Jason Carman gave himself until his 20th birthday to make a high-concept, effects-driven short film that would capture the attention of studio executives, convincing them to toss him the keys to a megabudget feature.
Now at age 25, having missed his deadline by a smidge, Carman is on the verge of enjoying a splashy debut for his sci-fi short, Planet, at San Francisco’s Palace of Fine Arts on Saturday. The question is whether studio executives will take notice—and, if they do, whether Carman can parlay that attention into his bigger ambition: injecting a sense of techno-optimism into Hollywood movies.
Stranger things have happened, both onscreen and off.
Following a two-year stint as head of content at aerospace hub Astranis, Carman launched the creative studio Story Company in 2024. If ​​any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, as Arthur C. Clarke famously put it, Carman was blown away by his time backstage at the magic show, and wanted to sell more tickets. With Story, the young filmmaker could extend his tech-evangelism to branded work for new clients like medicinal robot-maker Multiply Labs, while also making documentaries and sci-fi projects of his own.
“My goal with our movies is to give people a taste of what I experienced working at a company like Astranis,” he tells Fast Company, “where I got to feel what it’s like building cutting-edge hardware and science every day.”