Exploring the idea of internal struggle, Engulf You is a film painting the never ending ‘dance’ of emotions that make us. Much like the concept of the cosmic duality of Yin and Yang, our emotions are in a constant tango, vying for victory over one another. This film focuses particularly on the claustrophobia within us when anxieties and self doubt truly engulf us.

Director’s Statement

This project was self funded so we had to run with a very skeleton crew. With that obviously comes a ton of problem-solving against the clock. For the interior scenes we built a room inside of a work-out gym. What was tricky is that there were actually two totally different shoots going on with the camera package we rented. We’re from Wisconsin and the budgets aren’t so great out here. With that said our DP (@tonyporter) and us had a total of 5-6 hours to get the room built, painted, set decked, and lit. During that time we also had to bring our main characters into the world which can be difficult when you have people running around with paint brushes and equipment next to them. Our time in the gym was running out and we had about an hour to get these scenes shot. Everybody had to wear multiple hats and although it was stressful it allowed for a lot of collaborative discovery throughout each day on set. Being able to stay on the fly and roll with the punches is so crucial on set in general but especially on skeleton crews like this.

With all the challenges we faced throughout this project we couldn’t have done it without an incredible and flexible crew that was willing to take on tasks that weren’t in their department. These types of shoots are chaotic but there’s also something so visceral and rewarding about doing it this way.