Background: We became friends during our studies at Designskolen Kolding. During our time at the school we made a few, small film projects together, each time with both of us in front and behind the camera. Over the years we gained a lot of experience working with visual effects in films, on commercials as well as smaller personal projects and it came natural that we should make a film on our own. What we needed was time on our hands to come up with a story that would fit well with our skills.

During the winter 2008, a year after our graduation, both of us where working with post production at a small animation company in Copenhagen. In that period we would meet up after work and discuss ideas, draw sketches and look at various inspiration and slowly the idea for the movie evolved. We liked the idea of making a movie where a simple twisted postulate/setup drives the whole story. In this case, two people so dependent on each other that they share their breath. We liked the idea of making a movie where the entire story is driven by a a simple and twisted postulate/setup -- a deserted and poisonous world, where the only way to survive is by physically connecting yourself to another person, sharing your breath as if you were a single organism. A symbiotic relationship if you will.

We really liked this simple and of course metaphorical story, and the dilemmas the characters would face in a hostile world like this. This setting also opened up a lot of opportunities to focus on production design as well as the visual style and effects in the film. The film was supported by the Film Workshop at the Danish Film Institute.

The Film Workshop supports upcoming directors on smaller productions with a limited budget. They don't finance crew salaries but the money we received almost covered our expenses creating the costumes and helmets as well as transportation and catering at the shoot. The Film Workshop also supported us with most of the gear we needed, camera, light etc. We also edited the film at their facilities, used their computers for visual effects work, and they helped us with additional financial support for sound mixing.

Since we were working on the project in our spare time, making the film was a fairly long process. We received financial support from the Danish Film Institute in June 2008, and after meeting our producer Hui Rose, the project really began to take shape. Over the summer the whole crew was gathered and we found three great actors. We shot the film over three days in September 2008 and worked with our editor Johan Albrechtsen until we had a final cut around Christmas. After that we worked on and off on the visual effects for about 5 months. Color grading and sound was created during the summer of 2009, and the film premiered in Copenhagen in September, about one year after the film was shot.

Future: We recently started working together on a the script for a new short film, this time we have plans to work in the genre of magic realism. So there will probably be more focus on the characters and storyline than Connected had, but still with a lot of opportunities for us as visual artists to create a strange and unique visual universe as well. For now it still a spare time project, while we are also working on our own individual projects with our companies deerpark.dk and Chromascope.dk: Commercials, music videos and other design related jobs are in the works. In the last couple of months we have submitted the film to various festivals, and just now we are starting to hear from them.

Currently, Connected is scheduled to play at SFF-rated Athens in Greece 4. to 10. mar, Northern° Wave - film festival in Iceland 5. to 7. mar and Minimalen Filmfestival in Norway 5. to 9. mar. We hope to see the list grow in the coming months. Updates will be available on our website.