CLARE³ — A Retro Science Fiction Project Reborn

 A long-gestating animated science fiction story finally finds its home on Patreon.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 The Blog Was Quiet for a Reason

This blog has been unusually quiet for a long time. That silence was not inactivity. It was the opposite. During that period I was quietly reinventing my relationship with illustration, screenwriting, and cinematic storytelling.

For years I worked across different formats: comics, scripts, visual experiments,  but the tools and the production pipelines never quite aligned with the type of project I wanted to build. I wanted something closer to classic science fiction cinema: a narrative that could exist simultaneously as a film, as visual design, and as a written structure. Over the last year I began rebuilding that process almost from scratch. New tools appeared. Artificial intelligence entered the creative pipeline. Some tools proved promising, others disappeared halfway through development. Entire workflows had to be reinvented more than once. In the middle of all that experimentation, an old project resurfaced. Its name is CLARE³.

 

A Story That Began in 1996

CLARE³ did not start recently. The core idea dates back to 1996. The premise is deceptively simple:A child born in a cube and a robot explore an empty Earth after humanity has vanished. Over the years this concept evolved through several incarnations:

• an unfinished comic
• early screenplay drafts
• visual experiments
• different mythological frameworks
• alternate endings

Some versions were ambitious. Some were excessive. Many ideas were abandoned. But one central image always survived: a synthetic child growing up inside a cube, guided by a machine, in a world without witnesses. That image eventually became Clare and D.O.R.A. 9.

 

  

 

A Retro Science Fiction Spirit

CLARE³ belongs to a particular tradition of science fiction. It draws inspiration from the cinematic atmosphere of the 1970s: the era of films such as Silent Running, Planet of the Apes, and the philosophical science fiction of Arthur C. Clarke. These works were less concerned with spectacle and more with exploration: empty landscapes, quiet mysteries, philosophical questions, the long shadow of human civilization. CLARE³ follows that same spirit.Instead of constant action, the story unfolds through discovery: abandoned environments, fragments of lost technology, and the gradual realization that something fundamental happened to humanity.

Building the First Animated Chapter

Over the past year I produced the first animated fragment of the project. The production process was unusual. I worked largely alone, experimenting with emerging tools, adapting workflows that changed several times during development. At one point the main animation system I was using simply disappeared from the platform that hosted it, forcing me to improvise new solutions. The final result is a 24-minute animated segment, assembled using a combination of AI-assisted imagery, manual editing, and traditional storytelling techniques. Even the final assembly was done using unexpectedly humble tools — sometimes the simplest tools are still the most reliable ones.

Why Patreon

CLARE³ is not only a film. It is also a long creative process involving:

• screenplay development
• concept art
• visual design
• narrative exploration
• production notes

For that reason the project has found a natural home on Patreon. There, the project is published gradually as a serialized experience. Each chapter includes:

• film fragments
• screenplay chapters
• development diaries
• concept and production art

Together these materials reveal both the story and the creative process behind it.

The Project Is Now Live

The CLARE³ project is now live on Patreon.

Visitors can follow the story chapter by chapter while also exploring the artistic and narrative evolution behind it. If you are curious about retro science fiction, experimental animation, or long-form storytelling developed over decades, you may find the project interesting. You can explore it here:

https://www.patreon.com/c/walterplittquintin

A Long Journey Just Beginning

In a way, CLARE³ has been developing for nearly thirty years. But in another sense, it is only beginning now. The story of Clare and D.O.R.A. 9 is unfolding step by step — across film fragments, scripts, images, and ideas. And somewhere in the ruins of an empty Earth, a child and a robot are still trying to understand what happened to humanity.