Around the Fire, the Crew Grew Stronger With Natascha now on board and the first shoot moving closer, the time had come to bring the growing crew together properly. Until then, AYE MATIES had developed through individual conversations, phone calls, location scouting trips and smaller meetings. Every person who joined had heard parts of the vision. Each of them had begun imagining what this unusual adventure could become. But a project like this needed more than separate conve

The One Person They Refused to Replace With the first core members of the crew now on board, the next step was inevitable: the vision had to become an actual shoot. Back in Vienna, Dean and Old Salt sat down with the first moodboard for AYE MATIES. Until that moment, much of the project had existed in conversations, music, location photographs and fragments of an adventure world slowly beginning to take shape. Now they needed to turn that world into scenes. They began working

Building the Crew for the Journey Ahead When Old Salt, Dean and Silas returned home to Vienna, they brought back far more than location photographs and scouting notes. They had found the first places where the story of AYE MATIES could begin. They had chosen the shore on which Old Salt might arrive and the streets through which he would take his first steps into the modern world. But once back in Vienna, another question began to occupy the Captain’s mind. Creating a cinemati

A Story Needs a Crew When Dino – or Dean, as Old Salt called him in English – returned home after their meeting in Vienna, he needed time to process everything he had just heard. There was this extraordinary character: an old seafarer, a captain whose past felt as though it had been lifted straight from a great adventure story. There was the idea for AYE MATIES. There were images of ships, distant shores, riddles, storms and a journey whose true scale was only beginning to re

The Message That Started It All April 2026, Vienna.Sometimes, a great journey does not begin in a harbour. Not with a treasure map. Not with a ship on the horizon. Sometimes, it begins with a WhatsApp message. After 16 years, Old Salt reached out to his friend Dino. The Captain had an idea. A big idea. And before taking it any further, he wanted to know what Dino thought of it. Old Salt is not a man who merely tells stories about the sea. He has lived it. Behind the scenes of