Romke Faber

“Future of filmmaking: designing storyworlds to provoke awareness through world building”

Netherlands Film Academy, Netherlands

What if there was a storyworld that would combine a neo-liberal Western capitalist
society narrative with several personal narratives? The pillars where this storyworld would
be build on are pressing subjects such as:

• nationalism
• refugees
• climate change
• polarization
• welfare instead of wellbeing
• meaning
• fear

Now what if the story that we wanted to tell would have to emerge from this
storyworld which is still in development? And what if this story would not be fully written
out but evolve throughout the building of the storyworld?
The single author in film is traditionally the director/screenwriter. With world
building we like to provoke this notion and see filmmaking as an ever-evolving narrative
audiovisual medium which can never be stagnant but always developing.
Inspired by the holistic immersive world building process as advocated by the The
World building Institute via Alex McDowell we have been building a storyworld here in the
Netherlands. A storyworld we built with several filmmakers on different occasions since 2015.

This led to the basis of a storyworld in which we like to explore extremities of current
issues which challenge the Western capitalist societies already quite some time. Believing
that maybe we should look more outward and instead of pulling walls up breaking them
down we like to develop a story in this storyworld which will bring about some awareness
of the value of well-being for everyone instead of the happy few.
Together with director Igor Kramer, graphic designer John Peter Raven, director
of photography Joris Kerbosch, production designer, producer and director Nina Spiering
and myself we have created a storyworld through collaborative conversation i.e. world
building with room for a plurality of voices we will further develop. Welcome in the world
of Afsluitdijk.

Romke Faber is working as a production designer and world builder based in the
Netherlands. He is also since 2022 teaching production design at the Netherlands Film
Academy in Amsterdam. In 2008 immersed in world building and practicing as much of
this process as possible in his art department since 2013. Faberface Production Design.