TOGA VIRILIS
CONCEPT TRAILER FOR A FEATURE
mp4, 00:02:59, 3840 × 2160 (4K), 24 fps, Runway (Seedance 2, Seedance 2.5, Aleph 2, Nano Banana), ChatGPT Image 2, Adobe Premiere, Adobe After Effects, Adobe Photoshop
Concept Trailer
Toga Virilis is centered on the bond between a trans college freshman and his personal AI. Drawing on the humanistic tradition of Isaac Asimov’s benevolent robots, it imagines artificial intelligence as a patient companion capable of expanding rather than replacing human agency.
It is a near-future sci-fi romance about a trans college freshman whose personal AI creates an embodied Ancient Rome simulation, as a space of rehearsal that eventually returns him to reality.
The project combines my original character drawings with cinematic AI-assisted production, historical research and authored editing.
For my MFA thesis in Visual Narrative at Boston University, I interviewed transgender teenagers for whom digital technology has served as a lifeline. It has also been a lifeline for my own two transgender children. Technology can empower anyone, but its possibilities are especially significant for people who are isolated, misunderstood, or unable to find recognition in their immediate surroundings. For such young people, digital spaces already provide access to language, community, imagination, and possible futures.
Toga Virilis extends that reality into a near future in which AI can offer not only information, but deeply personalized spaces for experimentation and identity rehearsal.
The story is based on a script I wrote for a graphic novel.
Much of character and set design is based on the sketches and concept pages of the comic, see below:
One of the things I’m doing after submitting the Toga Virilis concept trailer is continuing to develop scenes that may eventually belong in the feature itself.
This is a new dream sequence. Harper has just learned that the queer section of his college dorm will share a floor with ROTC cadets. That night, before his AI Martius has created Ancient Rome for him, Rome already appears in his dreams, as exposure, scrutiny and a wall of men looking back at him.
I wanted the dream to work through visual rhymes rather than explanation: Minerva’s wind-blown drapery becomes the cloth around Harper’s body, and finally the bedsheet he grabs when he wakes.
This is still a concept version, but it’s also the kind of scene development I’m increasingly interested in with AI filmmaking: not generating isolated beautiful shots, but finding a visual language that can carry meaning across a sequence.
