I feel immense gratitude for my professional achievements so far. I have been fortunate to experience inspiring and motivating encounters with extraordinary people and supporters. My success in international advertising film enabled me to work with great talents, and my jobs for various television networks not only financed my studies but also gave me a close, documentary-like insight into people and stories I would never have encountered under normal circumstances. 

However, my life started in a rather unconventional way: 

I grew up in Aswan, Egypt, as the eldest of three siblings and was therefore exposed to different realities of life, value systems, and beliefs from an early age. Until I started school at the age of six, back in Germany, I had no contact with electronic media. 

Instead of sitting in front of the TV, my siblings and I were read the fantastic stories of Michael Ende while in Egypt. The novel Momo was particularly formative for me. Momo is much more than a children’s book: it tells a fantastical story with a dark, meta-narrative layer that directly addresses the dangers of the modern zeitgeist. It’s amazing how much of that you can understand as a child – even if you lack the words to articulate it. 

After returning to Germany and starting school, I experienced the influence of the “grey men” first-hand. Luckily, I was a lively and headstrong child with many interests and little inclination to conform to extrinsic expectations and rules. Instead of engaging with schoolwork, I was drawn to fantastic stories, technologies, and media. 

Like many children my age, I was fascinated by video games, which I saw as having even greater potential than films. Fortunately, my parents placed great importance on me spending time outdoors in nature. As a result, I often climbed trees or hopped over fences into other gardens. The challenge of gaining access to films and video games only deepened their allure. During one of my explorations of neighboring gardens, I met a young man who was among the first students at the newly established Film Academy Baden-Württemberg. His peers had worked on the special effects for Roland Emmerich’s Independence Day. From that moment, I realized that one day I, too, could earn a living from what was strictly regulated in my childhood home. 

Another pivotal moment was when I watched The Making of Jurassic Park at around eight years old. I realized then that the digital technology bringing the dinosaurs to the screen shared the same foundation as the first 3D video games I saw at friends’ houses on the PlayStation and Nintendo 64. 

This realization led me to steer my career path toward media production immediately after finishing school. By that time, I already had access to tools like the RPG Maker and the Mapmaker from Timesplitters 2, which allowed me to create my first (mini) worlds and gather feedback from friends. I was especially inspired by the cinematic works of Hideo Kojima and Hironobu Sakaguchi, who were taking their first steps toward Hollywood at that time. 

After completing my vocational training as a media designer for image and sound (IHK), I was ready for my next career step. 

At the Film Academy Baden-Württemberg, I completed my degree as a Creative Producer with a thesis on interactive storytelling and a game concept. Long before my final exams, I had already independently produced advertising films for renowned clients such as PETA, Mercedes-Benz, and the DFB while still a student. Some of my works were nominated for the German Advertising Film Award, the VES Award, and the Cannes Corporate Award. My success was based not only on luck and talented supporters but also on my ability to regularly seek and find unconventional solutions. 

An intuitive awareness of narratives, contextualization, and the needs of those around me fueled my success in advertising – but at a cost. As grateful as I am for the incredible experiences I gained from my advertising productions, I view the advertising industry with a critical lens. Ultimately, advertising is nothing more than the business of unfulfilled needs, desires, and longings of customers – the business of their emotions and pure manipulation, no matter how noble the underlying intentions may be. While I always selected my projects based on strict moral and content-related criteria, it was never possible for me to engage deeply with the topics that truly moved, interested, and seemed societally relevant to me. 

In my thesis, I wrote about the transformative potential of video games as a medium and the opportunities that can arise from shifts in perspective. I feel an increasing urgency to actually create and make such projects a reality. 

I believe in the opportunities that new and unbiased approaches to the medium can offer. Over the past six years, I have immersed myself deeply in both developing further concepts and self-teaching the practical skills needed for realization. Tools like Unreal Engine 5, with its notes-based scripting tool Blueprints, now provide possibilities I could hardly have dreamed of as a teenager. 

I have met new contacts and supporters and am currently working to finally turn my childhood dream into reality. My professional experience and my Creative Producer degree, complemented by practical experience, help me combine creative and project management components seamlessly. 

In my free time, I spend as much time as possible outdoors in nature, meeting friends, exercising, and reading. 

When it comes to games and films in my leisure time, I’ve noticed a surprising effect: it has become increasingly rare for me to come across a production that truly surprises, fascinates, and captivates me. Too often, I recognize the same formulas, patterns, and more of the “always the same” in a game that promises to be something new and unique. I feel a sense of saturation – the impression that I’ve seen it all before, sometimes even thinking I could have done it better myself. 

I hope, therefore, that with my own interactive productions, I can create something entirely new and unique that enchants my young audience and positively impacts their lives and abilities to tackle challenges and problems independently. Unlike my narrative film productions or linear advertising projects, I consciously aim to avoid the mistake of providing prepackaged answers or solutions. Instead, I focus on fully utilizing the unique possibilities of the medium by enabling perspective shifts, challenging personal beliefs, opinions, and emotions, and providing a philosophical toolkit. 

Throughout our lives, we are all on the same journey, which is partly about getting to know the world outside and ourselves better – assuming those are even two separate things. But that’s another topic entirely… :) 

In implementing my concepts and ideas and founding my own company, I feel immense joy, happiness, and fulfillment. I can hardly wait for the first releases.