A surrealist science fiction short film.
When employees at a virtual reality office start disappearing, an ambitious company man is the only one asking questions.
LANCE STERLING is a programmer working at a VR office. He struggles with the existential dread of office life but believes that if he keeps his head down and works hard, he’ll make a name for himself in the company.
But Lance’s illusion of corporate benevolence is shattered when people at the office start to go missing and he's the only one asking questions. He checks on one of the missing employees and discovers him murdered in his apartment. With help from his colleague and neighbor, ANNIE. Lance discovers that a recently fired employee, HOMER, has acquired the addresses of all their coworkers and is assassinating them while logged into the office. And to make matters worse, he's armed, in the building, and coming after them next.
Lance and Annie fight to save their lives. They ultimately must turn to their coworkers living in the same tenant complex to rally together and stop Homer.
A UNIQUE VISUAL STYLE
WORKSPACE is set in a surrealist dystopian future where the offices are not state-of-the-art, photorealistic models, but budget-tier digital spaces reminiscent of early-2000s video game graphics. By filming actors on greenscreen and compositing them into this low-fidelity CGI environment, the film aims to create a surreal visual style that will look like no other film ever made.
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Virtual reality, remote work, and class consciousness are prominent in the current cultural zeitgeist. Companies continue to experiment with virtual workplaces while an increasingly online generation grapples with loneliness and disconnection. These anxieties have found expression in internet-born art movements such as vaporwave, liminal spaces, and retro video game aesthetics.
By bringing these elements together with grounded narrative reasoning, Workspace has the potential to be a viral and cultural hit.
Vahan Bedelian
Workspace will be the 11th short film of director Vahan Bedelian, best known for his film The K-town Killer, which premiered at the prestigious Tribeca Festival in 2023. The festival had a less than 1% acceptance rate for shorts the year he earned an Official Selection, cementing Vahan as a top-tier short-format filmmaker.