Do you guys write your own scripts? Where does this process start?

So it starts off, at the very, very beginning, with the initial concept for what we're going to do. I'll be honest, I can't remember the exact concept we had for this, but obviously it was a concept for what we ended up with. And then that idea gets developed; we work very closely with the narrative team. And that idea gets developed into a full script, almost like a screenplay, like what you'd have for any kind of film or TV show. And from there, that's when we really start diving into the details. For example, in this case, and I can actually show you an example, that's when we actually start storyboarding it and getting an idea for how the visuals and the pacing will look. So in this case, for this shot here, I went and grabbed some versions of it. What you end up with in that early phase is something like this, where we've got the same basic idea. Again, we didn't know the exact workings of the ship at this previous stage, which is why it looks a bit different. But you've got that phase where you've got Maddy coming out of the turret, and then Alex Dugan coming in, and then her putting the handcuffs on. And that gives us an idea of where we want to go from there.

I want to add here that these ship commercial ideas can come from anywhere. We're very open to good ideas regardless of where they come from. So when these things really get started at the very beginning, it's literally all hands on deck. We have pitch meetings where the artists themselves can pitch ideas, where the folks from the community team can pitch ideas, where our dedicated marketing folks can pitch ideas. Very occasionally, if there's ever an actual developer who's really passionate and wants to get in, we'll take ideas from them, and we present them in an open group and we all discuss the merits and the drawbacks of each scenario, whether they're actually feasible and whatnot. It's a very collaborative process. And then when we have an idea that most of us are happy with that we want to pursue, as Alex said, we'll rope in the narrative team and be like, OK, you guys are writers. This is the kind of story we want to tell. What can you do with this? So after the writers start to work stuff out, we're back to, as you can see here, the storyboard process. Now, these are more than storyboards. These are animatics.

Can I jump in there real quick? It's a very unique process here. We kind of do that because we are such a small team overall. But this is something you would never see in the visual effects industry at all. By the time anything comes our way, it's been in production for a year or two, and everything's kind of locked down. So giving artists the ability to give input on something as early as the ideation, even in the scripting phase, is pretty unheard of in a lot of places. So it's a fantastic place to be if you have a lot of good ideas.