing three-dimensional shapes, to physically based rendering, animation, visual effects stuff like: masking, chroma-keying and tracking: an ability to capture movement of objects within a frame of a given video-file. Sheiny already spoke with Mr. Hambleton about using the whole computer class in non-lesson time, for rendering. As a kind of tiny render farm. Since using a physically based rendering algorithm takes a lot longer to draw each frame, then using a standard algorithm used in games, but it gives a better looking image. Much more realistic then in games.

Sheiny knew that what ever they would write, they should be able to film. They had money, but they didn't have Hollywood level kind of money. She had to think very carefully about everything. The alien creature should not be very hard. They could even try motion capture. Blender was not tested yet to have a full body motion capture ability using it's tracking. But maybe? Maybe with some tweaks to the software? Maybe with a cleverly designed system? If not, they could always animate the alien by hand.

There was a scene towards the middle of the movie that Sheiny thought was almost possible. It was in a grey area. She was not sure whether it was legal. It was not sexual, per say. It didn't have nudity, per say. But it could be interpreted as if both were there. In alien abduction cases that people reported, there is one reoccurring theme that she wanted to explore. It's a container full with guts, and slimy substances into which they put people. She wanted the girl to wake up in such a substance. She would be naked, but it's invisible. When the girl comes out of the substance, parts of the guns and all the slimy goo stays on her body. They could design it to fall just right, to be a kind of clothing. To cover up all the stuff that they need to cover up. But it will still look like a slimy dirt on a naked body. And since it is slime that's also presumably on a naked body, it may arouse some people. Sheiny didn't know if this was legal or not.

Some time had passed. Chloe and Sheiny were still shooting the regular stuff, for the regular black market. Ivan was still coming. His wounds were healed. He never played that game anymore. Instead of playing games, Ivan pursued music. He was learning guitar and Free music making software. Also he was trying to convince his friends to stop playing as well. And to start using Free Software. He stayed a rather dumb person in his ways of persuading. He didn't turn anybody. Presumably because he couldn't tell them the whole story. Or because those people were as imbeciles as he once was. But maybe just because he was not very smart to begin with. 

Mendel was coming. Still unable to find Cherish. Maybe because he was busy on the wood-chopping factory during the morning. And helping Sheiny with production during the evening. Yes. He did help them with production. Not as an actor. He was too loyal to Cherish. But as a person that works behind the scenes. He would operate the camera. He would think with Sheiny on the shots. He would write with her the movie that she was writing. He stopped being afraid to see them naked. It even stopped arousing him. He felt like if those girl were his children. And this filming was some kind of harmless playing.

Mendel didn't have a phone. He got out of jail not so long ago and still didn't purchase one. The wood-chopping job was one offered to him by the police as he was coming out of prison. He never needed to make a call. Meeting with Sheiny, Chloe, Ivan and Mr. Hambleton he learned not to buy a phone to begin with. Sheiny followed him. She moved all of her chats over to her laptop. Mendel bought a laptop himself. He was smart not to buy one with Windows. It had some strange distro on it. Mr. Hambleton helped him to install Ubuntu GNU/Linux. Sheiny didn't like it, but Mendel was a fresh user, perhaps this was more suitable for Mendel.

The production of the movie started not long after that. Chloe was cast as the girl and Mark was cast the boy alien. He didn't feel that bad being filmed for that kind of movie. Sheiny and Mark sparked a little intrigue. She still was in love with Mendel, but since he was taken, she didn't feel any moral problem to try out somebody else. Mark seemed to be in love with both of them. Chloe and Sheiny in the same time. He was the kind of boy who didn't care. Sometimes between the scenes they "played". Mendel returned to his complexes when Mark was a part of the "game". 

It was the day of the premiere when Cherish was found. Mr. Hambleton gladly gave his Cinerama, wide screen, curved, gorgeous place. It was cleaned up. A whole team of cleaners was hired for the job. Real advertising wasn't available to the girls. But they could print a bunch of posters and glue them everywhere they could. They changed the title of the movie from "The Girl & The Alien" to "Sinking in the Fire". It was both a little word play that Sheiny loved immensely. And it was referencing a scene towards the middle when the girl end's up in a fire, while the boy alien's place is filled with water. And that they kept loving each other through that. Watching each other through a little window in a door that was jammed. They accepted their fate. They touched each other's hands through the glass. Holding hands, perhaps for the last time. Their love for each other, the act of pressing the glass from both sides, fractured it. And the water escaped one room, to put out the fire in the other room.

The time of the premier came. Sheiny and Chloe were already both ten years old. Mendel grew to twenty nine. Cherish was about to be found. The cinema was waiting for the people. Mr. Humbert was standing at the entrance, for the first time waiting for a crowd to fill up the once abandoned cinema. There was no crew. He would be the cashier and the ticker checker. The projectionist and the sound person. The producer and the shower. He would come back to his early days of the cinema. Mendel showed up first. He sat in the cinema and looked at the blank screen. Soon the movie would start.
