How would you feel if one day you woke up trapped inside a foreign body? Hard to imagine?
In a futuristic world where companies offer people the service of having their memories downloaded “for backup”, the impossible becomes possible.
Oliver Klein wakes after a routine backup to find his memories restored into a body that is not his own. Not only does he discover he is capable of doing things he never could, he also comes face-to-face with the realisation that he is no longer who he he’s always known himself to be.
Writer and Director of the series Stuart Willis spoke to MWF about creating Restoration.
What inspired your web series?
The science-fiction concept behind Restoration was inspired by smart phones. By now, most of us are pretty used to having our phones constantly backed up. So, if you’re like me, and you lose them or drop them down the toilet or whatever, you can get a new phone, and “restore from backup”. It feels like we never really lost the phone. In fact, it makes it easier for us to regularly upgrade our phones, which is why phones have probably become some fashion drive.
So we asked ourselves, what would it mean if you could do that with people? We kept on toying with the idea but never really had a good basis to build it upon… until…
Matthew Clayfield (Restoration’s co-writer) and I often live away from our partners for work. One particular time, Matt and I were both living in the same city, and we were getting near the time to return home. We got talking about how weird the first month (often longer) is when you get back home after time away – how it feels like you’re a stranger in your own house, that you need to relearn the dynamics of your relationship, and the dynamics of yourself too. So much of our sense of self is defined by the world, object and people around us.
And, with that, we realised we had the emotional core for what could become Restoration: that profound sense of alienation.
Restoration is set in 2019, do you think that in the very near future we may start seeing technology advancing as much as it has in Restoration?
Unlikely! There is a lot of interesting brain/machine interface researching going on, but I don’ think we’ll get it as far as we show it. Honestly, we set Restoration in 2019 because it was about on the cusp of believability without us having to invest in serious production design to pitch the world as later. Also, Bladerunner is set in 2019, and we certainly don’t have flying cars or off-world colonies, so that was a nice reason to pick it. A little easter egg is if you look closely at the “mobile phone network” used by Oliver, it’s Nexus-6, which is the model number of the replicants in Bladerunner.
What kind of research was done when writing a series about technology advances that don’t exist yet?
We’re less interested in the technical specifics than the emotional and the personal. It is easy to assume that as a sci-fi writer that I’m interested in the technological “toys” so to be speak. But for me what’s fascinating about the printing press isn’t how the press itself worked (though that is pretty cool), but how the printing press reshaped the west: the Reformation – an increase in Empathy – Marx – Suffrage – were all made possible because of that technology. Human evolution and development is deeply tied to the tools that we create and use. They shape us and we shape them. Because I want to explore the human condition, then I have to explore technology.
We also looked into people who had suffered brain injury. There was one woman who could not remember her life before she had her accident, and one day she woke up having to take care of these kids who she can’t remember giving birth to, and had to relearn how to love a husband another version of her self married, but when she sat at the piano – she could play songs she never remembered playing. We found that really haunting.
What are the challenges you came across when making your series and how did you overcome them?
Independently producing a film with the production values required to support both the story and establish a strong position in the market place was not easy, especially without the support of conventional industry bodies and incentives. We have the loyalty, support and hard work of all our backers, crew and cast who believed in the project and its true potential to thank for Restoration’s success.
What is your background as a web series creator?
The very first project that Matthew Clayfield and I co-wrote (nearly a decade ago!) was a web series. It’s never been produced, at least, not yet. But we’ve been wanting to do a web series for a long time. We were inspired by the web series we were watching at the time: Legend of Neil and The Guild, the latter which has gone down in the halls of fame
My energy/focus redoubled when I released my sci-fi short film, PAYLOAD, to an enthusiastic response online. It made me realise the power (and addition) of releasing something online and having a conversation with your audience.
How did you fund your series?
We were “independently” financed. Which is to say that we ran a relatively modest Kickstarter which raised enough money for us to build the set, while the remainder was self-financed.
Do you have any future plans for this series?
We have a project set in the same universe – i.e. with the same underlying sci-fi tech – but it takes place around ten years later, when the technology is a little more… Wide-spread. It takes the core ideas of Restoration and amplifies them through the engine of a crime thriller.
What do you want your audience to take away from this series?
Emotionally? We want to invoke that sense of dread that great sci-fi horror can. That moment at the end of a Twilight Zone episode when you’re like ‘oh sh….
On an more philosophical level, we want to ask the question – where does the soul reside? For too long, and this is especially true in sci-fi, I think we’ve associated our humanity – our core identity – with our memories. But if you have personal experience with those stricken with dementia or Alzheimer’s or brain damage, then that sense of identity is challenged.
What is unique about your series?
Sci-fi due to the idea that it requires high production values to suspend disbelief and create spectacle tends to be rare in the self-funded end of web series; and even then, it tends towards the more “forgiving” world of exploitation or a broad sense of fandom (such as steampunk).
Restoration is a thoughtful sci-fi in the tradition of Twilight Zone, and that’s rare in television already, yet alone in web series.
What advice would you give to emerging creators?
I consider myself an emerging creator, so this is much for me as it is for anyone else:
The cheapest and best special effect you have is your story and the feelings it creates: take the time to get it right.
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