A ReelRun short film / proof of concept for .EXE
A desperate grocery store worker with an experimental neural implant is replaced by a sinister digital doppelgänger that traps him inside a void between reality and whatever lurks within his own head.
01 the idea
the horror was never the technology. it lives where it always has, in what we are willing to stop questioning, and in the patient entities on the other side that have been waiting for us to turn a blind eye.
02 director's statement
the machine has no will, no malice. it is only a door.
I have spent years working inside the machine, close enough to feel a quiet vertigo, a question I couldn't stop asking: what are we opening, and what is waiting on the other side? I have watched people hand over their attention, their judgment, their sense of what is real, and accept in return a reality the algorithm chooses for them.
I am haunted by the idea that in making ourselves machine readable, in feeding ourselves to these systems piece by piece, we are leaving something open. Not our data. Our presence. Our sense of soul. The film treats that surrender literally: a man who has given a part of his body and his mind to a system he doesn't understand, and the thing that walks in once the space is empty.
jack ruefli
03 characters
Tall and slim and running on empty, working the night shift stacking cans to keep a life together that's coming apart. On the surface he's dry and easygoing, the type to crack a joke at his manager or mutter at the hold music to keep from losing it, but the thing you have to understand is that he isn't reckless, he's desperate.
His sister has leukemia, the job that was supposed to cover it didn't come close, so he sold the only thing he had left, access to the inside of his own head.
An ancient presence from a lower dimension that has now found a doorway. It was never the technology, the chip in Martin's head is just the door, and this is what was waiting on the other side of it.
It doesn't kick the door down, it doesn't have to. It waits for him to be tired and alone, and what it wants isn't to destroy him, it's to replace him, to wear his face and stack his cans and live his life.
The store manager and a lifelong World of Warcraft guy, the kind of boss who's more of a coworker than an authority figure. Easygoing and a little checked out, the type to call the company that owes Martin money a bunch of assholes and genuinely mean it, but not the type to actually do anything about it.
04 the world · 2036
Tensor is set about ten years out, after the AI boom. The breakthroughs were real, the wealth was not shared. Medicine can cure almost any illness and almost no one can afford the cure. The grid brownouts most nights. Food has narrowed to a handful of brands selling rehydrated protein out of cans.
It's the world we already have, only older, dimmer, more expensive, and quietly hollowed out from the inside. And one company sits behind the cans on the shelf and the chip in Martin's neck.
get paid. get healed. get ahead.
Join a paid neural research program today. Treatment credit available for qualifying families.
Participant codes are assigned at enrollment. Suppressant regimen required. Payments subject to review. Please continue to hold.
05 visual style
Tensor lives in the fluorescent hum of a grocery store after close. Cold practical light, deep shadow, and a world that slowly stops being the one Martin knows.
in the vein of Videodrome / Pulse (Kairo) / We're All Going to the World's Fair
there are two realities and the space in between.
Red will define Martin's real reality, and purple will define the entity's.
the shift between them lives in the production design.
Small things first. A label peeling back to show a different one underneath, a box that's the wrong color, a tennis ball that comes back a different shade than the one he threw.
the product
Martin spends the night stacking them. Drag across the box. It isn't only the color that changes.
half human, half something else.
To keep the entity unknown, we lean on the uncanny valley. Our lead actor plays both Martin and the thing wearing him, his likeness pushed with SFX makeup, the soulless black eyes finished in post. Grounded, practical, and just wrong enough.
production design by hayeon kim
wider and open shapes & structure
Farmer Ben's as Martin knows it. Worn, ordinary, under-lit, the aisles still give him room to breathe.
dense and claustrophobic shapes & structure
The same aisles closing in. Signage that has quietly changed, product that's one shade off, and every can tracing back to Amaranth Group, one tech company's monopoly on the food supply.
06 the void
Real test footage, shot and comped by our team. The handheld move is tracked frame by frame to a fraction of a pixel, then the purple aisle and the void are built around it in post.
07 the location
A real grocery outlet in Los Angeles, scouted and ready to go. Drag across the aisle to see it the way the night shift will. This is where the location money goes: overnight shoots inside it, after it closes.
08 the bigger picture
Tensor is built to travel the genre festival circuit and show what this world looks like on screen. It's the proof of concept for .EXE, a feature that tells the whole story of what's waiting on the other side.
09 the team
Jack is a filmmaker from Perth, Western Australia, now based in Los Angeles. He's an AFI Conservatory Producing Fellow and runs ReelRun, and before that his Australian shorts and music videos played more than 50 international festivals.
He's also spent years working in virtual production and VFX, close enough to the machine to start asking what we're letting through it. That's where Tensor comes from.
10 the ask
Tensor is partly funded. The script's on its sixth draft, the location is scouted, the VFX pipeline is tested and the team is ready to go. What's missing is the money to lock the location, pay the people making it and finish it properly in post.
It's a small film with a big job, and every dollar goes into showing what this world looks like on screen.
Overnight shoots inside a real grocery store after it closes.
Paying the people making this a fair rate for long night shoots.
The void, the mimic, edit, color, sound and score.
11 donate
Every dollar goes into getting Tensor shot and finished, the location, the people, and the post work it takes to make the void look real. If you can't give right now, sharing the page helps just as much.
Fiscally sponsored by . Donations are tax-deductible to the extent allowed by law.
We're putting the finishing touches on the donation page. Leave your email and we'll send you the link the moment it's live, plus the odd update from set.
