Step 1: What's the Story?

General / 08 February 2018


5 years ago I had an idea for a story.  Like all early story ideas I've had this one was fragmented and mostly visual.

In a snowy distant future, a team of humanoid robots each varied in appearance and body language, march through a cold desolate winter forest. Remnants of humanity's past litter the woods, but the future is peaceful, and these robots are human.


Science Fiction has always been my favorite genre.  It was in many ways, my gate-way drug to science and to understanding the insane backstory of the world I lived in.  Terminator made me wonder about the future of robotics and visually helped me understand how human anatomy worked (That close up shot of the T-800's foot and its broken "Achilles hydraulic" was nothing short of a revelation to me as a 5 year old).  Jurassic Park helped understand the premise of genetics, and that intelligence as a property can be far scarier that a giant mouth full of teeth.


So for this project I decided to build something cool.  Something new and unique, but something that had something to say about humanity and its future struggles in identity, morality, and society in the centuries to come.  

Masked in the style of old Kurosawa Samurai films and in the  80's Scifi Film-Noir, I began to sketch, design, sculpt, model and write the world of EXT.  

I began early on with writing a feature-length script in 2014.  

Now I'm not a professional writer by any means (did this blog give it away?), but I have written scripts before and I have a lot of friends with better skills than myself in regards to screenwriting, so over the course of the next years I wrote, re-wrote, and wrote some more.  I also kept designing.  Slowly chipping away at that marble block until I had something I was proud of.

It's not easy.  And it's not always glamorous.

But what I found is that if you care enough about a story, the stuff that isn't fun becomes far more easier to overcome.

Over the course of a year I had my story and a crap-ton of visual material.  

So what was next?  Luckily in our industry, showing turns far more heads than telling.

I shared just a few of my images on LinkedIn (I know I'm like the only person I know that uses it) looking for producers that were interested.

Luckily a few answered the call, and my good friend and creative partner in crime John Kontoyannis of Zeus Pictures helped me refine my vision and construct a plan of attack.

What was that plan of attack?

Stay tunned for next week's episode where we dive into how to make a movie out of an ambitious artists's expensive-as-hell idea!

- ABobb

Ooh!  Wanna see something cool?

Here's the very first concept I made for EXT.

Back when I used to draw in pencil then scan it and color it in photoshop.