Every October, the world starts to feel a little more cinematic. There’s something about long shadows and falling leaves that makes stories hit differently. For OutWrd, that seasonal shift always sparks one question: what kind of story belongs here, right now? This year, as we hit the ground running on our second full year of productions, we decided to find out the hard way by giving ourselves an almost impossible challenge. We called it The 28 Days Later Challenge.

On October 27th, the first chapter of a new frontier saga will arrive: Just Enough Dead. It’s a Western told in its rawest form; a story about survival, vengeance, and uneasy alliances. The frontier we’re building is stripped-down and brutal, where justice is measured not in courts but in silence, in grit, and, when there’s no other choice, in bullets.

When we set out to edit This Land Remembers, the central question was how the world around our characters should feel. From the start, we knew it wasn’t just about sound design in the conventional sense — footsteps, doors, cups clinking on tables. This story was about the land itself, a place defined by drought, and we wanted the audience to feel that environment pressing in on them.

From the earliest days of developing the series, we had no intention of confining this story to a single season. Our vision was always to make this the beginning of something larger, an unfolding saga in which Jim Hawkins would continue to navigate the treacherous waters of the pirate world.

This is, without question, our most emotionally charged and narratively daring chapter so far. A story once rooted in adventure and buried gold now twists toward something deeper: loss, loyalty, and the painful forging of identity.

At the heart of this episode is John Silver’s trial — a moment we always intended to treat with weight. The pirates, once loyal to Silver, now turn on him in true mutinous fashion. Echoing the fate of Billy Bones back in England, Silver is handed the infamous black spot; a sentence of death in pirate lore.

Episode 5 of Treasure Island, The Devil’s Apprentice, marks a pivotal turning point in Jim Hawkins’ journey — not just as a character, but as a young man being shaped by a world far darker than he anticipated. This is the episode where he learns to survive not by clinging to morality, but by adapting to the ruthless logic of the men around him. And the man closest to him now is Long John Silver.

Episode 4, A Gun in Hand, marks a turning point in our retelling of Treasure Island. Until now, Jim Hawkins has been caught in the machinery of grown-up schemes - pursuing women, dodging pirates, and wrestling with questions of loyalty. But in this episode, he takes his first uncertain steps into the wilds of the island itself. And as it turns out, the jungle has its own plans for him.

In episode 3: Under a Black Flag, our team faced one of the toughest storytelling challenges yet: portraying Long John Silver’s mutiny in a way that respected the audience’s intelligence while still delivering tension, surprise, and emotional weight.

A Crew of Rogues shifts the tone, the pace, and the scope. New characters flood in. New dangers. New temptations. Jim has left the safety (such as it was) of the Admiral Benbow, and now he’s adrift in a city full of shadows, schemes, and charmers with silver tongues.

When we were planning the launch of OutWrd+, we knew we needed to start with something big - something that set the tone for everything we want this platform to be. Not just another story, not just another adaptation. We needed something that planted a flag. Something that told writers: “This is where you go when you want to build worlds the studios would never let you write.” That’s why we chose Treasure Island.

In the world of film, television, and even audio dramas, the screenwriter holds a central role.

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