Kodi Zene, 33 and currently residing in Dallas Tx, is a native Texan with a worldly view. Zene is the owner and creative director for Tempest Studios, a conceptual branding and marketing agency and production company featuring artistic design and in house printing warehouses for diverse marketing collateral capabilities.
Zene’s philanthropic heart, professional background, and talent have led him to create his current passion project, MONOCHROME. A multifaceted and multidimensional black and white world where readers and viewers are submerged into the implications that ensue when society sees color for the first time.
Zene’s hopes are to inspire others to take a different approach to film production, business and life to create social change and human connection.
I love stories, but most importantly in those stories, I believe in positive messaging. A moral of the story, a lesson learned. Art can be more than an expression of yourself but also of society and the world we live in. Important statements can be made through art that most people might turn away in any other form. It is a common language that connects the world no matter where we come from or language that we speak.
MONOCHROME is my statement. It’s my passion project that I’ve been carefully working on going on 6 years now. Yes, of course, I’m a huge fan of sci-fi and dystopian, but I wanted to create something more, something bigger. The current state of the world in which we live is quite frightening. Violence, war, racism and civil unrest are at remarkable highs. MONOCHROME ultimately is about equality but done so in a graceful, artistic and entertaining way. In a world with no color, how would society react if suddenly people turned color? Just how crazy would things get if it changed in a matter of days? The world in which we live doesn’t have to get to this point if you or I do something about it today.
I believed in MONOCHROME as I was writing, scouting and prepping, but it wasn’t until we started casting, filming/editing that it body slammed me. It exploded, the eerie parallel visuals of our world ingrained in my head. It’s grown beyond racial equality to equality of any kind. Our cast and crew are an extremely diverse cast of race, religion, and sexuality. All of whom believe in this message and have poured everything they are into it. I believe, and more than anything I want the world to see what we are building with this world of MONOCHROME. I hope and pray that other than just being entertainment, that it leaves an impression of doing good to all people.
We have a multi-award winning trailer. And this is our first feature, which is the origin story of the world and our characters. My vision is that this origin feature prologues a trilogy. Of which the first screenplay is 85% complete. We also have a collaborative comic book paralleling the story drawn by some of our fan artists. We also attend comic and sci-fi conventions spreading our message and we have a micro site dedicated to our equality aspect using #weareMONO. That is MONOCHROME.