In 2022, a single sentence ended two years of our work. It haunts us to this day. Sarah and I had developed a concept for a game about climate change, for children and teenagers. The first stage was funded by nordmedia, the film and media funding body for Lower Saxony and Bremen. To get the next round of funding we had to pitch the concept to a panel of five people and then rework it twice, each time a considerable amount of work.
What finally tipped it was an offhand remark. It came from someone on the panel in an advisory role, without a vote, whose word carried weight anyway: “I don’t know if you should be making a game about something like this at all.” And that was that. There were hundreds of hours of work in it.
Why am I telling it in this much detail? I think because some part of it is still traumatic for me. And that is exactly where the new project begins.
By the end of this year we want to build something new out of those old drafts: a film, several short films or a game. Using everything we have learned and used over the past few year. We work from our own material — photographs, video, 3D objects, Gaussian splats — and try to translate it with generative AI into one visual world that holds together. Whether it holds is the open question. So is what comes out of it: a film, several short films, or a game again. The making is the point, and we want to share the individual steps on several levels: here on the blog, on LinkedIn, Instagram and our genAI meetup. To tell the story of whether, and how, you can build something new out of a project that failed, at least for now.