Justin KazmierczakNov 11, 2026 · 5 min read
It had been a hard day. I had spent it talking with a lot of people, and by the time I got in the car I was at a real low. My world wasn't collapsing, but it never stood still either. I was facing things I had never had to face before, and the stress was on another level.
So I drove, and somewhere along that street it started to come to me. In hindsight, behind the wheel is not the ideal place to start dreaming.
The song was Reckless Love, and I couldn't let it go. I pulled into a parking lot and played it again and again until I had it, and I was still humming it when I walked inside. It was an emotional moment and a deeply spiritual one. I had a moment with the Lord, and I felt Him touch something in me and spark something new.
What came out of that moment was a film. It became my book, Exploit. The book comes first, but I have never stopped wanting to show people the movie I saw that day, and for the first time I think I might be able to.
A trailer in my head
What I saw played out like a trailer, and it lit me up. Then the dreams started. In the ones that followed, the same movie came back, nearly identical, with small changes each time.
There is one thing I have had to accept as a creative, and it's one of the hardest. That song is where the film began. I would love to keep it and put it in the trailer. I will never be able to use it.
So I set out to learn what it would take to make the movie. The answer was a great deal. Most films never reach an audience at all; I believe it's something like 98 percent. The ones that do are probably compromised somewhere along the way, no longer true to the story their creator first imagined. Only a rare few get a full green light.
The book first
The plan was simple: write the book, publish it, get it out there and see what happens. I started writing chapters and putting them out. Exploit is the first story in the Universe, the connected world all of my stories share.
Exploit by the numbers
- 202,521wordsand counting
- 50chapters
- 8main characters
- 1ststory in the Universe
Not every creative call I made along the way was a good one. Communication is hard. What counts isn't what I say; it's how the message lands. That gap is the difference between someone who just puts paint on a brush and someone who leaves a legacy. An artist always has something to say.
Then the picture changed. I made a short film with AI, [The Journey of the Coin](https://egt.studio/entertainment/the-journey-of-the-coin), and people responded far better than I expected. It isn't AI slop. It's me telling a story with AI the way I would with an animation studio, and that rewrites the whole script. AI can tell the stories I couldn't tell before, the ones I could never get funded.
Sixty seconds
When I first opened EGT* Studio, the AI film studio I have been building, it was nowhere near ready. That was months ago, and my honest verdict was that it wasn't even close. I kept building it with AI agents, and one of the first things it made was a rough 60-second trailer for Exploit. Chances are nobody else will ever see it.
I clicked on it, watched the scenes generate, opened the timeline and pressed play.
I could see literally the scenes that played out in my head.
There were no people speaking in it, because the trailer was built around soundscaping. That was the moment I realised how far video AI had come.
I'm genuinely excited that I may finally get to show the movie, and one day the series. The book still comes first. After that I will need to raise money for the film, because it is still going to cost money. But I can't wait to share it with the world the way I first saw it.
A cheat code for life
This will sound cheesy. No matter how hard things get, you can make it through anything, and you don't have to make it through alone.
In a dark season, when everything is caving in, it can feel as though the whole world has turned on you. As a minister of the gospel, I have watched a lot of people fall into addiction and fight it over and over. I have a personal stake in this story, too.
That is the heart of Exploit. I want people to know they are not alone, and that God is with them, shaping their whole lives through moments that seem small at the time.
There is an exploit you can use to change the outcome of life.
Your circumstances don't necessarily get better or worse. What changes is that you have a deus ex machina: one event that can shift your whole life in an instant. When you see it, you realise your entire timeline was leading to that moment. All of it was orchestrated, and all of it had a divine purpose. That is the book, told as un-cheesily as I could manage.
The story is cataclysmic. I didn't so much choose that as have it shown to me, I think because of what I was going through at the time. But it isn't horror. It's a cinematic spiritual thriller, dark where it needs to be, with hope running underneath all of it. And that life-altering event sets off every story that follows in its world.
I have already seen those stories. I have seen that world several films down the road, when everything has changed and you know every character. What I never had were the origins and the threads that connect them. Exploit isn't quite an origin story. Call it the origin story that comes after the origin story. Either way, everything in that world starts here.
Why it can't stay in a vault
The films that never get made become the scripts nobody reads. They end up archived, locked away in a vault, and I worried that mine would too. I worried for the whole vision, the purpose and the calling on my life. I did not want to stand before God one day and admit I had buried it in the sand and done nothing with it.
With The Journey of the Coin out in the world, I can at least say I have returned interest on my talents.
I don't intend to stop there. This is only the beginning, and I want to keep going.
