Violent Sorrow, Modern Ecstasy
Los Angeles, California | Film Short
Film-Noir, Sci-Fi
100 years in the future, a doctor must choose between saving his own life or saving Los Angeles from a murderous dictator. In this cyberpunk retelling of Macbeth, a team of USC filmmakers bring a modern twist to a classic. Support this film if, in a world that often seems wrong, you still have hope.
Violent Sorrow, Modern Ecstasy
Los Angeles, California | Film Short
Film-Noir, Sci-Fi
1 Campaigns | California, United States
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This campaign raised $4,623 for production. Follow the filmmaker to receive future updates on this project.
35 supporters | followers
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100 years in the future, a doctor must choose between saving his own life or saving Los Angeles from a murderous dictator. In this cyberpunk retelling of Macbeth, a team of USC filmmakers bring a modern twist to a classic. Support this film if, in a world that often seems wrong, you still have hope.
About The Project
- The Story
- Wishlist
- Updates
- The Team
- Community
Mission Statement
The Story
Violent Sorrow, Modern Ecstasy is the story of a dying man who still cares in a world with little room for caring.
When Dr. Victor LaRoche learns that the toxic ecosystem of Los Angeles has poisoned his blood, he takes to the streets to come to terms with this diagnosis. During his night walk, he runs into a woman covered in blood, driven by her own internal reckoning to wander in the darkness.
Even though he will surely die soon, he’s sworn an oath to put his patients’ care above all. He takes the crazed woman to his clinic to care for her, and finds out that she is the wife of Macbeth, the tyrant running Los Angeles.
Torn between his commitment to minister to the sick and his strong sense of justice that wants nothing to do with dictators, Dr. LaRoche takes Grace Macbeth back to Dunsinane. Though he hopes, by delivering her to her home and family, to be done with them all, he’s offered something he needs: a cure to his own illness.
Against his better judgment, he agrees to treat Lady Macbeth in exchange for medicine otherwise available only to the moneyed and powerful. But something wicked this way comes…. and everything gets worse from there.
We need this story now because the world feels bleak. It’s easy to lose vital context: that the issues we’re facing today, people were dealing with back in the time of Shakespeare, 400 years ago; that unless we do something to change our world, these issues will just get worse, and we may be headed towards a cyberpunk future. Our story is the story of someone who cares. It is a story about the power that comes from thinking of others first without hope of gain.
Eight years since its initial conception, there’s never been a better time to make Violent Sorrow, Modern Ecstasy. We are the next generation of filmmakers–a team of storytellers who have both the drive and the knowledge to make this project happen.
We are deep into preproduction, and by donating money through this campaign, you will help us make the production of this film a reality! The funds we raise on Seed&Spark will go directly towards filmmaking essentials by helping us secure equipment, locations, and everything else we need!
Violent Sorrow, Modern Ecstasy speaks to a growing emotional reality today: a sense of isolation and disconnection from one another, the fear of losing our humanity inside increasingly overwhelming systems.
Although the film exists within a cyberpunk dystopia, its emotional core is deeply human. At the
center of the story is a doctor who continues to choose compassion in a world that no longer
values empathy. In a time where technology, transactions, and survival often dominate our
lives, the small act of caring for others becomes quietly radical.
Rather than focusing only on spectacle of futuristic aesthetics,VSME zeroes in on the core of cyberpunk that projects the key issues of the present into the future, only to find them rooted in our shared past. Our story looks to Shakespeare’s timeless understanding of human mortality, the loneliness of the spirit, and the ultimate balm of human connection. What remains that’s human when society becomes emotionally numb? Can kindness still survive within that collapse?
As filmmakers studying in a big city like Los Angeles, we have all experienced the emotions
reflected in this story about distance, uncertainty, and the struggle to build genuine connection within large-scale structures that seem unmoved by individuals or community. Making this film has become a way to build that community, to transform those feelings into something shared and meaningful.
This is ultimately a film about borders, displacements, and persecution. What does it mean to be a stranger in a strange land? One important detail we have added to our main character is that he wears the Huguenot cross: when a massacre by those in power in France drove them from their homeland, the Huguenots were the first group of people to be referred to as “refugees.”
They were the immigrants to England that Shakespeare would have known in his time. It is believed that Shakespeare collaborated with other playwrights of his day to write the play “Sir Thomas Moore”, which features the famous speech, “The Stranger’s Case”—that case lays outt how citizens of a nation should treat the strangers who find themselves driven there: in the same way that they would wish to be treated if they could imagine themselves to be immigrants.
VSME adapts this story as a subplot within the larger world of Macbeth. Sir Ian McKellan has enacted the Stranger’s Case monologue since the mid 1960s. If you’d like to see a brilliant reading of it, please check out his performance on the CBS “Late Show”:
https://youtu.be/2l2RqzVG4ag?t=1384
VSME is also a collaboration between passionate emerging filmmakers from USC School of
Cinematic Arts who believe strongly in emotionally driven storytelling. Supporting this film
means supporting young artists who are trying to create a speculative world that feels intimate,
personal, and socially reflective.
Ultimately, this film matters because audiences are hungry for stories that imagine the
future, and also help us understand the felt emotion of the present. Beneath the neon and
decay, VSME is a story about people trying to care for one another before their humanity
disappears completely.
Filming for Violent Sorrow, Modern Ecstasy begins on July 18th! We will end production on July 26th, and enter post-production immediately after, allocating two months for editing and sound design. We plan to release the film to patrons in October of 2026 (the scariest month for Shakespeare’s scariest play!), and then to mount a festival run after that!
Our budget breaks down as follows:
Camera & Lighting Equipment - $1,000
To capture the light to build our world, to create the film’s dystopian, atmospheric visuals rendered in a distinct cinematic language.
Production Design - $500
To create the cyberpunk Los Angeles, with decay.
Insurance - $1,000
To ensure a safe and professional production environment for our cast and crew.
Permits & Locations - $1,000
To make sure that everything is possible to be filmed in the City of Santa Clarita.
Production Expenses (Food, Transportation, Supplies) - $1,000
To support our team during production and keep everything running smoothly on set.
If you believe in this project, and even if you aren’t able to support us monetarily, there are plenty of ways to help beyond donating!
- Follow us on social media!
- We have an Instagram page you can follow at https://www.instagram.com/violentsorrowmodernecstasy/ or @violentsorrowmodernecstasy. You can also follow our principal filmmakers at @msdosfish, @cindy._g_, @yuriss0415, @emo_yeec, @sammie_zenoz, and @ben.sontag on Instagram!
- Share the project!
- Please consider sharing our Seed & Spark page and our director’s pitch video with your friends! Consider using the following statement on social media:
- “Interested in Cyberpunk, Shakespeare, and an exciting new movie that bridges the gap between the two? Check out Violent Sorrow, Modern Ecstasy on @seedandspark and consider supporting them on their crowdfunding page: https://seedandspark.com/fund/violent-sorrow-modern-ecstasy”
- Follow us on Seed&Spark! Following us here helps our project get seen, and gives us access to incentives that help make telling this story easier!
Whatever way you are able to help, we appreciate your support from the bottom of our hearts. Please reach out if you have any questions or just want to talk about anything cyberpunk, Shakespearean, or movie related. Let’s share our hope for the future together!
Sincerely and with Great Thanks,
The Violent Sorrow, Modern Ecstasy Team
Wishlist
Use the WishList to Pledge cash and Loan items - or - Make a pledge by selecting an Incentive directly.
Camera & Lighting Equipment
Costs $1,000
To capture the light to build our world, to create the film’s dystopian, atmospheric visuals rendered in a distinct cinematic language.
Production Design
Costs $500
To create the cyberpunk Los Angeles, with decay.
Insurance
Costs $1,000
To ensure a safe and professional production environment for our cast and crew.
Permits & Locations
Costs $1,000
To make sure that everything is possible to be filmed in the City of Santa Clarita.
Production Expenses (Food, Transporation, Supplies)
Costs $1,000
To support our team during production and keep everything running smoothly on set.
Cash Pledge
Costs $0
Direct link:
Share this update!
About This Team
We’ve assembled a team of passionate storytellers, primarily of graduate students in the film production school of the University of Southern California who are excited to bring this cyberpunk take on Shakespeare to life!
Current Team
Incentives
- The Story
- Wishlist
- Updates
- The Team
- Community
Mission Statement
The Story
Violent Sorrow, Modern Ecstasy is the story of a dying man who still cares in a world with little room for caring.
When Dr. Victor LaRoche learns that the toxic ecosystem of Los Angeles has poisoned his blood, he takes to the streets to come to terms with this diagnosis. During his night walk, he runs into a woman covered in blood, driven by her own internal reckoning to wander in the darkness.
Even though he will surely die soon, he’s sworn an oath to put his patients’ care above all. He takes the crazed woman to his clinic to care for her, and finds out that she is the wife of Macbeth, the tyrant running Los Angeles.
Torn between his commitment to minister to the sick and his strong sense of justice that wants nothing to do with dictators, Dr. LaRoche takes Grace Macbeth back to Dunsinane. Though he hopes, by delivering her to her home and family, to be done with them all, he’s offered something he needs: a cure to his own illness.
Against his better judgment, he agrees to treat Lady Macbeth in exchange for medicine otherwise available only to the moneyed and powerful. But something wicked this way comes…. and everything gets worse from there.
We need this story now because the world feels bleak. It’s easy to lose vital context: that the issues we’re facing today, people were dealing with back in the time of Shakespeare, 400 years ago; that unless we do something to change our world, these issues will just get worse, and we may be headed towards a cyberpunk future. Our story is the story of someone who cares. It is a story about the power that comes from thinking of others first without hope of gain.
Eight years since its initial conception, there’s never been a better time to make Violent Sorrow, Modern Ecstasy. We are the next generation of filmmakers–a team of storytellers who have both the drive and the knowledge to make this project happen.
We are deep into preproduction, and by donating money through this campaign, you will help us make the production of this film a reality! The funds we raise on Seed&Spark will go directly towards filmmaking essentials by helping us secure equipment, locations, and everything else we need!
Violent Sorrow, Modern Ecstasy speaks to a growing emotional reality today: a sense of isolation and disconnection from one another, the fear of losing our humanity inside increasingly overwhelming systems.
Although the film exists within a cyberpunk dystopia, its emotional core is deeply human. At the
center of the story is a doctor who continues to choose compassion in a world that no longer
values empathy. In a time where technology, transactions, and survival often dominate our
lives, the small act of caring for others becomes quietly radical.
Rather than focusing only on spectacle of futuristic aesthetics,VSME zeroes in on the core of cyberpunk that projects the key issues of the present into the future, only to find them rooted in our shared past. Our story looks to Shakespeare’s timeless understanding of human mortality, the loneliness of the spirit, and the ultimate balm of human connection. What remains that’s human when society becomes emotionally numb? Can kindness still survive within that collapse?
As filmmakers studying in a big city like Los Angeles, we have all experienced the emotions
reflected in this story about distance, uncertainty, and the struggle to build genuine connection within large-scale structures that seem unmoved by individuals or community. Making this film has become a way to build that community, to transform those feelings into something shared and meaningful.
This is ultimately a film about borders, displacements, and persecution. What does it mean to be a stranger in a strange land? One important detail we have added to our main character is that he wears the Huguenot cross: when a massacre by those in power in France drove them from their homeland, the Huguenots were the first group of people to be referred to as “refugees.”
They were the immigrants to England that Shakespeare would have known in his time. It is believed that Shakespeare collaborated with other playwrights of his day to write the play “Sir Thomas Moore”, which features the famous speech, “The Stranger’s Case”—that case lays outt how citizens of a nation should treat the strangers who find themselves driven there: in the same way that they would wish to be treated if they could imagine themselves to be immigrants.
VSME adapts this story as a subplot within the larger world of Macbeth. Sir Ian McKellan has enacted the Stranger’s Case monologue since the mid 1960s. If you’d like to see a brilliant reading of it, please check out his performance on the CBS “Late Show”:
https://youtu.be/2l2RqzVG4ag?t=1384
VSME is also a collaboration between passionate emerging filmmakers from USC School of
Cinematic Arts who believe strongly in emotionally driven storytelling. Supporting this film
means supporting young artists who are trying to create a speculative world that feels intimate,
personal, and socially reflective.
Ultimately, this film matters because audiences are hungry for stories that imagine the
future, and also help us understand the felt emotion of the present. Beneath the neon and
decay, VSME is a story about people trying to care for one another before their humanity
disappears completely.
Filming for Violent Sorrow, Modern Ecstasy begins on July 18th! We will end production on July 26th, and enter post-production immediately after, allocating two months for editing and sound design. We plan to release the film to patrons in October of 2026 (the scariest month for Shakespeare’s scariest play!), and then to mount a festival run after that!
Our budget breaks down as follows:
Camera & Lighting Equipment - $1,000
To capture the light to build our world, to create the film’s dystopian, atmospheric visuals rendered in a distinct cinematic language.
Production Design - $500
To create the cyberpunk Los Angeles, with decay.
Insurance - $1,000
To ensure a safe and professional production environment for our cast and crew.
Permits & Locations - $1,000
To make sure that everything is possible to be filmed in the City of Santa Clarita.
Production Expenses (Food, Transportation, Supplies) - $1,000
To support our team during production and keep everything running smoothly on set.
If you believe in this project, and even if you aren’t able to support us monetarily, there are plenty of ways to help beyond donating!
- Follow us on social media!
- We have an Instagram page you can follow at https://www.instagram.com/violentsorrowmodernecstasy/ or @violentsorrowmodernecstasy. You can also follow our principal filmmakers at @msdosfish, @cindy._g_, @yuriss0415, @emo_yeec, @sammie_zenoz, and @ben.sontag on Instagram!
- Share the project!
- Please consider sharing our Seed & Spark page and our director’s pitch video with your friends! Consider using the following statement on social media:
- “Interested in Cyberpunk, Shakespeare, and an exciting new movie that bridges the gap between the two? Check out Violent Sorrow, Modern Ecstasy on @seedandspark and consider supporting them on their crowdfunding page: https://seedandspark.com/fund/violent-sorrow-modern-ecstasy”
- Follow us on Seed&Spark! Following us here helps our project get seen, and gives us access to incentives that help make telling this story easier!
Whatever way you are able to help, we appreciate your support from the bottom of our hearts. Please reach out if you have any questions or just want to talk about anything cyberpunk, Shakespearean, or movie related. Let’s share our hope for the future together!
Sincerely and with Great Thanks,
The Violent Sorrow, Modern Ecstasy Team
Wishlist
Use the WishList to Pledge cash and Loan items - or - Make a pledge by selecting an Incentive directly.
Camera & Lighting Equipment
Costs $1,000
To capture the light to build our world, to create the film’s dystopian, atmospheric visuals rendered in a distinct cinematic language.
Production Design
Costs $500
To create the cyberpunk Los Angeles, with decay.
Insurance
Costs $1,000
To ensure a safe and professional production environment for our cast and crew.
Permits & Locations
Costs $1,000
To make sure that everything is possible to be filmed in the City of Santa Clarita.
Production Expenses (Food, Transporation, Supplies)
Costs $1,000
To support our team during production and keep everything running smoothly on set.
Cash Pledge
Costs $0
Direct link:
Share this update!
About This Team
We’ve assembled a team of passionate storytellers, primarily of graduate students in the film production school of the University of Southern California who are excited to bring this cyberpunk take on Shakespeare to life!