In 1993, Madeline and her boyfriend are enjoying a quiet evening at home when they are interrupted by a visit from a stranger bearing a message from Madeline’s future self.

Timelike is a time travel film like you’ve never seen before, and taking the found-footage film genre to a new level. A story that revolves around Madeline and her boyfriend when they are strangely and intermittently interrupted by a stranger bearing a message from Madeline’s future self.

The idea for Timelike came about as a result of my love of reading Wikipedia articles about time travel. In particular there’s an article about paradoxes which posits: If you go back in time and give a young Shakespeare a copy of his own works before he can write them, then who actually wrote them? That thought experiment was the starting point for the story.

Despite all the nonsense, we feel like everything makes sense. As little as we know, the viewer is always at the same level as the characters in the film – or at least at the same level as the boyfriend, who happened to be videotaping at the moment. What also keeps things at a believable state is that the boyfriend was taping for a particular reason, and the loop of them coming back to that point meant he was always taping in that point in time.

Next, I decided that the best way to draw in the viewer and sell the early nineties setting would be to shoot on actual VHS, which proved to be more challenging than I’d expected as far as the workflow goes, but I think the result speak for themselves. As a bonus I now own a mid nineties VHS camera and 3 VCRs.