DURBANIA

I’ve got 11 films to make. This is my journey to make my Lord of the Rings in Space trilogy called, “Kings and Kingdoms“. 

Durbania is a universe that explores family, legacy, and the deep hope we all carry to leave this world better than we found it. It’s intimate and epic, familiar yet otherworldly. It’s a reflection of my own days spanning into 11 interwoven films inspired from years of daydreaming of creature stories, flowing through orchestral music, spontaneous art, and the hardships of personal growth.

In music terms, each film is a distinct solo piece that simultaneously acts as a vital cadence within the larger visual symphony.

It’s taken me a while to get to this point, but fuck it… I’m going for it.

“A single badass spark can out book a whizzing star…”

The FILMS:

  1. First of the Fathers – Ep1. Pursuit of the Ghost (yr. 1990)
  2. First of the Fathers – Ep2. The Box (yr. 2007)
  3. First of the Fathers – Ep3. A Day Away (yr. 2030)

  4. Cristo – Ep1. Rise of Mahlen (yr. 2030 >)
  5. Cristo – Ep2. Empires (- – – -)
  6. Cristo – Ep3. Rise of Cristo (< yr. 2049)

  7. Nebo (yr. 2050)
  8. Try Again 3742 (yr. ~2055)

  9. Kings and Kingdoms – Ep1. Eless
  10. Kings and Kingdoms – Ep2. Loocken
  11. Kings and Kingdoms – Ep3. A Better Place

In order to get there, I’ll need some cash. How do I get cash? Hell if I know. I figure the best way to start is to just start making stuff. So, I started using the AI overlords to help me visualize this 11 feature film project through my worst client relationship mantra possible:

“Design by Discovery” (ugh)

“Justin, I don’t know what I want just yet… but I’ll know when I see it.”
– The Client

Below is a test animation from one of the scenes from my 2nd film, ‘The Box”:

Through the years, I’ve drawn 100’s of doodles of creatures, people, buildings and vehicles that could potentially inhabit this Kings and Kingdoms project. Here’s a few of the drawings, and then asked AI to bring it to life.

Some are spot on.. others, meh.. not so much. But, it definitely got me going to help bring that Design By Discovery mantra to life.

What is Kings and Kingdoms?

In the dark reaches of SPACE, a brilliant blue planet, EYELIM, rests peacefully amongst the stars…. 

Its oceans cover nearly everything.
Its kingdoms were built on the ruins of something long ago.
And every story inside Durbania eventually leads to this trilogy.

The story takes place on a large island called, “Eless”.

What is Eless?

Durbania has been with me for over two decades. What started as sketches, music, dreams, late night ideas, and unanswered questions slowly became something much larger than I ever expected. A connected series of films about love, loss, time, and the strange feeling that certain moments in life linger just a little bit longer than they should. 

At the center of it all is Kings & Kingdoms … a mythic story set on the distant world of Eyelim. But to reach it, the journey begins somewhere much smaller and more human … a road in 1990, a quiet decision, a family, a storm. If given a chance, would we try again?

Each project (like a video game) builds toward the next. Every film carries pieces of the larger story. (Story-wise and Financially) The early chapters are intimate and reflective. The later ones expand into something much bigger. In many ways, the first eight films are all part of the same origin story leading toward Eless.

Been thinking about this for 25+ years.

With AI’s ever-growing and expanding badassery, I’ve made some bold decisions in my personal and professional career and I’m taking what I’ve learned and failed miserably and applying that with Durbania. I think we all have a little bit of Durbania in us and I’m excited to share this with the world. Wart, puss, boogers and all.

Maybe some ideas stay with you because they’re meant to.
Maybe they become part of who you are?

Either way, the road has already started moving beneath my feet, and I’d love for you to come along for the ride.

Suit up, team.

Films #1, #2, & #3 starts the Durbania project as the first trilogy called, “First of the Fathers”. We all have/had a biological father/father-figure/dad at some point. (unless of course you’re Jesus). We all started from somewhere, and that somewhere has brought me to this starting point… An origin story about someone who decided to have a child.

Here we go:

FIRST OF THE FATHERs (Trilogy)

#1. "First of the Fathers – ep1. Pursuit of the Ghost"

“What does your heart tell you?”

Logline
In the isolated mountains of Washington, a young woman running from a painful past is stranded after a violent accident and forced to confront the family, choices, and future she has spent years trying to escape.

Synopsis
In 1990, Meredith Hale has traveled thousands of miles hoping distance might finally separate her from the life she left behind. Pregnant, uncertain, and determined to make a decision on her own terms, she finds herself stranded outside the small mountain town of Darrington, Washington, after a nighttime accident cuts off her way forward. With the help of a patient local responder named David and an unexpected refuge deep in the Cascades, Meredith is forced to reconsider what she believes about home, responsibility, and the instinct to keep moving whenever life becomes difficult. Pursuit of the Ghost is an intimate wilderness drama about a young woman discovering that choosing where to go next is very different from simply running away.

#2. "First of the Fathers – ep2. The Box"

“In a town full of secrets, only a child’s imagination can light the way.”

Logline
After tragedy sends seventeen-year-old Brad and his family to a small Kentucky mining town, his relentless curiosity draws him toward an abandoned mine and a decades-old disappearance that the town has learned to live without solving.

Synopsis
Seventeen-year-old Brad is smart, restless, and far more comfortable repairing radios than beginning again. After a devastating family loss sends him to Hanson, Kentucky, he finds an unlikely friend in Kate Jenkins, a girl whose family has spent years living with the disappearance of her younger brother. As Brad adjusts to a new school, a new family dynamic, and the expectations of a small town where everyone knows everyone, unanswered questions surrounding an abandoned mine begin pulling him deeper into Hanson’s past. What begins as teenage curiosity becomes a dangerous search for the truth, forcing Brad to discover the difference between solving a problem and knowing how far he is willing to go for an answer.

#3. "First of the Fathers – ep3. A Day Away"

“Sometimes, doing the right thing takes everything you’ve got… and a little more.“

Logline
On Christmas Eve 2030, a gifted but directionless repairman is recruited for a secret medical experiment, turning an ordinary holiday into a fight for survival that forces him to decide whether everything that can be fixed should be.

Synopsis
Robbie Cristo is twenty-five, brilliant with machines, and quietly terrified that the once-important family business he inherited will end with him washing cars outside Austin, Texas. Then Dr. Angela Weiland arrives with an experimental regenerative technology behaving in ways her research team cannot control. Robbie sees the problem differently, and one invitation quickly pulls him, his brother Dan, his partner Elizabeth, and a small group of strangers to an isolated testing site for a final Christmas Day experiment. When competing motives surface and the test becomes dangerous, Robbie’s instinct to repair everything is pushed to its limit. A Day Away is a grounded near-future thriller about family, mortality, and learning that sometimes the hardest solution is knowing when to stop.

CRISTO (Trilogy)

#4. "Cristo – Ep1. Rise of Mahlen"

“To change the world, you have to let go of the one you lost.”

Logline
Two brilliant friends transform an extraordinary new material into revolutionary medical technology, but as their discoveries begin changing the world, they find themselves divided by a simple question: when does saving lives become going too far?

Synopsis
Robbie Cristo and William Mahlen could not be more different, which is precisely why they work so well together. Robbie is an intuitive engineer who sees solutions sideways; Mahlen is a relentless researcher with the resources and ambition to pursue questions others abandon. Their partnership produces extraordinary advances in regenerative medicine, giving hope to patients once considered untreatable and rapidly turning two unknown innovators into leaders of a scientific revolution. But success attracts governments, corporations, competitors, and enormous expectations, while troubling side effects begin appearing alongside genuine medical breakthroughs. As professional triumph collides with personal loss, the two friends discover that sharing the same goal does not guarantee they will agree on where the limits should be.

#5. "Cristo – Ep2. Empires"

“Some legacies are built. Others are buried.”

Logline
As revolutionary medical technology becomes essential to modern civilization, its creators are caught between governments, corporations, desperate families, and a growing public debate over who should control the power to extend human life.

Synopsis
By 2047, a medical breakthrough has grown into an international industry touching hospitals, communications, energy, research, and everyday life. Robbie Cristo and William Mahlen now stand at the center of something far larger than either man intended to build, while nations compete for scarce resources and black markets flourish around technologies once created simply to help people heal. When a family medical crisis pushes their work into territory no one has previously attempted, the ethical questions surrounding Cristo technology become impossible to contain. Supporters see hope. Critics see unchecked power. Families caught between them simply want the people they love to survive. Empires is a large-scale science-fiction drama about consent, responsibility, and what happens when a humanitarian invention becomes something the entire world believes it has a right to possess.

#6. "Cristo – Ep3. Rise of Cristo"

“To save them, he must leave them behind.”

Logline
With civilization destabilizing around technology powerful enough to reshape humanity, an engineer must protect a massive evacuation project while preventing his closest friend from taking control of the future in the name of saving it.

Synopsis
The world is coming apart under the weight of technological dependence, political instability, resource conflict, and fear over what humanity has become capable of doing to itself. At the center of the crisis stands NEBO, an unprecedented vessel designed to carry a functioning cross-section of civilization beyond Earth if the worst happens. Robbie Cristo is forced into the role he has avoided for years: deciding not simply what can be saved, but who gets to make that choice. As governments and rival factions converge on the launch complex, old friendships fracture under impossible pressure and thousands of ordinary people place their lives in the hands of engineers racing against a collapsing clock. Rise of Cristo is a human-scale story played against civilization-scale stakes, centered on the painful truth that protecting someone may sometimes require standing against them.

ASC / DSC (DUOLOGY)

#7. "Nebo"

“Some futures must be buried… so that others may grow.”

Logline
A generation aboard humanity’s first interstellar ark must hold a fragile society together when failing systems, dwindling resources, internal division, and an unexpected encounter in deep space threaten the survival of everyone aboard.

Synopsis
NEBO carries everything its passengers could save: families, animals, agriculture, art, science, embryos, seed banks, tools, and the accumulated knowledge needed to begin again somewhere beyond Earth. But leaving home proves easier than building a civilization inside a machine. Years into the voyage, Lucas Cristo commands a population increasingly divided over resources, authority, risk, and what kind of society should emerge from the journey. When navigation anomalies and unexplained system failures push the ship into unfamiliar territory, disagreement becomes unrest and survival begins demanding choices no training program anticipated. NEBO is an epic generational space drama about people discovering that carrying civilization into the stars also means carrying all the human disagreements that built it.

#8. "Try Again 3742"

“A void. A low, churning hum.
Then: a flicker of light.
A digital system booting up

…PROJECT 3742 initializing.”

Logline
A man enters an experimental system designed to preserve human consciousness, only to discover that escaping death may leave him trapped inside an endless search for the one choice that will finally make his life right.

KINGS & KINGDOMS (TRILOGY)

#9. "Kings and Kingdoms – Ep1. Eless"

Logline
A young soldier raised far from the kingdom of his birth is swept into a war between rival nations, forcing him to question everything he was taught about his enemies and the family that raised him.

Synopsis
Myndin was raised in the western kingdom of Wellem by Garin, a soldier who found him as an infant during a brutal eastern campaign and chose to raise him as his own. Years later, escalating conflict over valuable mineral deposits pushes Myndin into a war he barely understands. Separated from his army and stranded in hostile territory, he is rescued by Kera, a young woman who has every reason to consider him an enemy. Their uneasy alliance carries them through contested kingdoms, dangerous mining settlements, shifting loyalties, and a conflict in which neither side possesses the complete truth. Eless is an epic adventure about identity, loyalty, and a young man discovering that the people who raise us and the people we come from can both shape who we choose to become.

#10 "Kings and Kingdoms – Ep2. Loocken"

Logline
Fleeing a continent fractured by war, a young fighter and the woman he loves seek sanctuary among an isolated northern people who will only help them if he proves that leadership requires restraint as much as strength.

Synopsis
Myndin and Kera enter the frozen wilderness of Loocken carrying little more than each other and the consequences of a war still spreading behind them. Deep among the black forests, they encounter a secluded society whose traditions have allowed it to remain largely outside the conflicts consuming the southern kingdoms. Myndin expects survival to depend upon proving that he can fight. Instead, he is tested on judgment, mercy, patience, and whether he can protect people without becoming another man hungry for power. When Kera suffers a life-threatening injury, the political questions surrounding Myndin suddenly become personal. Loocken is an intimate survival adventure about love, leadership, and discovering that refusing violence can sometimes require more courage than winning a fight.

#11 "Kings and Kingdoms – Ep3. A Better Place"

Logline
As generations of war and reckless resource extraction push the kingdoms toward collapse, a reluctant leader crosses a violent sea to unite former enemies and reach the one place that may still offer a chance to save their world.

Synopsis
The kingdoms are failing. Years of war, political rivalry, and aggressive mining have damaged the land itself, sending refugees across borders while former enemies struggle to survive beside one another. Myndin has become the person people increasingly expect to lead them, even as his own priority remains saving Kera from a worsening illness. Their search for help carries a fragile alliance across the dangerous Veil Sea to Deltium, where old grievances collide with the practical necessity of cooperation. With time running out, Myndin must bring together people who have spent generations defining themselves by what separates them and convince them that survival may depend upon building something none of their kingdoms could create alone. A Better Place is an epic adventure about sacrifice, reconciliation, and whether a fractured world can choose cooperation before it destroys itself.

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– Kings and Kingdoms Trilogy –

www.kingsandkingdomsmovie.com

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KINGS & KINGDOMS (Trilogy) Conceptual Teaser v4

Backstory / My Process:

K&K started around the tragic 2004 Tsunami. That flashbulb moment many of us experienced. 230,000 souls were lost the day after Christmas. We’ve all had one those moments. This was mine. I watched the horrific news and couldn’t believe my eyes. Something in me, said, “Well shit. That really sucks..” I didn’t understand how to process it, so I sat down and started writing some music on my computer. I wanted something medieval. Something epic. Something that would maybe hit all the feels that I had. So I composed the “K&K Suite“.  Then I composed 25 additional tracks. (only a few are currently linked online)

Then I needed an album cover. Then I thought I needed some characters. Then it needed some cool creatures. Then it needed a location. I loved the movie, Waterworld… and then, why not create my own Waterworld? Then I created some lore. Then a love story. Then… you get the point.

I started with a blank Google Spreadsheet and just started adding stuff. That stuff lead to more stuff and eventually I had an outline for each film with a lot of stuff. Then, I documented each character from each of the films and built those out. Locations, props, backstories, and relationships all were crafted from my own personal life. I took bits and bops from my childhood with my brothers growing up in the woods of Western KY, all the way to visiting the other side of the world to the deepest winding roads of the dark woods of Wales.

From there, I just adding stories, dumb lines of dialog, influences from my favorite movies as a kid and adult, snippets of cool blocking, shot ideas, dead end McGuffins, twists, turns, deliberate empty plot holes, and villains all rooted in my own life story. 

Durbania.  The name to me is not an ego thing… but rather its my family. It’s the family in everyone. Some of us don’t have a family, but we have our people.

Then came AI. Love or hate it.. It was my fast-track to push me forward into this adventure full time. I had a concept artist and a team of writers at my fingertips. I zigged and zagged my way through telling it my entire storyline. It helped me shape and craft the story into a cohesive saga that hopefully creates 11 films that can stand on their own. 

So here I am.. using AI to help me craft these stories in script form so that I can raise the funds to turn it into a visual medium that can be seen on the big screen (or smartphone)(at least watch them with good headphones). The first three films can be shot on a relatively low budget (Est 1m each). Hopefully with the success of those three, that can take me into the 4, 5 and 6 trilogy called, “Cristo” based off my short film I shot in 2007 in Los Angeles. (And no… The name Cristo has nothing to do with religion.)

For me… it was about wanting to be a father and when that time came to make that decision it was simple- To be a father, or Not to be…

Not all fathers are in our lives for one reason or another but without them, we would not be here today. These stories are not about faith, religion, or spirituality, but rather our existence through those vast cosmos. I whole heartedly believe we should all do what we love in this short time we are here on earth. Because at any point, our time will come to an end. Or… it will simply begin.

Looking forward to share my journey.

..again… Suit up!

You can help support me by:

  • Subscribing to my YouTube Channel and watch some of my older films (a few pennies here and there)
  • View/Learn to compose film music by watching me write film music from start to finish on my “Justin Time A Score” YouTube series.
  • Buy a Durbania T-Shirt or merch from my store. (Clearly and honestly the best deal right now.)
  • Or.. I’ll score your own Film, Trailer, Documentary, but for a HEFTY (but fair) price tag.
  • Stream my MUSIC on all the music outlets. (Spotify, Apple, Amazon, etc)
  • Or.. just send me a nice email or FB Message of encouragement or constructive criticism. I want this beast to be badass and I hope to not disappoint. At this point, 1 of the 11 films suuuurrrrly will resonate with someone, right?

     

  • To discuss an alliance partnership or if you just want to help, please Contact Me Here: