Alice’s Adventures In Wonderland is set in a strange and crazy world that is entered by dropping into a rabbit hole, the world bends the boundaries of reality and is filled with extraordinary characters and peculiar landscapes. The story is also partially set in the real world when the story beings with Alice sitting next to her sister bored by a river bank. For my version, I want to make sure to feature several different aspects such as these to keep the correlation between my piece and the original story.
Immediately upon hearing the prompt for the project, I knew I wanted to add a twist to the narrative and setting of my story to set it apart from other stories. Although I would be comfortable following the story of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland down to the smallest details, I personally think it would limit my creativity, hence why I chose to take some creative liberties when telling the story of Alice. This all being said I didn’t want to tell a completely different story, as it also wouldn’t fit the assignment, so I would still strive to involve familiar elements where appropriate while still keeping other elements different.
The novel Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland contains many well-known chapters but for this particular project I will be focusing on the opening chapter ‘Down the rabbit hole’. When I first thought about how I would visualise this as a scene my mind instantly went to black holes, the reason being that at the time I was playing a game called ‘Kerbal Space Program‘ and was very interested in the setting that is space and its endless possibilities. A black hole is one of many areas of space that is often said not yet to be fully understood and in many sci-fi stories across media, they are often used as a device to travel through space and time. For instance take Interstellar, the 2014 sci-fi adventure film directed by Christopher Nolan, in which Cooper (The main character) travels beyond the event horizon, the boundary that marks the edge of a black hole in which nothing can escape nor be observed, and this causes him to travel to the fourth dimension. Another example can be seen in the 2008 movie Space Chimps directed by Kirk DeMicco, in which three chimp astronauts go on a dangerous mission through a black hole and once again this takes them to a new location crash-landing on an inhabited planet far away. I intend to draw creative inspiration from these movies in the hopes of improving the visual representation of my scene as well as improving its relevance with the overarching plot.
Therefore the change I decided to make was to include the same plot points of the original story but change the setting to the location of space. I will take the environment of space and use it to give the story new possibilities and features, the first of which is the introduction. For my story’s introduction, the viewer will play the role of Alice, but rather than a girl around seven years old, she is instead an experience space pilot in her 30s. Keeping with the original she still very much has the same traits that make her Alice, such as her imagination and thirst for knowledge as well as her determination and bravery. As for her story, much like in the novel, she starts out in the real world but after a strange event, she ends up in another dimension.
To elaborate I created a simple graphic below. The story starts with Alice in her ship orbiting Earth, she then gets a warning alerting her to the presence of an anomaly nearby. Of course, Alice isn’t one to shy away from adventure so she makes haste towards the target. Upon getting close she finds out that the anomaly was in fact a black hole, with no explanation of how it appeared she cant miss the opportunity so she sends out a scouting drone to find out what lies beyond the event horizon. The drone enters the black hole and travels through a winding wormhole before being shot out the other side. On the other side lies an expansive galaxy full of strange reality-bending worlds inconceivable by any scientific means.
