First

Besides making videogames my other great passion is film. I remember watching Jurassic Park for the first time when I was 8 and deciding I wanted to be a movie director. For a very long time that remained true. I learned everything I could about film-making. I watched a ton of movies, old movies, new movies, french, russian, swedish movies, zombie movies, spaghetti westerns. Everything that was considered good I would watch. I ended up with a 300+ DVD collection and became completely obsessed with Stanley Kubrick. I saw a lot of obscure stuff but my very favorite movies were actually pretty mainstream. Most of them were Sci-Fi. My top ten includes masterpieces like Terminator 2, the first two Alien movies, Blade Runner and of course the greatest of them all, 2001: A Space Odyssey.

I got into college still wanting to make movies, but little by little I realized that videogames had a lot of untapped potential and that they could be very powerful story-telling devices. In the end, what I really care for is stories, and not the format they are in. During college I worked on a couple of short-film projects and they just turned out terrible. Thats part of the reason why film-making had lost a bit of it's luster for me. I got on with my videogames where I felt more comfortable but in the first year of my MA I got another shot to finnaly make a decent short-film.

Joana and I teamed up again to make a special effects heavy sci-fi short. At the time I heard a story about some dudes at Nasa that proposed a one way trip to Mars. They said that getting there was pretty easy, getting back was the hard part. Of course a mission like this would never be approved but it really made me think. I'm sure it wouldn't be difficult finding volunteers. They'd go down as heroes for all of history.

And that's what the main character of our story thought as well.