In a surreal and quiet suburb, a beautiful girl waits for the flirtatious postman to arrive each morning. Little does she know, across the street lives a lonely ghost, trapped in an old house, longing for her from afar.

In a film four years in the making, director Nik Wansbrough brings us an imaginary strange tale of a lonely spectre infatuated with the girl next door. While a beautiful girl waits for the flirtatious postman to arrive each morning, across the street lives a lonely ghost, trapped in an old house, longing for her from afar.

Girl + Ghost began life when I walked past a book of monster costumes for children. On the cover stood a child in the stereotypical ghost costume comprising of a white sheet draped over the body with holes cut out for the eyes. The image set my imagination on fire. I began dreaming of how I could appropriate the visual and imbue it with a sense of character within a narrative film.

Dreams transport us from the here and now, they sustain us through the hard times and provide us with something to strive for. Thus, Girl + Ghost is an ode to the imagination.

The particular theme gives the film a morbid and clumsy Burtonesque feel, while touching on an unusual one-sided romance. A unique mix of live actors within model-set environments, puppets, stop-motion animation and digital compositing all molded together with an original score to tell the surreal tale.

I had already created a number of shorts in a style that I like to call “Paranormal Pantomime;” narrative pieces, free of dialogue that explore the point of view of non-human characters. Girl + Ghost was to be the culmination of all the stylistic elements I had been playing with in those previous projects. However, this time I wanted to twist the audience’s sense of morality. Girl + Ghost is a love story, but only from one character’s point of view. I wanted the audience to be on the side of the voyeuristic ghost and disregard all the notions of a traditional, reciprocated romance.