About the Project

Hello.

This is a project with a long history and even longer future.

Rise! is a dystopian sci-fi thriller feature film about the future of human society, evolution and revolution.

The original idea for the film grew out of a need some of us had to create and work together on a meaningful project.

Budget constraints forced me to think around creating a story would be set in one location.

I started thinking about cool but practical locations. Naturally I gravitated towards the obvious: hotels, rooms, prisons, cells, institutions, concentration camps, underground bunkers, caves. Something about prisons, mental institutions and concentration camps intrigued me. These spaces were spaces in which humans were incarcerated. I thought about the idea of incarceration; it isn’t just through physical confinement that people are suppressed, it also with suppression of their spirit.

Thematically, I have always being interested in the exploration of constraint, repression and suppression. These types of external pressures are damaging to the individual, to their spirit, to their mind. Such external forces are destructive. At least most of the time.

In the other times though they present singular opportunities to create something new, something that arises from the breaking down of contraints.

Being a fan of dystopian sci-fi, I decided to situate my film within this genre.

And so, the idea for Rise! came. Rise! is a story that brings together some of the themes we are grappling with in society at the moment: technological advancement, AI, futurism, freedom of speech, censorship and social media.

In developing a story set in our not so distant future I found the need to create the background of the film, that takes place roughly 100 years from now. In describing the story I was asked by cast and crew to provide an account the events that would lead to the events depicted in Rise!

I started thinking about what these events would look like. I sketched a timeline of events spanning roughly 120 years. When I had finished, I found that I wanted to tell not just the story in Rise! but the whole saga.

I saw that Rise! was a single bit of story hat belonged to another world. While the world resembles our own very much, the world of Rise! is another place, with a different logic and a different path, regardless how parallel it might be to our own. Rise!World was therefore born.

RISE!World is a wider project seeking to bring audiences into that world over many platforms including, VR, game and graphical.

Seeing my team receive the characters and the world inspired me to bring the project to life. Each and everyone involved in this project has made it their own. They have visualised, styled it, informed it, added to it and breathed life into it. It is now an idea bigger than us all individually as cannot wait to bring it to you.