Rinsch already earned devotees with his earlier short film The Gift, created for Phillips' Parallel Lines project, which deftly blends the stark aesthetic of a Soviet winter with the sleek sci-fi promise of a future filled with cool ass robots. He was previously tipped to direct Scott's Alien flick Prometheus before Scott took the helm.
I visited the set of 47 Ronin and, while I can't yet say much of anything about that project, it was a highly ambitious affair -- a fantastical take on the classic Japanese folk tale of 47 rogue samurai out for revenge -- and was filmed in 3-D to boot.
So it comes as little surprise that Rinsch would create something as inventive and slick as Escape the Map; you can watch a short 20-second teaser, or the longer five-minute gameplay capture (below), but the most immersive experience will come from actually playing/watching over at the official website, which also takes about five minutes; in it, you meet a woman named Marie (Mariah Bonner) who's desperate to escape the shifting digital world around her, and follow her prompts to navigate around faceless Sim-like people on the streets of Hong Kong. It's not the deepest concept of all time, but it's a nifty few minutes -- and it was shot, Rinsch tells Slashfilm, "in one day on his day off from editing and post production on Ronin."
• Watch Carl Erik Rinsch's 'Escape The Map' Mercedes-Benz Interactive Short Film [Slashfilm]