Welcome to EXTRA ORDINARY: A Big Story That Started Small

Some stories begin with a carefully constructed premise.

This one began with a kid with a small idea.

Years ago, when Damien Silva was still in elementary school, he wrote a short story with a few friends about a boy with a mysterious power. It was imaginative, funny, and filled with exactly the sort of impossible logic that kids accept without requiring seventeen pages of explanation.

The idea stuck around.

So did the kid.

And a few years later, that little story became something much bigger: a summer writing project between a father and his twelve-year-old son.

That project became Extra Ordinary...

An Ordinary Kid With an Extraordinary Problem

Extra Ordinary is an animated family adventure about Evan Daily, a grieving twelve-year-old who discovers he has a mysterious ability to bring things to life.

There’s just one problem.

The one person he desperately wants to bring back is his mother.

When Evan becomes convinced that a massive gemstone mysteriously lodged inside Old Faithful could hold the key to understanding his power, he sets off for Yellowstone with his intuitive stepsister, Lila, and an eccentric inventor named Grish.

Waiting for them is a mystery that has been building beneath the park for years, a once-in-a-lifetime eclipse, some extremely questionable science, a best friend who believes almost any emergency can be solved with the proper vest pockets, and extraordinary powers that may be considerably harder to control than anyone realizes.

The adventure gets big.

Really big.

But the thing at the center of it remains very small and very human:

A kid who wants something back that he cannot bear to lose.

That became the heart of the movie.

A Father-Son Writers' Room

We’re Russell and Damien Silva, the father-son writing team behind Extra Ordinary.

Russell is a filmmaker, director, cinematographer and screenwriter with more than 20 years working in production. He’s written five feature screenplays and tends to gravitate toward high-concept stories grounded in emotional truth: strange circumstances, complicated relationships, and ordinary people trying to make sense of something much bigger than themselves.

Damien is twelve.

His resume is considerably shorter.

His imagination is not.

He’s an avid reader and writer who brought something to this project that no amount of professional experience could substitute for: the perspective of a kid roughly the same age as the kids in the movie.

And that mattered.

A lot.

Because although Extra Ordinary contains superpowers, secret experiments, a giant gemstone, geothermal mayhem, an eccentric inventor, a chameleon named Churro and one exceptionally important Yellowstone snow globe, we never wanted the kids at its center to feel like miniature adults written by adults.

We wanted them to sound like kids.

Think like kids.

Make terrible decisions like kids.

Make unexpectedly brilliant decisions like kids.

And, most importantly, feel things as enormously as kids do.

That made writing the movie together one of its secret weapons.

It also made for a pretty great summer.

The Story Beneath the Adventure

As the screenplay grew from Damien’s original idea, we kept discovering that its biggest concepts weren’t really about superpowers at all.

They were about control.

About the things we desperately hold onto.

About what happens when the world changes before we’re ready.

And about the difference between letting something go and losing it.

Evan loves ordinary things. Familiar objects. Routines. Rituals. A world that behaves the way it did yesterday.

That isn’t an accident.

His life has already changed in the one way he most wishes it hadn’t.

So when something impossible happens and Evan discovers that maybe, just maybe, he possesses the ability to undo that change, what twelve-year-old wouldn't try?

That's where the fantasy of Extra Ordinary and its emotional story became the same thing. Evan doesn't simply need to learn how to control his power. He needs to understand why he needs to control everything in the first place.

And the other characters around him are wrestling with their own versions of that same question.

Lila sees connections other people miss and would do almost anything to keep Evan from disappearing into his grief.

Grish has spent years trying to control something he fears because of something he couldn't save.

Zeke prepares for absolutely everything because, as it turns out, preparedness can be its own kind of armor.

And Amaia, a young seismic geologist whose first day at Yellowstone goes spectacularly off the rails, follows the science until it collides with something science shouldn't be able to explain.

Their powers may be extraordinary.

Their reasons for using them aren't.

Why Yellowstone?

Then there’s the other main character.

Yellowstone.

Old Faithful.

It’s difficult to imagine a better place for this story.

Old Faithful is predictable enough that thousands of people gather every day and wait for it to do exactly what they expect. Until, in our story, something changes.

There was something irresistible about putting Evan, a kid who desperately wants the world to remain predictable, in front of perhaps the most famously predictable natural wonder in America...

…and then breaking the schedule.

Yellowstone also gives the movie the scale we wanted from an animated adventure: geysers, steam, mountains, forests, boardwalks, seismic activity, enormous skies and a landscape that already looks slightly impossible before we add a glowing red gemstone to it.

And hanging over everything is a rare total eclipse.

For a few extraordinary minutes, the familiar world becomes unfamiliar.

Which, when you think about it, is pretty much Evan’s entire story.

Some Things Can't Be Fixed

That eventually led us to the line that now sits above the title:

Some things can’t be fixed. But they can become something more.

That’s Extra Ordinary.

Not a story about getting over someone.

Not a story about pretending loss doesn't hurt.

And not really a story about fixing grief.

It's about carrying things forward.

The people we love change us. They become part of how we see the world, how we love other people, and eventually how we move through a world without them physically beside us.

For Evan, accepting that his mother is gone doesn't mean leaving her behind.

Quite the opposite.

It means finally recognizing all the places she never left.

That's a pretty enormous realization for a twelve-year-old.

So naturally, we gave him a giant gemstone, an eclipse and an erupting geyser to help him figure it out.

From a Short Story to 106 Pages

What began as a fun father-son summer project eventually became a 106-page animated feature screenplay.

And somewhere along the way, it became much more important to both of us than either of us expected.

There were arguments over dialogue.

There were discoveries neither writer had planned.

There were jokes one of us thought were considerably funnier than the other did.

There were scenes rewritten over and over until suddenly they clicked.

There was an alarming amount of discussion about fictional gemstone physics.

And there were moments when something Damien had imagined years earlier suddenly connected with something we had just written and made the entire story better.

That's the fun of writing with someone else.

Especially when that someone else happens to be your kid.

The screenplay is now beginning the next part of its journey: professional evaluations, industry reads, competitions, festivals and, hopefully, conversations with people who can imagine this strange little-big movie coming to life.

This website will be where we share some of that journey: artwork, screenplay news, behind-the-scenes thoughts, milestones, Yellowstone inspiration, and probably a few stories about how Extra Ordinary became Extra Ordinary.

But for the first post, we wanted to start where the screenplay did.

With a father. A son.

A writer with a passion for story. A kid whose small idea became something big.

And one very big question:

What if the thing you had the power to bring back was the very thing you needed to learn to let go?

Welcome to Extra Ordinary.