Film as craft, not just plot
Film pulls me in through everything beyond plot: light, pacing, an actor's inflection, an edit. Lynch, Kiarostami, Tarkovsky, Varda, Akerman, and Deren all do that better than anyone.
FILM + PRODUCT DESIGN
Parallel
A mobile app for talking to other versions of yourself, tracking dreams for patterns, and exploring past lives. Designed as a real product, then built into a short film that treats it as one.
A self-directed exploration, not client work. I designed the app first, then wrote and shot a short film around it. The film never confirms whether Parallel is real or an elaborate piece of AI theater, and the app and its marketing site carry that same ambiguity.
MobileAI0 → 1
THE STORY
Where this all comes from
The pull underneath it is quantum physics, and stories about identity outside of what's tangible: talking to a version of yourself in another reality, revisiting a dream on purpose, seeing a past life. Parallel started as a way to text your parallel self, and everything else in the app grew out from there as I kept writing.
Why it doesn't end when the credits roll
Like the old Donnie Darko and Space Jam websites, I want Parallel to keep going after the credits, not stop at the runtime.
Starting with what I know
A decade as a product designer meant I could build the app myself. Two locations, two actors, and minimal dialogue kept the production doable.
A scientist nobody quite believes
VCL's founder is a decorated quantum physicist. Whether her research is real or an elaborate AI hoax is a question the film never answers.
A product built the way the story needed it to
The app has its own timeline: a dream journal, then Lumenate-inspired hypnosis, then Twins, born from a Large Hadron Collider premise, then Echoes.
THE PROJECT
Designing Parallel
WORLD BUILDING
Making the fiction feel believable
A real feeling parent company
Vera Continuum Laboratories operates the Continuum Network, a system of relay arrays. The fictional science, the Verowski effect, is framed as discovered at CERN in 2016 and commercialized by 2019, the way GPS is explained through space research.
In-world research papers
Three fictional papers underpin the product's claims: one on the mechanism behind Twins, one on the induction process for Dreams and Echoes, and one on relay network siting.
Tone over spectacle
The reference points for tone are Apple, OpenAI, and SpaceX: calm and matter of fact rather than mysterious or dystopian, so the product reads as plausible rather than science fiction.
A committed internal logic
Dreams are treated as actual travel to a parallel reality, not memory, which is why revisiting one is framed as a return. Echoes reaches backward along your own timeline instead. These positions are settled and intentionally not up for debate.