Synopsis.
Working harder and harder to meet the deadline set out by a mysterious suited superior, Johnny is an ambitious young office worker who does things by the book. The stress levels only grow as caring Johnny's efforts are hindered throughout the working day by his strange and colourful companion Mary, who appears to have her playful young mind set on ruining him.
Reality leaves a lot to the imagination in a boring world of facts, figures, credit crunch escape, lost love, and seesaws, as we watch the 'ups and downs' of Johnny and Mary's rocky relationship during the emotional un-doing of a hard working inner city 'high flyer'.
Short Fiction
Genre: Sci-Fi / Comedy
Runtime: 20 Minutes
Shooting Format: HD
Production: Spring 2009
Imagining Love. Background.
After being frustrated by the credit crunch lull, and taking influence from 1950's science fiction and tales about traditional nuclear families; the original idea was to create something with larger than life characters and elements of false reality and escape. Imagining Love is a strange and colourful tale with a momentum that comes full circle without having too many boundaries by conforming to a typical genre. The project is an art film with a modern day story about people and their complicated relationships both at work and at home.
The story and characters were written over 6 months and then developed further by the actors shortly before the film was shot in Greater Manchester, spring 2009. The shoot took place in Manchester city centre as well as parts of Salford and Didsbury. The film was made on a tiny independent budget with cast and crew working on days off to get it shot between other jobs.
Touching on themes of romance, fantasy and false reality, with science fiction imagery; the film explores moments of dark humor alongside an underlying and more important idea about how people deal with modern day pressure, stress at work, and "e;madness"e;. From word go the production was ambitious and challenging, and like most low budget films the project became a jigsaw puzzle of problem solving. One such problem being that half way through production the town centre based sales company office, in which some of the main scenes of the film take place, declared bankruptcy due to the current financial crisis, causing production to be halted. Having already shot most of the scenes with next to no budget, completion of the film was looking uncertain, but the cast and crew refused to give up and eventually regained access to the location for one last days shoot, which meant they were able to see production though until the final edit was finished in June 2009.