Blackbird kind of came at me out of nowhere. For the most part, I enjoy genre, specifically horror, but I kept imagining this set piece of a guy speaking to a woman on a tablet as if they were in a relationship in a kind of a twilight zone way. That's where a lot of ideas start for me, some kind of set piece or scene or scenario that I can't really let go of. I just started imagining what was the reason for this connection, the tablet, the distance, the bad camera feed style imagery and it, for obvious reasons, turned into exploring a sci-fi idea. From there, I knew I wasn't going to have a ton of money to throw at it and I just went back to sci-fi stories, both books and films, that had an overall simple story that was amplified by its setting, something that would work regardless of genre. The main influences were Solaris and Blade Runner. I just really was into the themes of those stories in terms of what love looked like in those universes. They both present their protagonists with either a reunion of a lost love or a new love and neither of those loves are human and the protagonists have to grapple with the idea of whether or not that matters. Those ideas just really hit me hard and so I wanted to just play with the idea of writing what a quasi-futuristic love story would look like.