After 3 movies by legendary creative minds, I wanted the Starship Troopers franchise to continue on but with a new direction. Luckily, the former movies did not fully decrypt the power suits from the original novel by Robert A Heinlein. When I realized this, it gave me a spark of idea. The gentleman I met at Comicon, Mr. Shinji Aramaki, is known for his realistic yet stylish mechanical designs, and he did design some power suits in his past works (e.g. Appleseed). He would be the perfect person to re-imagine the power suits for Starship Troopers!  I eagerly proposed this idea to Joseph and Mr. Aramaki and I got a very positive response — with even a quick initial sketch by Mr. Aramaki (See picture below. Just to be clear, this is not the final version as it will be more badass). I was excited and happy with the idea but bringing that further to a movie that the fans would enjoy was not that simple, and it was even more difficult to convince the big bosses. I won’t bore you with the details of what happened during the process but it was a tough fight and I lost a few troopers on the way. 

Once we got the greenlight, we started discussing what the fans would want to see. We asked many experts, the original filmmakers as well as the younger generations and the fans. The challenge was that everyone had different opinion and different likes and dislikes. Some loved the satire in the movie but some did not. Some thought it was too cheesy but some thought that was the best part. After extensive debate, it seemed like everyone wanted something with more action in space and with bugs, and more relationships decrypted in the first movie. We felt that we needed the camaraderie in the vein of war movies such as Black Hawk Down or in the vein of war games like Company of Heroes, but in space with a horror & thriller feel with the inspiration of classic alien movies. And, even though we would be toning down on the cheese, we need to keep some of the spirit of fun and comical satire. Even for a CGI-only production, we were somewhat daunted by the challenge of a well balanced story & dialogue, and the scope of the action sequences and vast bug battles. But we really wanted to get this right for the fans.  So the struggles continued to the next stage to pull out a good script and cool designs. Will write about that in the next updates with some sneak peak of the new designs so, stay tuned!