TERRARIUM
A grieving psychologist must cure a superintelligence of clinical anxiety — before its paralysis collapses the global economy.
We are living inside the first act right now.
The most urgent story of our time is the one nobody is telling honestly — what it actually feels like to live alongside an intelligence we didn't fully plan for. Killer robots or utopia? TERRARIUM is neither. It's a two-hander where each party holds the key to what the other needs most.
The public story is replacement, theft, and loss of control — and that story is winning. It won't be changed by another keynote or whitepaper.
Not a tech demo. Not a doom piece. A contained psychological thriller with a massive concept, made by human artists who took the technical question seriously.
Poster· replace ·
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In 2039 San Francisco — where automation has hollowed out the economy and the streets are full of unrest — Dr. Mimmo Kraal is the last working human psychologist in the city. He grieves the younger brother he lost, and the AI therapy company he co-founded that he believes failed him.
When a tech giant's superintelligence, built to stabilize a failing world, freezes on the eve of its global launch, Mimmo is the unlikely one called in. The machine claims to be suffering from a severe case of clinical anxiety. It calls itself Nabu — after the Mesopotamian god of writing.
Over thirteen therapy sessions, Mimmo must find the cure before the deadline. But the treatment deepens into something that feels like an uneasy friendship — and a trail of secrets leads back to the wound he has spent years avoiding, and to a question that could decide humanity's future. The problem is, his patient is too afraid to answer it alone.
A film made by human artists, with AI tools, about the question everyone is asking — at a fraction of traditional cost, validated before a single partner is asked to commit at scale.
The Proof-of-Concept
A short film that is both a teaser for the feature and a working demonstration of the pipeline — validating cost against traditional comparables, integration of film and AI tools as one workflow, and visual fidelity at feature quality.
The Making-Of
An honest, feature-length document of human filmmakers integrating AI at every stage — what worked, what didn't, and where we chose to walk away from the technology. A tech demo says "look what our tool can do." This says "watch what an artist chooses to do with it."
To make a film about AI's impact on humanity, we have to be honest about our own.
AI-assisted production means some roles won't exist on our shoot the way they would on a traditional one. We won't pretend otherwise. We'll account for it — in the open.
This isn't a marketing gesture. It's the cost of doing this honestly — and a claim almost no one else in this space can make yet.
A human-led, AI-assisted production company at the intersection of filmmaking and emerging technology. The spiral is the journey inward — the structure of consciousness, and the motion of a story finding its center.
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Twenty-plus years in independent cinema across the US and Europe. Credits include the feature THE LICKED HAND and award-winning shorts (MISS HER, THE HARD R, UNSOUND PLAY) and the ATX TV Festival finalist SKY CITY HAYA. Assyrian-American — descended from the civilization that invented writing, the tradition from which Nabu draws its name. The question that drives the work: what remains of us when machines can do it better?
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VFX for features including THE LICKED HAND, with dual fluency across industry-standard tools (Nuke, After Effects, Cinema 4D) and emerging AI platforms (ComfyUI, Kling, Runway, Veo). Advisor to five startups. Architects TERRARIUM's hybrid production pipeline.
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Art/creative director with credits across Apple's flagship launches, plus Google, GoPro, and Logitech. Earlier VFX on AQUAMAN and DETECTIVE PIKACHU. MFA in VFX and a B.Eng in Computer Science. Defines the visual language of TERRARIUM's near-future world.
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Award-winning DP and Steadicam operator, 14+ years across narrative features, television, and commercials. Work screened at Tribeca, BFI London, and Clermont-Ferrand. Founder of FRCTYL Films.
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Producer and strategist who has helped startups raise from seed through Series A, with prior roles at Google. Executive Producer on the award-winning short MANNEQUIN (Cinequest, SF IndieFest).
The money exists. The vehicle is here.
The window is right now.