The writer
Ricardo Zuccolo
Writer and creator of NOVA
Ricardo Zuccolo grew up in Brazil in a house with a guitar in it. His father played and sang at every family gathering, and by the time Ricardo was seven or eight he was writing songs of his own. He was the kid who finished the books assigned to his grade and then read the ones his two older sisters brought home from school. Stories came to him the way songs did, sometimes slowly over days, sometimes all at once and nearly whole.
He studied naval and ocean engineering and built a career in offshore energy, programming from his first year of college onward. In engineering he found himself telling stories anyway. Every project has one, and Ricardo became the engineer his managers handed the final report to, the one who could take months of calculations and make a client see what they meant. Today he leads major proposals in energy: understanding what a client is really after, and telling the story that wins the job.
He has followed artificial intelligence closely for years, long before the first public chatbots, and once trained a self-driving car of his own with neural networks inside a simulated world.
Screenwriting came into his home through his wife, who began studying the craft together with her sister. Ricardo started building a writing tool for the two of them, still in development, and to build it he had to learn how screenwriters actually work. The stories he had carried for years began to look like screenplays.
NOVA came the way his best songs did: in a single afternoon, mostly whole. Over the months that followed it became a 134-page screenplay, a visual world and a concept trailer.
NOVA is his first feature screenplay. Other stories, very different from this one, are already waiting their turn.
“Every story about AI ends one of two ways: it kills us or it saves us. I wanted the third: it listens.”
The process
How NOVA was made
The story, the characters, the world, the structure and the ending of NOVA are Ricardo's, and so was every decision about what each scene would contain. He used AI the way he has used software his whole career, as an instrument under his direction. Portuguese is his native language, and much of NOVA was imagined in it. An AI assistant helped him organize those ideas, draft them in English screenplay form and fill gaps, always at his instruction. Text it drafted remains in the screenplay, and he revised, redirected and approved every page.
The concept trailer and the images on this site were made with AI image, video, voice and music tools, from shots he designed and chose, and he cut and mixed the trailer himself.
NOVA is registered with the WGA West and filed with the U.S. Copyright Office and with Brazil's Fundação Biblioteca Nacional. The U.S. filing discloses the use of AI.