RolandsFarblood
Registered User
- Joined
- Jul 25, 2026
- Messages
- 6
I’ve mentioned a few times here that my writing process tends to move back and forth between prose, structural work and visual ideas.
I can finally show what some of that work has actually been about.
For quite some time I’ve been developing a science-fiction universe called STARSEEK.
The basic premise is fairly simple:
Six exploration ships leave Earth on different routes into the unknown.
They share the same origin, but from that point on each ship develops its own story, encounters different worlds and eventually faces very different questions about exploration, responsibility and what happens when people find something they weren’t prepared for.
The first storyline follows the ship ASCENT, and the complete story already exists as three fully illustrated books.
Developing them became a mixture of writing, structural work and visual storytelling. Sometimes something worked perfectly as an image but not nearly as well once I looked at what the scene was actually supposed to do. Other times the visual development made me reconsider the writing.
For quite a while I kept the books and the film side seperate.
Then I started wondering whether the illustrated world could actually be translated into cinematic scenes without simply turning the existing pages into moving illustrations.
So I produced a 4:49 technical Proof of Concept.
It shows a later moment from the first book: the final phase of a shuttle landing, the opening of the ramp and the first human step onto an unfamiliar world.
It is not Transmission 01 and it isn’t the beginning of the story. It was really a test of whether the characters, environments, visual language and pacing could survive the move from illustrated fiction into film.
Generative image and video tools are part of that production process, but a surprising amount of the work ended up being much more traditional: deciding what a scene needs, designing shots, rejecting material, editing, sound, music and trying to make everything feel like it belongs to the same story.
The result convinced me enough to try the next step.
The Kickstarter for STARSEEK 01 launched yesterday.
Rather than trying to fund one huge production at once, I’ve divided the three-book story into up to 18 connected cinematic chapters, which I call Transmissions.
€4,500 funds the complete production of Transmission 01, and every additional €4,500 unlocks the next part of the story.
If anyone is curious, this is the campaign:
https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/farblood/starseek-01-fund-the-first-transmission
But one of the questions that has probably occupied me almost as much as the technical side is the adaptation itself.
When the source already has a strong visual identity, how much should you allow the film version to change?
At what point does changing something for another medium improve the story, and at what point are you really starting to create a different version of it?
I’m still figuring out where that line is.
Cheers, Roland
I can finally show what some of that work has actually been about.
For quite some time I’ve been developing a science-fiction universe called STARSEEK.
The basic premise is fairly simple:
Six exploration ships leave Earth on different routes into the unknown.
They share the same origin, but from that point on each ship develops its own story, encounters different worlds and eventually faces very different questions about exploration, responsibility and what happens when people find something they weren’t prepared for.
The first storyline follows the ship ASCENT, and the complete story already exists as three fully illustrated books.
Developing them became a mixture of writing, structural work and visual storytelling. Sometimes something worked perfectly as an image but not nearly as well once I looked at what the scene was actually supposed to do. Other times the visual development made me reconsider the writing.
For quite a while I kept the books and the film side seperate.
Then I started wondering whether the illustrated world could actually be translated into cinematic scenes without simply turning the existing pages into moving illustrations.
So I produced a 4:49 technical Proof of Concept.
It shows a later moment from the first book: the final phase of a shuttle landing, the opening of the ramp and the first human step onto an unfamiliar world.
It is not Transmission 01 and it isn’t the beginning of the story. It was really a test of whether the characters, environments, visual language and pacing could survive the move from illustrated fiction into film.
Generative image and video tools are part of that production process, but a surprising amount of the work ended up being much more traditional: deciding what a scene needs, designing shots, rejecting material, editing, sound, music and trying to make everything feel like it belongs to the same story.
The result convinced me enough to try the next step.
The Kickstarter for STARSEEK 01 launched yesterday.
Rather than trying to fund one huge production at once, I’ve divided the three-book story into up to 18 connected cinematic chapters, which I call Transmissions.
€4,500 funds the complete production of Transmission 01, and every additional €4,500 unlocks the next part of the story.
If anyone is curious, this is the campaign:
https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/farblood/starseek-01-fund-the-first-transmission
But one of the questions that has probably occupied me almost as much as the technical side is the adaptation itself.
When the source already has a strong visual identity, how much should you allow the film version to change?
At what point does changing something for another medium improve the story, and at what point are you really starting to create a different version of it?
I’m still figuring out where that line is.
Cheers, Roland
