Submit a cover letter to express creative vision and share background information. Help the judges get a sense of your creative vision and professional experience. Make it as fun or formal as you like. Make sure to let us know what format your project will be in, if you’ve begun production, and what you’d be able to use the funding for.

History Emergent is a multi-media series of stories I've been thinking about and collecting ideas on since 2013. It's a project I'm committed to. Over the past few months I've begun to devote the time necessary to focus the stories and develop producible scripts.

I have hundreds of pages of notes detailing technologies, aesthetics, character timelines, and world events. That said, I'm not afraid to make the cuts necessary to tell the story well. Treatments, outlines, and notes only go so far in crafting compelling, sharable stories.

Ultimately, I see the scope of the series as comparing to Star Wars, but more tied to life in our solar system, Earth history, mythologies, technologies, and politics. While I seek to cover deep philosophical and political topics and hard science, I want to balance this with an adventurous spirit and achieve a light heartedness.

Where most sci-fi and speculative fiction resolves as bleak, colorless, and dystopian, I seek to illustrate a colorful, psychedelic, AI managed utopia where anything is possible through technology (where technology is like magic). The utopia of History Emergent is continually pushed and bettered until a hero, or anti-hero ~20 years in the future named Janus(a la Fight Club's Tyler Durden), fails to believe in a brighter future and endeavors to kill the AI known as Omni.

I want to launch this as a TV series based in the near future, capturing how the AI comes to power through a struggle between an idealistic startup, a corporation with government support, and religious leaders all vying for impact. Much as Game of Thrones caused audiences to question their allegiances to favorite characters, I want to challenge stereotypes and assumptions through characters with tangible connections to real world political, social, and economic subgroups.

My background is in filmmaking and mechanical engineering, with degrees in both. I feel specially equipped for sci-fi. I've worked in product design, construction management and technology (VR, AR, 4D), startup management, and finance. I've made more than 10 short films and during recent months I've begun to catch up on and learn special effects.

If I'm awarded funds or for this script I will use them frugally to secure mentorship and feedback to further refine it, produce sizzle reel/trailer content to help raise further funds, and produce a short version of the script to submit to film festivals (if I am unable to produce the full script with sufficient quality). I would also love to hire other screenwriters to help develop more scripts.