One of five short films I directed and finished in collaboration with Motionpoems. The process was wonderfully open: choose a poem and build a film around your own interpretation. It’s the kind of creative exercise that keeps you honest—no client brief, just you and the poem.

For this piece, Spirit in the Dark, I shot actors on green screen and built out 3D digital sets, placing the story in a stylized version of New York. The twist? I used dollhouse furniture for all the props—tables, chairs, lamps. Everything except the record player, which is real. Combining all these different-scale elements gave the film a strange, dreamlike quality I liked. And to push it further, the whole thing runs at 12 frames per second—just enough to give the movement a slight stutter, like memory trying to recall itself.