STINGS
SHORT FILM
WRITING · DIRECTION · EDITORIAL
What does rejection feel like before you’ve had time to make sense of it?
Stings began with a breakup, a piece of music, and a dream.
After an intense relationship ended abruptly, I became interested in the strange, disorienting period immediately afterward — when you’re moving through ordinary life but nothing quite feels ordinary. That night, while listening repeatedly to “Stings” by Kamaal Williams, I had a feverish dream of moving from one encounter to another, each increasingly surreal. I woke up knowing I wanted to turn that feeling into a short film.
I gave myself a simple set of constraints: under five minutes, a small cast, locations in and around my neighborhood, a limited budget, and a one-day shoot.
Rather than work against those limitations, I used them to build the film’s language. The project became an exercise in atmosphere — finding ways to create a specific emotional world with very little.
Music became the foundation.
While developing Stings, I created an hour-long mix to map the emotional rhythm of the story and immerse myself in its world. Music helped me find the film’s beats before we ever shot them, shaping the pacing, imagery, and progression from the familiar toward something increasingly dreamlike.
Stings became less about explaining heartbreak than trying to recreate its atmosphere: the confusion, absurdity, and emotional free fall of suddenly being rejected.
The visual language of Stings continued beyond the film itself.
Working with Andrew Lubis, I developed the poster using imagery pulled directly from the film. We printed frame grabs, cut them apart, layered and taped them back together by hand, then scanned the compositions and finished them digitally.
One image of Max became the foundation: a quiet moment of him lying in the grass at the point where the story is about to shift. We repeated and fragmented the image into three layers, echoing the three stages he moves through in the film.
The process gave the poster the same quality I wanted from Stings itself — familiar elements rearranged into something disorienting, raw, and unexpected.
Poster Design
Andrew Lubis + Patrick Wilkinson