Synopsis

"Closed Circuit Love" is, in its essence, a love story. It is set in contemporary times and addresses such issues as voyeurism, jealousy and the universal feeling of not really knowing our partners.

Bruce and Sandra have been living together for almost a year. A week before their anniversary, Bruce receives an email with a CCTV video of Sandra being assaulted sexually in an unidentified car park. She has never told him about this and he feels curious, enraged and jealous. He is not bold enough to ask her about it, and his curiosity increases as the clues continue to arrive in more emails some of them with dangerous implications. As he delves deeper into the mystery he finally finds the car park and all the answers he had been looking for.

Director's Notes

"Closed Circuit Love" was conceived keeping a piece of music in mind. As part of 2007's Thinksync competition, all entries were given a large selection of gratis music to choose from. I picked 'Free Love' by Barry Adamson. I knew Adamson's work from his days with the Bad Seeds and of course for his contributions to Lynch's 'Lost Highway'.

For a couple of weeks this track was the only music I listened to. I took it everywhere on my mp3 player. I already had a couple of ideas for the film in terms of pacing and themes, but no images yet. One afternoon I was walking home from work listening to the track when I was nearly run over by a girl riding a bike. I stood there looking at her and, wouldn't you know it, the beginning of Free Love matched the movement of the bicycle perfectly. From there the rest of the script came pretty fast. I took into account what resources I could get my hands to in terms of locations and props.

All I needed was a crew, so I pitched the project around during on OTT meeting and got all the crew I needed in a single evening! Some locations were hard to find like the car park and the abandoned apartment, but my AD came up with goods and they were sourced. The cast was found through the Starnow website, and they already knew each other from previous work; this would prove invaluable for the more intimate scenes which they did with no problems and very professionally.

Due to the availability of all of us, the film was shot in 4 half days spread over 3 weeks. We used an HDV camera with a redrock 35mm lens adapter and some wicked lenses, the highlight being an 85m f 1.2 that is exceptional for close-ups. You can easily spot this lens in a lot of the shots during the film. Everybody got along very well and the general feeling is that we all would like to work together in the future.

Overall I am extremely pleased with the film and feel we all learned a lot from it. There were a couple of things which could have been better but that just means the next one will be even better.

I hope you like it and that this film does justice to the great community that is OTTfilms.