The Dollhouse
Waking up in a locked room, Amai’s instinct drives her to search for the pills she depends on. But as she reaches for the next dose, something shifts in the darkness—waiting for her to take it.
Short Film The Dollhouse
In this project, I am...
DOP
Sound Designer
Composer
Stills
About the project
The Dollhouse is an episode in the Ken Ket series, an episodic web project I worked on during my time at RMIT University while pursuing a Bachelor of Digital Film and Video. The series sought to represent near-death experiences by experimenting with various media formats. For The Dollhouse, we explored surrealistic production design, drawing inspiration from German Expressionism. We used decorative items, makeup design, vibrant lighting, and unconventional camera angles to visually depict the character's dependency on her daily doses, creating a disorienting and dreamlike atmosphere.
As the Director of Photography, my approach drew the focus on creating a variety of perspective to portray the character's wandering mind as she is constantly high on drugs. Given the limited size of the location, setting up the camera angles and lighting equipments was very challenging. In most of the setups, I had to operate alone in order to give the shots enough space to achieve the targeted visual.
The Dollhouse as well as the Ken Ket series received high validation from across the film program after being displayed in an educational screening event. As a task that was also assigned by the course, we created a social media presence for the series and it is currently streaming on Youtube.
