Game On with Daniel Jamal Judson's Echo Chamber

Daniel Jamal Judson is an award winning writer-director hailing out of Asheville NC. He's an award winning cinematographer, an alum of the IFP (Gotham) Emerging Narratives Lab, and has a distributed horror feature he co-wrote/produced under his belt. Daniel took top spot in Season 3 of Filmmatic's Sci-Fi Awards for his edgy and unique sci-fi thriller "Echo Chamber". Some Q&A with this prolific writer/filmmaker...

1)  How long have you been writing? 

I’ve always been writing or drawing comics or making videos since I was a kid. I wrote my first proper feature in college, where I also had the opportunity to write and direct three short films. Since then I’ve written several spec features and a couple of series, mostly elevated genre. I love sci-fi and horror that uses spectacle to make a statement. 

I co-wrote two features with indie directors; one was optioned, and the other was an indie-horror feature that I helped produce. That film was chosen by the IFP Emerging Narratives Lab and ended up with a small distribution deal, most famously seen in $5 DVD bins at Walmart.

2)  What screenwriting training have you received? 

I got my BA in Mass Communications at UNC Asheville, where I was able to take a couple of screenwriting classes with a great teacher named Hal Marienthal. After that, I read a bunch of books, took several online courses, and read every screenplay pdf I could find. I also did a course led by veteran showrunner, Patricia Green, who has been very supportive to me. 

3)  What writing habits work for you?  Do you write in short or long shifts, at scheduled times? 

I mostly write at scheduled times, unless there’s an imminent deadline, then I might stay up all night. On normal days, mornings are best for me, a three or four hour session, then I change gears to my day job that often flows into the evening. 

4)  What is your current day job, and how does it influence your writing & project choices? 

I have a small production company in Asheville, NC. I’ve worked various roles in film and television production for a couple of decades, from camera department to VFX to writing and producing. The biggest influence of my day job on my writing is that I think about physical production while I’m writing. How can a scene or moment be executed with cinematic elegance and technical simplicity?

Equally important, it taught me how to collaborate with other creatives as well as suits. My early experience as a video editor, right out of college, forced me to get over my ego/emotional attachment to iterations of creative work, regardless of the time I had invested. Understanding my role on a given project is big. Sometimes I have a lot of creative input, other times I am working in a purely technical capacity. 

For my choice of projects, the biggest thing is being realistic about how much time and energy will go into a project and to select projects that I care about enough to fully commit to. 

5)  Our judges loved your sci-fi/horror feature "Echo Chamber", how would you describe the project to our readers? 

It’s a sci-fi/horror about an obsessive-compulsive researcher who lands her dream job with a famous game designer studying his experimental neurotech that boosts brain activity to “Limitless” levels, but it turns into a nightmare when she discovers the device hijacks users’ minds to feed a parasitic sentience lurking at its core–trapping her in a deadly game of survival. 

Inspired by iconic sci-fi thrillers and supernatural horrors from GET OUT to EX MACHINA, to INCEPTION and ROSEMARY’S BABY… ECHO CHAMBER taps into our collective aspirations and our deepest fears surrounding the advent of A.I. and the prospect of giving it reign over our shared reality. Evicting the human spirit from the creation of media is the existential threat at the heart of ECHO CHAMBER. 

6)  How did you evoke the unique premise behind "Echo Chamber"? 

ECHO CHAMBER grew out of a moment of eavesdropping on my young daughter sneaking an extended conversation with SIRI. I was irked by this unnatural interaction, but also fascinated by it. This specific concept emerged through an exercise I do a couple of times a year to generate loglines/concepts and get back into big picture thinking. I came up with a bunch of concepts based on that moment and I tested the loglines out on some friends. This one actually came in second place, but it tapped into my background in media studies, my suspicions about the effects of media on the psyche, and it had a character I wanted to spend time with, so I ran with it.  

7)  What are you working on now?  What do you plan on writing in the near future?  

I am currently co-writing a family monster-musical with a grammy-winning children’s musician and finishing up a spec feature script based on my short film SHELTERED.  

Next up is a slightly sentimental, contained sci-fi/horror that challenges our relationships with family, aging, and the deceased in an increasingly virtual world. 

8)  How does living a distance from any major production hub affect your industry networking and outreach? 

I think as a writer, I choose a certain amount of isolation, so I’m not a natural at networking. It feels a little sweaty to cold query strangers, so I mostly don’t. My network is people that I’ve worked with in LA or ATL and they’re mostly crew, with a few directors and producers. Everyone seems to be trying to figure out the shifting filmmaking landscape these past couple of years.

9)  Where would you like to be writing-wise, and industry career-wise, in 3 years? 

I want to be collaborating at a higher level. 

I’d like to see ECHO CHAMBER made by filmmakers who love it and have the ability to attract the prestige talent that the film deserves. I want to direct the feature of SHELTERED in North Carolina, where I have strong relationships with crew and locations.  

A major goal for me is to have a relationship with a manager/producer who works in genre films, loves my perspective, and has the professional insight to guide my work to its best form, and knows how to sell what I do.

Overall, I want to be collaborating more, whether that’s writing a script for a producer’s concept or one of mine, working with a room or with a director. I really enjoy the process of sharing perspective. I find it much easier to see a story and make decisions in collaboration. I can get overwhelmed with “good ideas” when I’m working alone , especially when there’s not a deadline, so I really appreciate having other creatives to explore and interrogate ideas with. It definitely makes the process faster and is a lot of fun. 

10)  Any advice for those about to write their first sci-fi project?  Any pitfalls to avoid when adding AI or VR elements to a storyline?

Don’t settle for the first thing that pops into your head, because it’s probably something that we’ve already seen. Spend time to dig deeper. The best ideas are excavated after we dig out all the derivative or obvious ones. Also, use the genre to take big swings! Make big statements, but make sure it’s from the bottom of your heart. Don’t tell us stuff everyone knows. Tell us what YOU know, that we don’t, and don’t hold back the part you’re embarrassed about. Since these technologies are inherently sterile, it’s even more important that you bear your soul. Like, if you don’t feel uncomfortable about the level of personal intimacy you’re sharing, go back and risk more of yourself. We will all thank you for it. 

Congratulations once again to screenwriter/filmmaker Daniel Jamal Judson, our Season 3 Sci-Fi/Fantasy Awards Winner. All contact and script requests for Mr. Judson will be forwarded to his attention. You can also find Daniel on Instagram and on his website.