About Matthew M. Sandoval

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I believe some proper introductions are needed; my name is Matthew Sandoval. I am a Junior at Arizona State University who is majoring in Film and Filmmaking practices through the Herberger Institute for Design and the Arts. Filmmaking as an idea for a career was, unlike most grand stories of origin for others, something that I never truly knew I wanted to do until the last couple of years. I did however know one thing before college, and it was that I loved stories. 

–Any story, no matter how grand or small, was something that always took my attention. I would always listen with such awe as these stories would be told to me, whether they were more recent mythologies such as The Avengers, or more ancient texts such as Beowulf. No matter what it was, it kept me with an inspiration to create stories; small narratives that I started in my early high school years very small, but never did complete. However, something changed in me over the time of the pandemic and my passion to create something that I was invested in began to spark.

–I over the first year of quarantine began thinking of a mythical world whose narrative mirrored real-world issues that have occurred and are occurring currently through the aesthetic and mythology of Greek, Norse, Egyptian, and monotheistic gods. This story I continue to work on is called Divine Ruin and is the centerpiece of the themes that I hope to evoke in all my stories. I have focus on my stories for more gritty, dark reflections of our world that are either mythological or dystopian in their nature.