Crossing Over: The Making of Parallel Partners
Anya and Logan
*** Pro tip: Rotate your phone for the full experience.***
What if love wasn’t just a risk—it was a breach in reality?
Parallel Partners is a short film about impossible connection, fractured realities, and the gamble of crossing over—when doing so might collapse everything. It’s sci-fi, yes. But more than that, it’s a metaphor. A mirror. A leap of faith dressed in circuitry and stars.
A scientist accidentally invents a device that allows people to communicate with their counterparts in parallel universes. Two strangers—one from each world—find each other. They speak. They connect. And against the warning signs, they decide to meet. The closer they get, the more the world around them begins to shift, crumble, and distort.
For them, it’s love. For you, it might be a dream, a career, a version of yourself you’re too afraid to meet. Parallel Partners is about that moment—the threshold—where you decide: do I stay where it’s safe, or do I step forward into the unknown?
At its core, this story is less about technology and more about choice. About the unseen moment just before the leap—when your heart knows what it wants, but your logic tries to hold you back. It's about standing in that space between realities, between what is and what could be, and making the decision to move.
It’s a story that lives on the fault line of emotion and consequence. The closer Logan and Anya get, the more unstable their worlds become—both literally and metaphorically. It's a visual metaphor for those moments in life when progress threatens everything familiar, and the cost of connection might be collapse. But they move forward anyway. Because some things are worth the risk.
I wanted to make something that spoke louder than an audition ever could. Not just to casting, but to anyone watching closely. A film that said: this is the world I want to live in — and this is the kind of man I want to explore. Someone still. Wounded, maybe. Trying. The kind they rarely trust me to play. A good man — but not a perfect one. Not performative. Not loud. Just real. The kind of role that lingers in the silences. That holds space instead of filling it. Something with a little Clark Kent energy, before the cape — when he was just trying to be human.
“Parallel Partners is about that moment—the threshold—where you decide: do I stay where it’s safe, or do I step forward into the unknown?”
PARALLEL Partners WENT ON TO WIN MANY AWARDS ACROSS THE GLOBE
I had never produced my own work before.
Back in early 2021, I stumbled across Dan from Dream Reach Media. He had this whole ethos of helping artists break into filmmaking on their own terms. His work and approach struck a nerve in me. At the time, I couldn’t move forward with him—life was life-ing, other projects came up—but I never forgot his name.
Then three years later, I found myself in a good place financially, and it just clicked: Now or never. I emailed Dan out of the blue—repeatedly. He finally picked up the phone and said, “You’re very persistent.”
I told him: It takes me a while to make up my mind, but when I do, nothing can stop me. I get obsessed.
That’s how it started.
Three months of pre-production later, we had the cast, crew, and director locked in. Massive shoutout to Melissa Vitello—without her, there is no film. Her producing kept the train on the tracks when I was juggling everything else: a full-time leadership role running multiple warehouses, pre-production logistics, self-funding every dollar, and preparing as the lead actor.
No sleep. All in. And I wouldn’t change a second.
I went deep—custom-built props like the LED wrist detectors that glowed based on threat levels, a data pad that nods to Star Wars (Logan, my character, is a canon-level fanboy). I wanted to give him a kind of Luke Skywalker energy: optimistic, driven, a little naïve.
My influences were all over the map but shared a certain gravity—The Creator, 65, Interstellar—stories that ask big questions in quiet ways. And then there’s Hitchcock, who said 90% of filmmaking is casting. He wasn’t wrong. The soul of a film lives in who you choose to carry it.
From day one, Parallel Partners felt like sci-fi Romeo & Juliet. Not just star-crossed lovers—but dimension-crossed. Two people who were never meant to find each other, but did anyway. And maybe it wrecked them. Or maybe it woke them up. Either way, they reached the edge of their lives and didn’t flinch.
They leapt.
In a way, I’ve been there more than once. Personally. Professionally. This film is just that experience—painted in the language of Sci-Fi genre. And I wanted to make it real.
It checked so many boxes for me. New footage to market myself. Festival wins for Best Sci-Fi, Best Actor, Best Actress, Cinematography. A vision made real. Proof that you don’t have to wait for permission to be great.
Control is underrated. So is risk. Every actor—every artist—should make something that’s theirs. No price is too high for your own voice.
This one’s mine.
“It takes me a while to make up my mind, but when I do, nothing can stop me. I get obsessed”
and out
Whatever it is, the way you tell your story online can make all the difference.
Would you dare to cross?
