Katy went to a wedding and developed superpowers.

Things get pretty crazy in Patrick Muhlberger’s freshest short ‘The Katy Universe‘. It’s not a total shock after featuring his last completely whacky short ‘Pop Music‘. Katy is the story of a young woman who believes she developed superpowers during her friend’s wedding. She ends up reaching out to the only person she thinks will understand, her ex-boyfriend from high school.

After my last short POP MUSIC, I wanted to write something smaller in scope and easier to produce. I ended up writing about an experience I had years before, where reading an article on the size of the universe gave me an existential crisis. I combined this with some other dark and memorable moments from my 20s and the character of Katy was born. Once Mary signed on, the challenge became making a monologue as visually interesting as possible while still giving the performance room to shine. This simple idea quickly expanded to include dancing, fighting, and floating samosas. It was definitely not the easy short I intended to write, but everyone stepped up and I’m really happy with how it turned out.

The story takes us on a wild ride of uncertainties seen through the eyes (or mind) of our protagonist Katy (superbly performed by Mary Holland). Patrick constantly makes us wonder if Katy truly has superpowers or if she is deliriously high on cocaine, and this is all creating with an incredible work of choreography between the cast and crew, as well as in post production.

The film was shot on the RED Dragon with scorpio anamorphic lenses. To capture the spinning effect that reflects her mental state, they ended up using this rig called a skater scope that spins the image practically with mirrors. According to Patrick they “pretty much lived on a Fisher dolly the entire shoot, except for the explosion sequence where we used a Ronin2 from DJI” which allowed them to really show off her powers in long, dynamic takes.