Time Freak is a 2011 short film (ten minutes) directed by Andrew Bowler.
A young man, Evan, goes looking for his roommate and old school buddy, Stillman, whom he hasn't seen for three days. He arrives at a warehouse in a grungy part of town and finds a rather manic, disheveled Stillman at a drawing board. Stillman hits a button, and Evan arrives again. And again. And again.
Finally, a more clean and neat Stillman welcomes Evan into the warehouse. It seems that Stillman, who is a scientific genius, has invented a time machine! Evan is amazed and asks about whether or not Stillman has gone to ancient Rome, which was long a fantasy of Stillman's. But it turns out Stillman hasn't been doing anything like that. He's traveled back only to yesterday, and all he's done is try to get his shirt from the dry cleaners and impress a woman he knows called Debbie. And he's been doing this for, in his own frame of reference, a year and a half.
Andrew Bowler reworked this short into a 2018 feature film also called Time Freak. This trope list is based on the original 2011 short film.
Tropes:
- Animated Credits Opening: The opening credits show Stillman's equations floating and spinning over live-action footage.
- Berserk Button: Stillman cannot deal with the dry cleaners not having his shirt ready. He has to go through several time-travel attempts at going to the dry cleaners before he can stop himself from flipping out, and he is still seething when he tells Evan the story.
- Extremely Short Timespan: In Evan's frame of reference, anyway, as he has only a single short conversation with Stillman about the Time Machine.
- Failure Montage: Stillman, embarrassed about how he freaked out when he went to the dry cleaners and found his shirt wasn't ready, decides to use his machine to travel back in time and be nicer to the proprietor. But he keeps losing his cool, leading to a montage of several trips to the dry cleaner where Stillman keeps freaking out. Later, he keeps trying to be cool and witty and impress Debbie, but he keeps failing, leading to another montage. (On one occasion he has exchanged his usually rumpled clothes for a nice suit.)
- Field Trip to the Past: Stillman wanted to do this, to visit Ancient Rome. But he was too wrapped up in arguing with the dry cleaner and impressing Debbie.
- Minimalist Cast: There are only four characters in the film: Evan, Stillman, Debbie, and the dry cleaner.
- Only One Me Allowed Right Now: After they travel two minutes in the past, Evan wonders where "me from two minutes ago" is. Stillman explains that it doesn't work that way, that there's only ever one of a person and that if you travel into a past where you already existed, the "new" you is the only one there.
- Set Right What Once Went Wrong: Evan realizes that the time machine isn't good for Stillman, that if he keeps using it he'll just spend his whole life wasting time on piddling nonsense. So Evan leaps into the time machine, travels back to their school days, and gets Stillman to major in oceanography rather than quantum mechanics.
- Temporal Sickness: A mild case, as apparently going back in time causes some sort of sinus headache. Stillman tells Evan to hold the bridge off his nose.
- Time Machine: Yep! Stillman builds some kind of rig with a bunch of Tesla coils that throws off cool sparks before sending whoever's inside through time.
- Time Travel: Does Stillman use it to resolve historical mysteries? To see what the future will bring? To go to 1978 and buy Apple stock? Nope, he uses time travel to make better impressions on a dry cleaner and a pretty girl.
- Year Inside, Hour Outside: What Stillman's basically done for himself, by continually dicking around with all the trivial conversations the day before. Evan is shocked to find out that while in Evan's frame of reference, Stillman has only been gone for three days, Stillman has actually spent a year and a half continually traveling back to the day before to impress Debbie and be nicer to the dry cleaner.
