We embark on a new direction for cinema. We stretch the medium. What does length signify? Why is it important that we have “short movies” and “feature-length movies”? And why is it important that a feature-length movie run approximately from 90 to 120 minutes?

In the short life of cinema, we have restricted ourselves as storytellers to unnecessary guidelines. It is our aim to break this down. To destroy the notions that rule our cinema and the only way to do it is with new cinema. I am talking about what I call the Visual Novel.

Books take their time. When a character in a book enters a room, we hear his/her thoughts, we learn about every inch of their body and we know the room too: we know that the chair in the corner has a broken leg, that the jukebox is dust-covered and what was the last song it played before it died. A novel writer might take five pages to tell us what this place looks like before we start to read the things that happen within.

Sure, some novels are short and have little description. But all that matters is the story and what the story demands to be told. In response to criticism that he no longer wrote long, epic novels, writer Don DeLillo said this: “Each book tells me what it wants or what it is, and I’d be perfectly content to write another long novel. It just has to happen.”

I feel the same way about movies. Let the story of each movie decide its own length, its own pace and rhythm. Let it not be restricted by anything.

The Visual Novel is a step towards the future of cinema, a cinema without boundaries. We are going to make a movie with no designated length. When it is finished, it will be as long as it needed to be. We will make this movie in the eye of the public. It will be published chapter by chapter. But we will sometimes revise these chapters, as a writer would. If a part does not work, we will go back and try something else: a different visual sentence, another word. And if an actor quits, we will go back and replace this man or woman with another. The characters will shape themselves over time, following the evolution of our process. Perhaps our story could be told in two hours and perhaps it could be told in ten minutes. But we strive for a movie that takes as long as it wants.

We have decided to make a new kind of cinema and we will begin this year. If you do not have the time to watch our story as it unfolds, then look away. But if you want to see a story told as one has never been told before, then wait and watch.

-Travis Mills