Breath of Love

Roles: Writer, Editor, Director, Cameraman

Breath of Love is a skit parodying the rom-com genre. It follows Payton, a demolition company’s consultant who never has time for anything other than work. One day, his best friend Jerry brings him to the gym, where he encounters Kathrina, a construction company consultant and the woman of his dreams. There’s only one issue; Payton gets so nervous around Kathrina that he can’t remember anything about her. In a flash, a year passes and it’s Payton and Kathrina’s one year anniversary, but he doesn’t even remember any of the time he spent with her.

This skit parodies popular rom-coms such as Annie Hall and 50 First Dates and takes their tropes to an extreme. It also takes elements from career woman comedies and does a gender role swap to create the “career man comedy” where the male lead is focused on work until romance sweeps him off his feet. It also takes aspects of homme-coms and uses subtle gross out humor and reverses gender roles once again. Where rom-coms fail to create dynamic and 3D characters, Breath of Love parodies and expands on that convention. The skit deviates a little from the final script, but it's for the better. It leans more into the fantastical element found in rom-coms.

One of the biggest challenges I encountered on this project was working on a massive time crunch. All of my actors were super busy, and for most of my scenes I only had a few takes; furthermore, some of my scenes were outside and needed a specific time of day and weather, which nearly caused a rewrite for Kathrina and Payton's break-up scene because of all the aforementioned limiting factors. However, I was able to get it all done and I think the comedy element is elevated by the loud squeak caused by Kathrina's shoes on the recently rain-kissed playground slide. Additionally, the entire project was shot using an iPhone and tripod combo, which taught me the valuable lesson of investing in lavalier microphones. To date, this is my longest video project and I'm proud of how well it came together.