The Mountain Under My Desk

Under my desk stands a machine, and inside the machine sleeps a film. The machine is a NAS, a black box full of hard drives, and it ticks. I hear it every day, all day, while I work half a meter above it. On most days I manage not to think about what is inside. On the other days, I write articles like this one.

Inside are roughly forty terabytes. Seventy hours of footage from two years of traveling to the places where our planet is changing fastest. Floods in Bangladesh. Burning forest in Brazil. Permafrost and firefighters in Canada. The melting ice of Greenland. The Great Barrier Reef in Australia. A film Markus and I shot and never finished, called The Journey to the Climate. It does not exist yet. That is the most precise sentence I can say about it: it does not exist yet, and it ticks under my desk while I answer emails.

A few weeks ago I tried a shortcut. DaVinci Resolve released an update where an AI looks at your footage, understands what it sees, names the clips and sorts them into bins. Maybe, I thought, the machine can climb the mountain for me. Maybe I open the project one morning and find structure where I left chaos. I fed it everything. My workstation ran at full load for three days, fans howling, electricity meter spinning, and it got nowhere, because seventy hours are seventy hours. On day four the software crashed and took the entire run with it. Four days of computing for nothing. I closed the project and went back to color grading The Last Places. The ticking under the desk did not change. Mountains are patient.

The plan, back then, was simple: finish The Last Places, sell it, cut the climate film, sell that one too, become filmmakers. I was in my mid twenties and it sounded completely solid. So we flew. Bangladesh first, where COVID caught me after three weeks and sent me home. Then six weeks of Brazil. Senegal. Greenland. Canada. Australia in November 2023, the last shoot, the reef. In between, Markus filmed hammerhead sharks in the Galapagos, pristine nature as the counterweight. We had one topic per country and no script. We improvised, found people on the fly, and shot images I still cannot quite believe we got. What we did not shoot, anywhere, was an agreed story. We collected the most expensive puzzle pieces in the world, without the picture on the box.

People ask me when the project died. It never died. It froze, slowly, the way a lake freezes: from the edges, quietly, while everyone is still talking about swimming. I had jumped on Markus's boat, that is exactly how I thought about it. He was the director, the story mind, the one who knew where to point the cameras. I admired him for it, because I could not do it myself. Then, in the edit of The Last Places, I watched the story resist him. There were holes, no red line. The test audiences said so. I had said so myself after the first rough cut. Markus said a sentence I still think about: there is no other way to edit this. I believe there are infinite ways to edit anything. But I did not trust myself with a single one of them. Between his one way and my zero ways, the film stood still.

The bigger frame story we had planned needed money we did not have. The edit grew heavier, and I watched it grow heavier for Markus than one person should have to carry. He began to see failure where two years of work sat. At some point, he stopped. In early 2025 he closed his production company and left Germany for good. I understood. I also understood what it meant: the boat was gone, and I was swimming. Forty terabytes were now mine to bring to shore.

Yesterday I showed my grandpa that The Last Places is out. Afterwards he clicked through my channel and found my showreel, and I watched him be surprised, the honest surprise of someone who had quietly assumed his grandson makes silly little videos, and instead saw a burning forest in 8K. Then he asked the question every single person asks: why are you not doing anything with this? Why is nobody buying it? And I gave the answer I always give: because there is no product yet. I have the raw material. I have to shape it into something first. He said what they all say: then do something. Do it. For him it is that simple. For my dad it is that simple. And they are right, and it is not simple, and both things are true at the same time.

Here is what actually happens when I open that project. I see seventy hours, I look for the storyteller who is supposed to turn them into ninety minutes, and I do not find him in me. I feel like a good cinematographer and a bad editor, and the mountain of editing is so large that I cannot even find the bottom of it to start climbing. Fear paralysis is the technical term. What follows, if I am not careful, is the old loop: you cannot do it, you never could, everything flowed into this and you are going to waste it. I say openly that this loop is one of the reasons I am in therapy, because I have decided that the stigma around that word is not mine to carry. Going was not weakness. It is the most structured work I have ever done, on the one machine that does not take updates: my own head.

So why not let it go? Delete nothing, promise nothing, let the drives tick until they die. Because too many people helped us for this to become nothing. Because my mother believed in it when the whole thing was two backpacks and a plane ticket. Because somewhere in those two years I stopped being a guy with a camera and started believing that we have to fight for this planet, and I fell in love with the idea that our footage could be part of that fight. And because of my son. I brought him into a world I keep calling broken, and an unused forty terabyte archive about exactly that, sitting under his father's desk, is not the answer I want to give him one day.

So here is the honest math, and the honest math is that I do not have it. I cannot tell you what finishing this film costs, because the first missing number is not in euros, it is a person: an editor. The rights situation is real but livable. I may use every frame for one film, and that film must be called The Journey to the Climate. The distribution rights sit with Greenpeace, so nothing gets sold to broadcasters without talking to them first. What I am always allowed to do is tell the stories myself, in my own voice, on my own channels. And that is exactly where time and money land, the two things a membership actually buys: hours in which I do not have to shoot commercials, and a runway to train the editor in me on smaller projects, until one of us is ready, the film or me.

But maybe the faster path is not inside me at all. Maybe it is you, or someone you know. Somewhere out there is an editor who is tired of cutting content, who wants one project with meaning in their filmography, who reads seventy hours from seven climate tipping points, shot at the edge of the possible, and feels their fingers itch. To that person I cannot offer a salary. And the deal where you work for free and hope, I refuse to offer on principle. I offer a partnership: a real, contractually fixed share of everything this film ever earns, the same risk I am carrying, and a credit as co-creator, not a contractor's invoice. If it becomes a success, I will not come back to negotiate you down. If this is you: my email is at the bottom.

You cannot say my attempts have failed. Most of them have not happened yet. That is either the saddest sentence in this article or the most hopeful one, and I have decided it is the second. The mountain under my desk keeps ticking. Seventy hours of a planet in transition, waiting in the dark, backed up twice. Yesterday my grandpa asked why nobody has bought this film. The honest answer is that I never asked anyone. Consider this text me asking.