Season 1 (Before the Stars): A boy, a machine he should not have woken, and one night when the moon came up over an unshielded town.
Curious, quick, and completely unable to leave a closed thing closed. He can take apart anything, including rules. He is not the strongest child on this planet and he knows it, which is why he wins by changing the problem instead of hitting it. Everything that goes wrong this season starts with him. So does everything that gets fixed.
An ancient machine shaped like a dog, found dormant and woken by accident. Dry, blunt and faintly rude. He limps, he does not explain himself, and he never says a kind word out loud. Jokutai repairs him slowly, badly, and by hand across all six episodes. Nobody built him for this boy. He chose him anyway.
The older brother. Wins arguments by not moving and ends fights by standing in the way. He would rather go somewhere dangerous with Jokutai than find out afterwards that he went alone. He never says that, obviously. He is twelve.
A Namekian who was on this planet long before the settlers landed, living quietly among the ruins with a failing stone companion called Mona. He guards something. He has guarded it his entire life and never once used it. He is warm, funny, and answers almost nothing.
A relic salvager working the edges of an empire, looking for a piece of old navigation equipment worth a great deal of money. Polite, genuinely charming, and very good at his job. He does not think he is stealing. To him, abandoned things belong to whoever reaches them first. He is the only other person on this planet as curious as Jokutai. That is the whole problem.
An ordinary girl having dreams of a place that does not exist and stars nobody recognises. She wants very badly to be normal about it. The quietest person in the group, and the first to notice anything.
Reads machines the way other children read faces. His family have kept this town's salvaged technology running for three generations. He is the one who stops to understand something while everyone else runs past it, which saves them, right up until it doesn't.
Goes straight at things and enjoys it far too much. The strongest of the younger children and the first to volunteer for anything that looks dangerous. Being wrong has never once slowed him down.
Can cross anything in the dark, and says so constantly. Loudly and cheerfully afraid of almost everything, right up to the moment she moves anyway. Katien's older sister, and the reason this group is never quiet.
The smallest of them, and the one who says the least. She is also braver than all of them, which nobody notices until it matters. Katuo's younger sister.
Jokutai's father. An engineer who speaks about twelve words a day and expects you to have thought about all of them. He teaches by asking one question and then waiting. He is carrying something he has never told his sons.
Jokutai's mother. The calmest person in any room, including the ones that are on fire. She feeds people instead of giving advice. Warm, unsentimental, and far harder to move than she looks.
PLANET 1234567. A warm, weathered frontier world of red rock and deep green canopy, where every building is carved stone bolted to salvaged machinery, and everything has been repaired at least twice. The people here are Saiyans, but not the kind the galaxy is afraid of. Their grandparents arrived as soldiers and found nothing to conquer. Two generations without a war have made them engineers, farmers and parents. They are good at fixing things because nothing here is new. They are not the first to live here. Whoever came before left ruins across half the continent, a symbol nobody can read, and technology that still works after a thousand years of silence. Nobody knows what happened to them. Nobody likes to ask. And on the ridge above the town stand tall stone towers that everyone can see and nobody explains. They are not for defence. They are for the moon.
Aug 15, 2026
Before a character appears in a single frame, they exist as a reference sheet: front, side, three-quarter, colour palette, and a height. Then everyone gets lined up against a wall together. The children in this story are 8, 9, 10 and 12, and the difference between 8 and 10 is about a head. Get that wrong once and an audience quietly stops believing the group is real. So we check every render against this line-up. Ravok on the far left, Elder Habu and Mona beside him, then Jokutai's parents, then the children, smallest last.
Aug 15, 2026
Every frame of this series is built to one specification, and it never changes: 35mm anamorphic at f/2.8, Kodak Vision3 250D, natural motivated light, soft contrast, real grain. The note at the bottom of every image brief reads "premium indie feature cinematography, naturalistic and unglossy." No neon, no gloss, no heroic sky. It is slower and fussier than stylising it would be, and it buys exactly one thing: when a ten-year-old boy is frightened, you believe him.
Aug 15, 2026
There is no narrator in this series. Not once, in any episode. If something matters, it has to be shown, or said by somebody who wants something, and Episode 1 has under 450 words of dialogue in eighteen minutes. Which puts a lot of weight on sound. The single most important beat in the first episode is not a line and not a fight. It is a small mechanical noise coming out of the dirt, and the boy who decides to keep digging anyway.
Aug 15, 2026
Every location in Season 1 was built as a place first and a set second. The rule we wrote for the whole planet was one line: nothing here is new, and everything has been repaired at least twice. So the plaza has salvaged hull plating bolted onto carved stone. The workshops run cabling through thousand-year-old arches nobody built for cabling. Even the ruins have ruins in them. It means a character can walk anywhere and the world holds up, and it means the audience learns the history without anyone stopping to explain it.
