Schema · Technologies Index Systems nominal Build 26.09 04 products · 02 films
PRD-002 · Short film · In pre-production · 2027

How the West Was Won

~14 minALEXA 35 · Anamorphic 2.39:1Near-future MedellínSci-fi · Techno-thriller · EspionageEnglish · Spanish subtitles
Pre-
production
Key art in preparationWritten and directed by Christian Ramirez
01

Synopsis

Sofia is a senior partner at Wintermute Capital — an independent finance firm whose clients are American intelligence agencies. She operates in the space between institutional power and deniable action.

When she is rerouted to the Medellín compound of Case Emmerich — an ex-tech founder now selling experimental cryptography hardware to whoever can afford it — the assignment reads as routine. A formality. Sofia is not a field officer, and this is not supposed to matter.

The mansion Case has built for himself is a monument to controlled excess: concrete and glass, neon at its centre, the city glowing on the horizon beyond a floor-to-ceiling wall of night. Inside, the party moves. The deal moves. Everything is proceeding exactly as planned. Until it isn't.

What unravels is not chaos. It is a decision.

02

The world

How the West Was Won is set in the same near future as Infinite Regress. Wintermute and Kalinatek — names first heard in the earlier film — return here, and the argument continues: in a world where power belongs to whoever controls the most dangerous technology, who gets to decide what happens next.

The film is built in three layers. A contained spy thriller in real time. A political argument about the privatisation of intelligence, already accomplished. And a personal one — what the person who structures the deal owes the person who has to survive it, when they turn out to be the same person.

PaletteThree palettes, one building. Steel-blue pool light through floor-to-ceiling glass. A sunken neon room in pink and electric cyan — the room is not decorated with neon; the room is the neon. Then emergency red at the breach, and a corridor of strobing orange and blue.
ArchitectureA single-storey modern compound outside Medellín: board-formed concrete, glass, an interior loop wrapped around the neon room, a pool the camera can stage against the glass. Colombian practices only. The location is a casting decision.
SoundThe handler exists only in Sofia's earpiece and ours — a codec voice. The rest of the world drops below his channel whenever she listens.
03

Director's statement

“My work is in capital and technology. The financial logic, the corporate pragmatism — those are the tools I think with. This film takes those tools into a different arena. It's a reading of how capital and strategic interest converge — from the outside, at close range. Not a verdict on it.”Christian Ramirez · writer / director
04

Production

Writer / directorChristian Ramirez
ProductionSchema Technologies · self-produced
FormatALEXA 35 · master anamorphic · 2.39:1 · colour
RuntimeApproximately 14 minutes · proof-of-concept short
LanguageEnglish, with Spanish subtitles
StatusPre-production. Principal photography planned for 2027 in Medellín.
Prior filmInfinite Regress (2021, 10 min)

Crew, locations and collaboration. The production is assembling its heads of department and scouting compounds in and around Medellín. Cinematographers, production designers, location owners and producers who want to be part of it can write to hello@schematech.co.