The trailer is an introduction to the Cellarius franchise, so we wanted it to raise our central question of, “Whose Future Is It?”. This tagline is double-edged: it refers to the user-defined canon aspect of the project as well as the in-universe tension between humanity and technology, which we want the community to explore and debate. In the trailer the audience begins to see the motivations of both the AI and the rebel factions. Neither side is necessarily “right.” We wanted to provide some background information about the CX universe with plenty of action to engage viewers.

We were lucky to get to work with the talented team at Spacejunk, who adapted elements of the lore and style guide into scripts:

“There’s a whole lot to unpack in the this extremely unique project. We weren’t just launching a trailer to get an audience to want to consume media, we were trying to genuinely excite people to participate in creating new content that takes place the Cellarius Universe. Our objective was to provide backstory and build the world while developing a narrative that shows the audience the true potential of the kinds of stories that can be told with this new and exciting franchise. And we had to figure out how to make that work in under three minutes! Figuring out the storytelling math on this was a super fun challenge. The Cellarius Universe Guide was a tremendous springboard for the Launch Trailer. Every page sparked about twenty new ideas that could have filled an entire video. That’s what led us to set the opening scene in the museum-like Information Center. It was the perfect device to pack the trailer absolutely full of Easter eggs for astute viewers to explore and potentially use as fuel to develop their own stories.” —Kevin Rapp, an art director at Spacejunk

Our teams collaborated to refine the script into an early version of the short. The story centers on a robotic tour guide extolling the great works of Cellarius before getting blasted by Vindict raiders, who then broadcast a less rosy history lesson. But the Vindicts are not the “good guys,” either — they separate families in the name of “decoupling” people linked to the AI. As we mentioned in our post on Blockpunk, we don’t know the AI’s true motives, and we wanted to avoid the cyberpunk trope of a sinister machine attempting to wipe out humanity.

“One thing we wanted to avoid was an omniscient narrator that just explains the world in a black and white fashion. The Cellarius Universe has so much room for ambiguity and nuance, so we came up with the idea of dueling narrators that provide conflicting accounts of history as a way to leave room for other potential collaborators to explore the moral shades of gray on both sides of the struggle.” — Kevin Rapp

Once we finalized the script, Spacejunk began work on storyboards. These sequential sketches would set up the composition of key scenes for the animation. The storyboards are a vital phase of the animation process, the step that converts the script into a visual concept and format. This early stage is when most of the editing takes place, as it’s much simpler to modify the initial sketches than finished art.