Egofobia

Date of Shooting:	July, 3rd 1990
Date of Video Editing:	July, 18th 1990
Date of Audio Editing:	July, 21st 1990
Duration:	6min
Actors:	Ricardo Nori Gáudio
	Rodrigo Lemes
Sound Track:	Revolutions (Jean-Michael Jarre)

A shy boy, alone at home, trying to change his own personality to a more appealing one, confronts his alter-ego.

Egofobia is many things. It is an old story. It is also a neologism.It is sort of autobiographical. It is a psychological story, first meant tobe a thriller.

Egofobia was shot right after the Kobold Pictures director's return from his one-year trip to Germany. There was an excitement in group about restarting the filmmaking activities. We had already many stories written - ready to go -, so we didn't really have to improvise. Egofobia was a project that had been postponed since 1988.

The plot is the development of some different ideas: the double; the suspense based on an imaginary chase of a scared boy alone in his house; the personality change of a character, accomplished by the change on the way he looks.

The double became common place in the koboldian films, as this is an idea that had been used in other Quick Movies before this one (Gemini, The Reflex and Vlad, for instance). The technique was the same: the creation of the duplicity ilusion by the way the film is edited. The result here was fine, but not outstanding, although a body double was used in some scenes to increase the effect.

Suspense could have been better developed. Maybe the whole problem with that lays on the sound track. Jean Michel Jarre's Revolution definitely does not fit in here. Probably only by reworking the sound track - by removing this music and adding some sound effects - the suspense (which is one of its original inspirations) could be saved in this Quick Movie.

The personality change, on the other hand, seems to be convincing. The glasses, the clothes and the haircut, along with the acting itself, work just fine to build two completely different characters; in fact, two characters that are exactly the opposite.

If the other two ideas had been better developed, maybe the story of the shy boy, his conflict, and his attempt to change his own personality through a Psychology book could then have been less confusing; the duel between him and his alter-ego could have been clearer, and the necessity of one's death to the survival of the other could have been more evident.