The Coma

Roles: Writer/Director/D.O.P/Producer/VFX/Editor

The Coma is a psycological thriller based upon the book by the same name wrtten by Alex Garland.

Synopsis-

Carl, a man bored with life and pining after his secretar, gets into an altercation on the train home from work leading him into a world of self discovery within his own mind. He will have to explore his past and present to escape the prison he has created for himself.

The Coma is my first short film, I made it entirely myself except for the acting and one scene where I needed an extra pair of hands focus pulling. Overall, it is not my proudest work but I do think it shows promise and dedication. Inspired heavily by noir films of the 50's, especially "The Third Man"(Reed, 1949) and "Touch of Evil"(Welles, 1958)

The dark, subconcious exploration that Alex Garland created with the novel felt perfect for a noir due to its heavy, dark themes and depressing overtone. Noir is a genre/movement charactised by morally grey characters, shadowy lighting and a dark story/mystery at the core. This film falls into the neo-noir sub genre, "(of a film) set in contemporary modern times, but showing characteristics of a film noir, in plot or style" ("Definition of neo-noir | Dictionary.com", 2022).

This film was mostly shot during the middle of the COVID-19 pandemic which meant I had to be creative with certain locations. For the opennign train scene I hastily developed my own virtual production studio system modelled on ILM and Jon Favreau's work on "The Mandolorian" (Favreau & Filoni, 2019-2022). My "Volume" (Baver, 2022) didn't have massive LED screens but instead used unreal engine to real-time key out my green screena and output it to my laptop.