The emotional weather.
Storm begins as music: pressure, forward motion, a voice choosing whether to move into danger or away from it. The song establishes the feeling before the world has architecture.
Creative work 05 · Production record
Storm: behind the scenes.
How “San Francisco is the new Venice” moved from a provocation inside a song to a complete future world—and then into production assets another studio could use.
The real deliverable
Not images. A shared mental model.
The work became useful when the city was specific enough that writers, image-makers, editors, and engineers could make independent decisions without inventing a different world.
This page documents the progression at the level that matters: the question each phase answered, the artifact it left behind, and the next collaborator that artifact enabled.
Six transformations
Song to production system.
San Francisco is the new Venice.
The first counterfactual makes the metaphor spatial. Sea-level adaptation is no longer background exposition; it is ordinary life. Boats, floating blocks, port labor, and improvised public systems become the grammar of the city.
Give the future constraints.
Early music-video concepts establish recurring characters, Pier 70, the Jubilee Fleet, the poisoned Bay, and autonomous water probes. Amber human warmth pushes against blue-green technological distance.
Make a complete argument.
The Future Vision XPRIZE trailer treatment turns fragments into a beginning, rupture, investigation, and choice. The world must now carry a story, not just a mood board.
Watch the trailer ↗Resolve what must stay consistent.
Character anchors, vehicles, locations, props, color systems, shot plans, and evaluation records convert the treatment into repeatable production knowledge. The goal is controlled variation, not identical frames.
Let another studio enter the world.
The production packet gives surRIHL enough canon and visual authority to direct the music video while bringing its own cinematic craft. A useful world survives contact with a new author.
Meet surRIHL ↗Next artifact
The music video.
The trailer proved the world. The next film lets the song and the artist take the center of it.
Boy Math Club + Terrence Sims + surRIHL. In production.
Return to the Storm world →