Falling in love is hard in this adaptation of spoken word poet Neil Hilborn’s beloved poem ‘OCD’.
The film deals with mental health, OCD and relationships, as we follow ‘him’ and ‘her’ as they navigate the world of love and its end, through a specific lens.
Pre face
Obsession lives inside of us all, but Neil Hilborn’s words in his poem OCD, struck a chord with how such a specific experience on love and relationships could at the same time be so universal.
Neils words had such a potency in his performance piece that as a director I felt compelled to adapt it through the use of image and sound due to just how descriptive and weight his words were, it was like finding a beautiful script that had not been adapted.
I feel this is a piece that can connect not only to the audience that deals with OCD but also to most people on a universal level, everybody experiences relationships in their
life, the good and the bad everyone deals with obsession when it comes to relationships.
Production and approach
Once the decision had been made to adapt the poem into a short film I knew that we would be up against it as a production due to it being solely a passion project with no funding whatsoever, favours were brought in on all aspects from equipment to to crew and we only had two days to shoot lots of microscopes that would build the world centred around the couple living out Neil’s words.
In terms of approach I wanted to embrace how universal the poem felt and so that informed the shooting style, this meant trying to literally bring the audience into the experience to evoke a feeling of the audiences own personal experiences regarding love an example of this is the use of POV portraiture for a lot of the microscenes.
Almost the entirety of the amazingly talented crew was made of Bournemouth Film School graduates, it was a really rewarding experience to get everyone back on the same set together again and re-establish the overwhelmingly positive work environment that helped carry the tough shoot to its end.
There was something special about making a film about relationships with a crew that are all very close and considered friends as much as co-workers.
