How a School Exam Became a Short Film

While rummaging through some old carboard boxes left in the back of a closet my mother recently discovered some old school documents I’d written long ago. One was an article dating back to 2008, my last year in Ungdomskolen—the Norwegian equivalent of Junior High School, where I detailed the broad strokes of the history of time travel in fiction. Much to my surprise, however, stapled to the back of this report was a five-page short story simply titled The Time Loop.

Hardly a masterpiece, but not terrible for something written by a Norwegian teenager in about an hour.

It was written in English and was part of my final exam that year (I got an A if you were wondering). It tells the story of an Oxford student named Ian McDougal who is accidentally sent three decades forward in time while working on an experimental device being developed by an eccentric professor. In the future Ian stumbles upon a lecture being held on a now common teleportation device. He decides to steal one of these devices and take it back to the present, figuring it will make him a rich man. The lecturer, who’s also the inventor if this device, catches him in the act and chases after him. Ian succeeds in getting back to the time machine and subsequently back to the present with the stolen device. In the following years he claims the device as his own invention, patents the idea, and becomes one of the richest men in the world. Then, one day thirty years after his time travel incident, while lecturing at his old university he sees someone trying to steal his device, chases after him, only to realise that the young man is his younger self, thereby bringing the circle of events to a final close.

Fourteen years after I wrote this story, in December of 2022, I released a short film on my YouTube channel titled Paradox, and if you’ve already seen it you might have recognised that the plot I described above is nearly identical to the plot of this film. 

This is obviously no coincidence, though you might be surprised to know that until this recent rediscovery by my mother, I was convinced this document had been lost.

Paradox actually started in late 2018 at the London Film Academy, when I was encouraged by the joint principal, Daisy Gili, to write and direct a 10-15 min. short film that would be co-produced by the school. I was at the time getting ready to travel back home to Norway in just a few days and would have to hand in a script before leaving. This didn’t give me much time to come up with a story. Luckily, I remembered the basic plot of The Time Loop, and the following day I handed her the first draft of the script. Ian was now Morgan, Oxford had changed to London, but all the story beats remained pretty much the same. She was pleased with the script and felt it was doable within the agreed budget, so we set a date for the following year when I would return to London to shoot the film.

The shoot itself went quite well, but the post-production can only be described as one of the most frustrating things I have been through. I will keep it short, but suffice it to say that Covid-19 caused many delays and that I did not get a proper “final” cut done until early 2021. Initial screenings to friends and family forced me to admit that I’d made a pretty serious casting error and the following year I decided to reshoot every scene with the middle-aged version of the protagonist, a process requiring multiple green-screen set-ups in London (which was shot by a second unit), something which created many time consuming VFX shots, and the final film was not completed until December 2022. Keep in mind that during the more than three years that had passed between the shoot and the final release, I had written a whole novel, started work on two more, not to mention written, produced, shot, edited and released a whole other short film earlier that year. It’s safe to say that this is by far the longest I have ever worked on a single story—for better and for worse.

Despite all this, I must say it was a fun experience once more hold the original short story in my hands and being able to read the original idea for the first time in sixteen years (even if the writing wasn't very good).

The film crew, plus lead actor Perry Jaques, on wrap day in August 2019.