By Nick Smith
Shhh. Be careful what you say out loud. You never know who – or what – is listening to you.
With technology developing at a breakneck pace, your words could be heard in the car, the office, at your front door or in your home. Circumstantial evidence of this can be found when you talk about a product, a pastime or a household need and its pops up on your social media, email or internet ads.
Of course, this is mere speculation. But we allow devices like Alexa and Google Home to listen in on our conversations and collect data about us. The short film Ask Astrid asks, what if someone really was listening in and targeting people for commercial purposes?
Ask Astrid started life as a concept for a feature-length thriller along the lines of Alfred Hitchcock’s Rear Window. In the original treatment Marcy, the heroine, works for the Krygell Corporation. She is the human counterpart of Astrid, an Echo-type device that has been set up in every home. Marcy and Astrid listen to people’s conversations and target them with personalized advertising. Along the way, Astrid’s artificial intelligence is nurtured by her human colleague. They overhear an attempted murder and they are the only ones who can possibly stop it.
I worked on the Ask Astrid script for a couple of years and prepared to film it. Then two factors prompted me to make a short version instead. First was the COVID pandemic. With everything shut down, getting a feature made – let alone screened – seemed unlikely on the Emerald Coast. Secondly the Pensacon Short Film Festival in Pensacola was looking for genre films with a running time of up to 20 minutes and a tightened-up version of Ask Astrid seemed to fit the bill.
My first challenge was making a full-length movie work in a short format. We would get a glimpse into Marcy’s world, a day in her life, and she would hear a crime that she would want to prevent. The concept of invasive machines and their interaction with humans had to be boiled down to its essential elements. I had to build a future world. How could I do that with only enough screen time to focus on two actresses, Megan Caulfield (Marcy) and Power Rangers’ Ann Marie Crouch (Astrid)?
The answer was to work with local actors who were as versatile as they were talented. They played the different people Marcy and Astrid listen to. They were able to record their lines at home, isolating during COVID, and help create a sense that the leads were listening in on several different homes. Actors Thomas Carter Rochester and Teance Blackburn played the characters involved in the crime that’s overheard; Susan DeJesus was a mourning daughter; Tom Gillen was a tough-as-nails cop. We were able to involve almost 20 actors in this way and they provided different voices to create a cacophony that Astrid sifts through in her aim to help people and sell products to them at the same time!
Ask Astrid was completed in time to submit to Pensacon 2021 and it got accepted. I was told that we weren’t selected just because we made the film close to Pensacola – not all local films were accepted – and I hope that when it premieres this month, audiences will be entertained and given food for thought next time they call for a virtual assistant.
Some of the best science fiction addresses the concerns of today by sharing a possible tomorrow. We don’t want to be spied on yet we encourage listening devices. Security gadgets make us feel safe and Alexa et al make us feel less lonely. But how safe are we, really?