How Scienshell Began?

By Yaboo

Hi! Thanks for opening this post. I’m Yaboo, one of the people building Scienshell. I’d like to tell you a little about how we got here.

You might have found us on YouTube, on our website, or in some other corner of the internet. Wherever it was, I’m guessing we have something in common: a love of sci-fi.

Those few letters mean an awful lot to me. Sometimes I find it hard to explain just how much. Looking back, science fiction was a huge part of my first twenty years.

Before Scienshell, most of that relationship was with books. I wanted to read every Hugo and Nebula Award winner I could get my hands on. The worlds those authors imagined were strange and wonderful, and they stayed with me. Naturally, I wanted to become a great science fiction writer myself. At least one Hugo, surely?

Forgive a student’s ambition. At the time, that seemed like a perfectly worthwhile thing to spend a life working toward.

Well, I got older. I read more widely, and I began to learn a little about the realities of publishing. The dream of becoming a great writer got more complicated.

If I had to pick the two books that have meant the most to me, I’d choose Robert Silverberg’s Dying Inside and Robert L. Forward’s Dragon’s Egg.

I brought a lot of my own feelings to Dying Inside. I still wanted to write science fiction, even as I watched the publishing industry struggle. Perhaps that gap between the dream and the reality is why the book hit me so hard.

I’d like to spend a little longer on Dragon’s Egg. It explains a lot about why I love hard science fiction, and how that love eventually found its way into Scienshell.

Forward places an intelligent species on the surface of a neutron star. Then he takes the idea seriously. What could life look like there? How would these creatures move, sense their surroundings, and make sense of the world they live in?

In the novel, extreme gravity and magnetic fields shape their bodies and the ways they move. Their biology depends on interactions very different from those that sustain life on Earth. Those conditions carry through into their daily lives and their civilization. Before long, you’re trying to understand their world on its own terms.

I love that experience. A single physical premise can grow into a whole world of stories. The more seriously you take its conditions, the more likely you are to end up somewhere you couldn’t have imagined at the start. The science helps shape the imagination. It makes the world stranger, and more specific.

What especially fascinates me about Dragon’s Egg is the difference in the two civilizations’ sense of time. The Cheela live, think, and move through generations much faster than humans do. A few hours for us can contain a long stretch of history for them. Over the course of a single encounter, each side’s understanding of the other keeps changing. A gap in development that seemed fixed can disappear remarkably quickly.

That shift in scale makes it hard to keep treating humanity as the measure of everything. Our ideas about lifespans, history, and progress all come from the conditions we live under. Change those conditions, and the universe might produce an entirely different way of understanding the world.

But what I love most is the generosity in the exchange of knowledge. Humans share what they know with the Cheela. Later, the faster-developing Cheela leave knowledge for humanity in return. Their capabilities and their positions change. The willingness to understand each other, and to help each other keep exploring, survives.

I think that’s why the book gives me such a sense of distance from everyday life. For a while, I can step back from the arguments around me and imagine this kind of relationship between civilizations. We might be profoundly different. We might barely be able to share the same experience of time. And we could still want to tell each other what we’ve learned about the universe.

That kind of hard science fiction has had a lasting effect on me. I want to bring that way of thinking into the films we make at Scienshell. If we imagine a city, an engineering project, or a way of life, we keep asking questions. What does it need to work? Where does the energy come from? How does the environment shape its structure? What would it actually feel like to live there?

Those questions gradually find their way into the images and the sound. I hope our films can give you a similar feeling. The world in front of you is unfamiliar, but as you begin to understand how it works, you want to stay a little longer.

And yes, after that detour, we’ve finally made it back to Scienshell.

For me, science fiction has become a way of life. It lets me step away from the problems of the present for a while and look back at today from a much more distant future. From there, I can find meaning in the life I’m living now. Nothing else gives me quite that perspective.

But where should that way of life lead me? With the limited time I have, what can I do to help the thing I love keep growing?

Space documentaries on the BBC, Discovery, and YouTube gave me a lot to think about. Film could inspire curiosity and imagination too. Perhaps this was a way I could take part in making science fiction.

I’ve always felt that a good science fiction story, whatever form it takes, can leave you wanting to walk outside on a quiet night and look up. The stars have been there all along. But for a moment, it feels as though you’re seeing beyond your everyday life for the first time again.

I want to make things that can give someone that feeling.

I once read a passage that has stayed with me:

We could have chosen a vast future, but we all ended up burrowing into tiny integrated circuits instead. May those little chips one day power the ark that carries humanity to the stars.

I keep coming back to it with a feeling of frustration. When I look at the wars, the arguments, and the ways we hold each other back, the futures I grew up reading about still feel a long way off. And I don’t want the future I care about to depend entirely on the schedules of people in Washington.

We have to do something.

What I can do is turn the futures that fascinate me into stories, and try to make other people curious about them too. I think that’s worth doing. It’s worth giving some of the best years of my life to.

Bringing It to Life

We had a whole world we wanted to put on screen.

Our early Cosmic Geographic films had received encouraging feedback on YouTube. They gave us a starting point. Now we needed to work out how to bring the larger world we had in mind to life.

But the tools we had and the speed we could work at were still a long way from what we needed. We knew what we wanted to show. We also had to find a way to make it.

Over time, advances in 3D engines and other tools gave us more room to work. We gradually improved our workflow and became able to produce films more consistently. I brought my own experience with music and visuals into that work as we developed Scienshell’s new series.

I hope you like them.

Of course, Scienshell has never been something I could do alone. There was a long stretch when things stalled. Along the way, though, we found people who shared our enthusiasm and wanted to help make these worlds real. We’re still a small team, with contributors working on everything from the science behind a setting to the final images and sound. Together, we have enough to get this journey started.

And that means we need to think seriously about how to keep going.

We Need to Hear from You

Let’s start with something practical. CG films like these cost a lot to make.

We’ve stuck with creating our own visuals and sound. A piece of original music can take months to go from the first idea to the finished score. It may go through revision after revision, ending up as a project file with dozens of tracks.

A single major shot might take several 3D artists months of work, each picking up where someone else left off.

That is real time, skill, and effort from the people making these films. We want them to be paid for it. We also want them to be able to come back and make the next one.

As a fan, I could spend as long as I liked imagining these worlds. As a creator, I also have to work out how to put them in front of you. And once we finish this film, how do we make the next one?

So yes, we want Scienshell to earn money. We want the films to eventually cover their own production costs. That’s what I mean when I talk about making this a business. It’s a fairly simple idea, but it matters a lot to us.

In 2025, we started making a new series.

We felt we were making real progress with the models, the image quality, and the music. But the views, subscriber growth, and engagement on YouTube weren’t giving us the response we’d hoped for.

There was a gap between how we felt about the work and how it was being received.

Honestly, that’s a rough place to be.

We still love what we’re making, and we want to keep making it better. But our own enthusiasm can only take us so far. We need to know what stays with people after they watch.

When someone takes the time to talk about a setting or a scene, we pay attention. I want to know what you saw, what drew you in, and what didn’t feel right. Those conversations help us understand our own work, and they affect what we do next.

Paying for the films helps us cover the cost of making them.

If we go too long without enough response or support, it becomes hard to keep going, emotionally as well as financially. I think we should be honest with you about that.

Without your support, we won’t survive.

Why We Built This Website

That was the situation we were in when we started talking about a website of our own.

Building a separate site before we’d found the audience we wanted on YouTube might sound a little odd. A website doesn’t automatically bring an audience with it. It also takes time to maintain.

But the problem we wanted to solve was specific. If someone likes these films and wants to help us keep making them, can we give them a direct way to do that?

So we built this website.

And once we had a place of our own, we wanted to see whether we could present the films in a way that suited them better.

You may have noticed the story map for Out of the Cradle on the homepage. It shows where the stories take place, and places the individual films within a world that’s gradually opening up.

We want to explore how humanity might develop into a more advanced civilization. Energy, transport, resources, and the places we live are all part of that story. Putting them on a map might make it easier to see how the films relate to one another, and how they fit together into that future.

We’ve also kept six films free to watch: episodes 02–04 of Out of the Cradle, and all three episodes of Cosmic Geographic.

They’re a way for you to see what we make, and how well we can make it, before spending anything. I hope they give you enough to decide whether you like what we’re doing here.

Paying for the Films

We decided to offer one-time purchases rather than subscriptions.

I like the idea that, when people spend money, they’re voting for the future they want. For Scienshell, we’d like that choice to be as specific as possible.

If you like a particular film, you can buy that film. If you want to follow the whole series, there’s an option for that too. And those purchases can help us understand which stories you want to see more of.

One-time purchases also make the cost clear. You know what you’re paying when you buy, and there’s no automatic renewal afterward. For now, that’s the approach we’re most comfortable with.

An individual film currently costs US$2.99. You can start with whichever one interests you most.

The Season Pass costs US$42 and covers the full 24-episode season of Out of the Cradle. That includes the season’s paid episodes that are already out, as well as those still to come. Buying a pass also means helping fund the rest of the season, and trusting us to make it.

Why 42? Well, we make science fiction. We were hardly going to pass up the answer to the ultimate question of life, the universe, and everything from The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. Allow us a little sci-fi indulgence when choosing a price.

The Life Pass costs US$369 and gives you access to all of Scienshell’s paid films, now and in the future.

369 is a nod to the number lore associated with Tesla and the idea of a “key to the universe.” Another small Easter egg from a group of science fiction fans.

It’s a much larger purchase. If you love the work and can comfortably afford to give more support at once, this is an option. That support will make a practical difference to what we can make next.

Of course, both passes include work we haven’t finished yet. Once we receive that support, we still have to do the work and make those films. Being trusted with that money means taking responsibility for it. You can find the details of what each pass covers, and how upgrades work, on the Plans page.

Whether you buy one film or a pass, you’re helping us cover production costs. We need those purchases to add up over time, so the next film can happen.

A Little Utopia Here

Alongside the films, I’d like to use this blog to talk about things we couldn’t fit into them, and what was going through our heads while we were making them.

Things like what you’re reading now. I may ramble a little, but I think we should have somewhere we can talk to each other directly.

If you’ve found the TECHNICAL ESSAY ON THE ENGINEERING CYBERNETICS OF THE AEROSTAT CITY, you can thank our scientific advisor for the care and work that went into it. Even a single setting in a film can leave us with plenty more to discuss.

If you like articles like that, please tell us. I’d love to know what you’d like to explore beyond the films themselves.

How much support will the website bring in? How far will it help us go? We’ll have to keep working to find out. The site takes time and money too, and we’re still figuring things out.

But if you like Scienshell and want us to keep making films, there’s now another place where you can help us do that.

Your support is what keeps us making these things. Thank you for loving what I love.