For our short film pitch, my group and I ended up going with a nice basic home invasion style horror scenario with our ghoul taking influence from the visual motifs and themes of eastern horror movies. More or less a guy steals money from his housemate and then get’s chopped by a ghost for doing so. Lots of slashers tend to follow a similar chain of events in which typically teens or college students are up to something sinful or promiscuous and proceed to be judged and punished for their sins. For example in ‘Nightmare on Elm Street’ the teens were guilty of being sexually active, in ‘Friday the 13th’ again it was a group of teens guilty of underage drinking and sex who Jason terrorized, same as Texas Chainsaw Massacre except those cookers in that van were also guilty of taking and selling drugs. (wouldn’t have happened to the Scooby gang because Shaggy’s a wholesome stoner who must also be a virgin since he never got brutally stabbed by anyone.) In our film however, Jack’s character who get’s terrorized is guilty of stealing instead.

We shot our footage today in Doncaster and unlike the last time I went to film for a project, I actually brought my camera battery chargers for when they inevitably die on you… Which they did. On one hand it was great to have two SLRs to use for when this happens because it means you don’t get held up, but now I’m going to have to colour-grade the footage to match visually. (I plan to start on post-production tomorrow.) The thing about the cameras we shot on is that my EM10 has better footage stabilization than the SONY I borrowed from my housemate, however his A7S is much stronger in the low-light department and shoots nicer, deeper full-frame footage as well as being able to plug in a shotgun mic (bit of a shit feature of the EM10 missing that without an adapter). Both were helpful for different types of shots, so again there are some benefits as well as gripes when using two separate cameras. The location (Jack’s House) actually suited our needs pretty well and the dull light from outside wasn’t bad either, we used a lighting stand and plastic from a green bag to create a cooler unsettling look to the house since we needed lighting to warm light doesn’t really do wonders in this context to compliment a horror environment when you need to light scenes up. I am hoping that the shots match up alright lighting wise too, but again I’ll have to do what I can in post-production if they don’t.