From Vision to Production: When the End of the World Becomes a Story About Human Connection

What would you do if you knew the world would end today?

Would you chase extraordinary experiences? Try to save yourself? Or would you simply look for someone to share the last sunset with?

These are the questions at the heart of The End, the original feature film project developed by Bianca Xavier as the final producer presentation for the Film Industry Short Course at the European School of Economics Rome Campus.

Rather than imagining the apocalypse through spectacular destruction or heroic survival, The End deliberately takes the opposite direction. The catastrophe has already been announced: scientists confirm that Earth’s atmosphere will become unbreathable before nightfall. Humanity has less than twenty-four hours left. There is nothing to stop. Nothing to fight.

What remains is simply… being human.

At the centre of the story is Bella, a young immigrant living far from her family. While the rest of the world reacts with fear, despair or denial, Bella continues her ordinary routine, moving through familiar streets, running small errands and crossing paths with strangers whose lives are quietly changing forever.

It is in these seemingly insignificant encounters that the film finds its emotional power. Rather than focusing on the end of civilisation, The End explores the fragile moments of intimacy that emerge when people realise time has run out. As Bella gradually reconnects with the emotions she has kept at a distance, the apocalypse becomes less a story about extinction than one about reconciliation.

This quiet emotional arc reflects the project’s artistic identity. Inspired by the language of contemporary European auteur cinema, The End favours atmosphere over spectacle, observation over action and emotional truth over dramatic excess. The film asks viewers not how the world ends, but how people choose to spend the final hours of their lives.

That artistic vision, however, was only one half of the assignment.

The final project, designed by Francesco Perciballi, required students to think not simply as filmmakers, but as producers. Every project had to be presented through a professional pitch deck capable of demonstrating both creative ambition and industrial feasibility.

Alongside the artistic presentation of The End, Bianca developed a complete producer’s proposal, analysing how the film could exist within today’s international film industry. The project examined its target audience, market positioning, comparable titles, development pathway, packaging strategy, financing opportunities, production scale, distribution routes and overall feasibility. Rather than separating creativity from production, the assignment challenged students to demonstrate how the two must support one another.

This producer-centred approach reflects the philosophy of the Film Industry Short Course at the European School of Economics. Throughout the programme, students learn that a successful film begins long before the cameras roll. It starts with understanding rights, development, budgeting, public funding, co-production opportunities, audience positioning and strategic planning: all the decisions that transform a compelling idea into a credible production proposal.

With The End, that philosophy comes to life through a story that is both intimate and universal. In imagining the final day on Earth, the project reminds us that the greatest human drama is rarely found in extraordinary events themselves, but in the relationships that give those events meaning.

Because, in the end, the last story humanity tells may not be about survival at all.

It may simply be about finding one another before the light fades.