The Impact50 Storyworld and Timeline

About the 'World' of the feature film 'The Impact'

We wanted to create a storyworld that would challenge screenwriters and filmmakers to dig deep into a human narrative that transcends politics, religion and petty differences.

We want to explore the idea, ‘As we look into the face of death with certainty, who would we choose to be in those last few hours?'

We also want to tie the stories together with a single global incident. ‘The Impact’ is not country specific and we encourage diversity.

Phase one of the screenwriting and filmmaking phase produced some amazing work. We felt we needed some tougher stories too, to create more dynamic and confronting moments of humanity, good, bad and downright beautiful or ugly.

The Impact has a VERY strict time construct, to which you must adhere. Here are the story beats BEFORE our story begins...

• Zero hour: Amateur astronomer James Anderson spots the asteroid from his home observatory in Alice Springs, Australia. He immediately puts in a call to NASA.
• One hour in: Four other amateur astronomers from the dark side of the planet confirm the Asteroid, provisionally named KT-1887.
• Two hours in: NASA verify and confirm the size, trajectory and estimate ‘the impact’. They debate action to take.
• Two hours and fifteen minutes in: The White House is called and information relayed to William Jones, chief scientific advisor to the President.
• Two hours and thirty minutes in: The President is pulled out of a meeting on agricultural policies and briefed on the impending threat.

Where our story begins...

• Two hours and forty five minutes in: The President addresses the nation and planet. ‘An asteroid the size of New York city will impact in the Atlantic Ocean, off the coast of Africa, in 97 minutes, it will destroy all life on earth aside from microbes. The blast will take just over one hour to travel around the planet…’
• Four hours and twenty one minutes in: Impact in the Atlantic Ocean. The physical impact will be felt planet wide, mostly experienced as a small earthquake. The blast wave from the impact will take one hour to circulate the planet.
• Five hours: Total annihilation of civilization and the end of our story as the blast wave comes full circle on the opposite side of the planet.

Asteroid Impact 101: The Facts

Picture from the dashcam of a driver in Russia who saw the Chelyabinsk meteor

• Many meteors hit the atmosphere each year and appear to us as shooting stars. Few make it to the ground as a meteorite.
• Recently, we all saw video clips of the Chelyabinsk meteor which was half a ton when it finally hit the earth.
• In the more distant past Meteor Crater in Arizona was created 40,000 years ago by a meteorite the size of a basketball court.
• The dinosaurs were killed by a meteor that struck the Yucatan basin 65 million years ago. Ash and debris engulfed the atmosphere and temperatures plummeted, killing almost all large animals. Rodents and other small animals thrived and dominated and rose subsequently. This meteorite was estimated to be around 10km wide.
• Most scientists agree that a large asteroid impact is a certainty. It’s just a matter of when.
• A big enough asteroid has the potential to kill all life on earth. The impact would boil and vaporise the ocean, create massive Tsunamis, blast the atmosphere into space. Truly hell on earth.
• NASA has a $4m per year budget to run the Spaceguard Survey, charting near-earth asteroids more than 1km in size. There is no way to track everything in space, especially an asteroid that wanders into our solar system from afar.