Help Produce The ZĒP Movie and Graphic Novel

Hey there! My name is Nolan Cross, I'm the creator, director, and author of the 12-part ZĒP graphic novel series, a project that has been in the making since the summer of 2018. Over the past 3 years, I have been working closely with graphic artist Benji Andringa and later, our tech and music editor Declan Saville, on Volume 1 of Project ZĒP. Developing our own styles when it comes to this epic and massive-scope story along the way, we have all taken the deep dive into my World of Zēp, which is an alternate world and universe to Earth - populated with an expansive range of bizarre, deeply complex characters and stunning mythical locations....

 

The World of Zēp is a relatively small place, but with an intensely powerful footprint on the cosmos, and with huge ramifications on the eternal battle between Good and Evil. The story itself, chronicled through 12 Volumes of varying length, is fraught with danger, depravity, and tragedy, but also blessed by Light and the innocence of Imagination...this story blends all genres and all tropes to create something wholly unique. Taken together, ZĒP has high fantasy adventure, mind-numbing sensory horror, Lovecraftian science fiction, all-too human melodrama, and perhaps most of all, pitch black comedy and inexplicable quirkiness.

 

Like the mosaic of oddball characters and creatures that come together to form the non-linear narrative, ZĒP is the very definition of artists of all kinds joining forces to bring one vision to life. Made, written, drawn, and edited in Revelstoke, B.C., a quintessential small Canadian mountain town, designer Benji Andringa previously had worked mostly on T-shirt and mural art until meeting the then 13-years-old Nolan Cross (me!), who had and still has the dream of one day making movies. I have had this story in the very front of my mind for over a decade, first dreamt up by a little kid playing with his action figurines with his then-babysitter Vicki, my greatest mentor and a grandmother figure in my life. Through twice-a-week improvised rolling theatre, Vicki and I conjured up the World of Zēp and everything in it, and from there, I took the reins and began to form the full story - inspired daily by watching movies and playing games. ZĒP, as it is today, is the result of all those fantasy action games you played with your toys as a kid, but imagine the kid playing them never grew up, and instead went off to consume as much horror and mystery-crime media as you can imagine...then returned to those childhood daydreams and merged the two to make something that is pretty much Lord of the Rings combined with Twin Peaks and the video game Outlast.

 

While a good writer and book author, my real talent lies in film directing and making art through the medium of cinema...and ZĒP is the gateway towards this dream of mine.

 

Despite all this history, the Journey has only just begun...we are still 11 whole Volumes off of finishing this magnum opus, and my dad Steven Cross - who has served as project manager and producer this entire time - only has so much left in his bank account that Benji, Declan, and I have sucked dry with funding ZĒP. Be part of the creation, and all of our dreams, by donating today!