Craving

Craving is a self-isolation fever dream about one man’s hunger that is increasingly harder to satiate, driving him to the brink of manslaughter (or man-potato slaughter) in order to satisfy his growing delusions of grandeur, paired with his prolonged confinement from others.

Food-porn will never be the same.

Featuring Rodrigo Penalosa

dop: Stefan Yap
Set design: Will Vincent

Editing: Nick Armstrong @ Cut+Run
Sound by Echoic

Studio and equipment : Park District

Onset VFX & FX: Pery McCafferty
Matchmoving: Peanut
Modelling, animation, lighting, compositing: Greg Barth
Additional houdini sims: Stuart Whelbourn @ ETC

Screen & title design : Futurneue

Grade: Connor Coolbear @ETC
Grade producer: Oliver Whitworth @ ETC

Huge thanks to:

Barney Richards, Rodrigo Penalosa, Yuki Hono-Archer, Ben Ridolfi, Phil Derham. Piers Quérée, Alex Dujet, EXTRASET.CH, Lauren Coutts, Lucy Orr, David Rodger.

During lockdown, our family dinners were becoming more basic,  and I started becoming obsessed with the wierd and solitary experience of microwave dinners: the somewhat strangely transfixing experience of watching your dinner sadly rotate in front of you. I don’t have a microwave, but imagined someone living alone having that moment every day where they would look at their single-person dinner cook, only to be dissapointed by the experience.

Partly due to my waning sanity during this period (2 kids at home at all times), this wierd microwave idea became a surreal essay on mental health, male vanity and the whole fragility of the gig economy during this time, which came together to become probably my wierdest short film, but one that I am extremely proud of. Rodrigo Penalosa elevated the film so much – I mean he IS the film – it’s really thanks to his transfixing (and slightly pervy) presence that Craving actually came to fruition.