Short Cinematic Film
Dozed Off is a three-minute surrealist short film produced entirely in Unreal Engine 4, edited in Premiere Pro and After Effects. The brief was minimal to the point of absurdity: make a cinematic that includes a cactus with good narration. What emerged was a complete work of personal cinema.
The film has almost no dialogue. A single word — “sir?” — spoken by a security guard in the final frame, is the only human speech in the entire three minutes. Everything else is music, ambient sound, mumbling, nature, animals, the squeak of a creature, the rhythm of a subway. The sound world carries the film’s emotional register without language.
The story follows a man — tired, alone — on a subway car. One by one the other passengers leave until he is the only one remaining. The world empties around him. Then a fairy enters — not human, not from this world, recognisably impossible — and exits at the last stop. He follows her out of curiosity. He climbs dark stairs and enters a forest that shouldn’t be there. He finds an abandoned house. Inside, a creature speaks in a squeaky language to the fairy, who transforms into a cactus. He sees the living cactus and the speaking creature and startles — and everything blurs out. He wakes in the subway, a security guard standing over him. He was dozed off.
The visual language of consciousness was built into the camera itself. The frame blurs and darkens as the protagonist enters the dream state. It clears as he is woken. No title card, no voiceover, no explanation — the optics of the image carry the transition between waking and dreaming. The audience feels the movement between states because the image performs it.
No script was written. The story lived in the director’s mind and was translated directly into the medium — angles felt rather than planned, composition intuited in the moment of production. 3D assets were sourced and directed rather than modelled from scratch: the craft was in the selection, composition, lighting, camera movement, and editorial rhythm. The film was completed in one month.
The inspiration for the protagonist came from someone known personally — a specific figure, carrying a specific weight of feeling, observed in exactly this kind of exhausted solitude. That private origin is what gives the film its emotional precision. The tired man on the subway is not a generic everyman. He is someone real, translated into a dream.