Countdown
A man with a toothache tries to read while waiting for his long-overdue dentist appointment, but gets interrupted by an annoying family who starts talking, and doesn’t stop talking.
Ruairi is a multi-talented sound designer, musician, and filmmaker from Houston who’s work evokes the silly and the weird. He has recorded and mixed sound for multiple award-winning films, and is currently signed to the record label Very Jazzed – LP “Ataraxic” out now.
A goal I set out for Countdown was to create the anxiety of being trapped inside your own head in a funny and abstracted way. I wrote the screenplay after talking with a couple of friends about how stressful it is to be trapped between tasks, unable to make headway on one task before a new one distracts you – there are days where I walk in circles for hours, and I wanted to provide some catharsis for that.
The main character is simply trying to read a book to distract him from an awful toothache, only to be interrupted by a loud, scatter-brained family, again and again. As the interruptions increase in size and amount, the main character’s anxiety grows and grows until he snaps, and reality breaks.