My twenty minute short, Memoriam was written over the course of about a month, though the idea has been in my mind for years. The film began with a question, “If everything you have ever experienced, basically your entire reality and person is stored in your memory, what would happen if someone were to tamper with it?” and then the ideas came slowly. I knew it was important to explore the timely idea of radicalisation, how terrorist converts are convinced to believe in the caliphate but I needed something deeper for my protagonist. After years of stewing in my mind, I settled on a hyperthymestic protagonist (hyperthymesia is a condition that essentially manifests as uncanny biographical, photographic memory, effectively super memory and the task of understanding what that might entail from a visual perspective, actually opening up the mind of the character and seeing her “memory palace” from the inside out into the world was a challenge but an exciting one. Essentially, the protagonist serves as a foil to the memory hackers, she has the ability to see her memories changing shape, and thus is the key to understanding and stopping the threat of mind terrorism.

The film was extremely complex to write and the characters all had to balance properly and I knew establishing a large group of people as the antagonising force would be slightly less effective than having a proper antagonist that is the antithesis of the main character. Stay tuned for production photos and behind the scenes.