Oats Studios Is Back With a New Sci-Fi Short, ADAM: The Mirror

Oats Studios, the freeform, experimental, independent film studio created by director Neill Blomkamp, has returned with a new short film after having seemingly wrapped up the “Volume 1” part of its project. We’ve written extensively about Oats in the past, calling the first three films, Firebase, Rakka and Zygote an “amazing exploration of the boundaries of horror, gore and sci-fi.” Now we’ve got ADAM: The Mirror, which keeps the creative spark burning while hinting at more sci-fi filmmaking to come.

ADAM: The Mirror tells the story of a nameless android who appears to be the mind of a human, trapped in the body of a robot, cast out from a walled city or prison and sent into the wastes along with others like him. It’s the follow-up to a previous film, ADAM: Chapter 1, which showed the android’s initial awakening and expulsion, while also being a test of the advanced CGI made possible through the so-called “Unity” engine. More details about the series can be found at the Unity website, which seems to be partnering with Oats to showcase this new rendering technology. We highly recommend visiting that site if you’re at all interested in the technical side of computer-generated effects, as it goes into great detail on the creation of the ADAM series. Here’s what it has to say about the setting:

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Adam tells the story of a human whose brain has been erased and imprisoned in a robotic shell. When the hero is expelled from a walled city with a crowd of his fellow prisoners, the newborn cyborg realizes he is exiled in a post-apocalyptic world.

“I was interested in directing several pieces on the story setup in the first Adam episode, […] the thematic backbone of it is a discussion of where your soul is,” explains Neill Blomkamp.

Second installment The Mirror finds our amnesiac hero on a deadly trek from the walled city to a refugee outpost, where he will discover a clue to his identity. The third episode, The Prophet, reveals an opposing tribe of survivors, this one human and heavily armed. Both films hint what the future might hold for the Adam universe. The films will be released on Oats’ YouTube channel.

The mentioned third short film, ADAM: The Prophet, is not yet available, although Oats seems to hint that the release will come fairly soon, similar to the way they released Rakka, Firebase and Zygote in relatively quick succession. The obvious question is what the studio, and Blomkamp as storyteller, intend to do with the world they’re creating for ADAM afterward. Will we get a feature film out of these concepts? Or a series of shorts? Will there be a full-on “Volume 2” for Oats Studios, or will that Volume 2 constitute the expansion of one of the stories they created in Volume 1? We’re still itching to see longer versions of some of these stories; Rakka and Zygote in particular. We’ll just have to wait and see. In the meantime, check out ADAM: The Mirror in the player at the top of the page.