Hello everybody and welcome back to my blog. This time we’re talking about horror… the whole unit this time though.

If you are an avid reader of this blog you would hopefully know that our most recent project was based around horror and creating a movie. Back in the middle of October we took a trip down to Seattle to learn about the genre and theme of horror. Visiting one of the top rated haunted houses in all of North America, I may not have gone in there but everyone else sounded pretty terrified. We also spent a ridiculous amount of time in the horror exhibit of the MoPOP. The other main highlight of the trip wasn’t horror related but some of the best food I’ve ever had. This would be the restaurant we visited named Din Tai Fung. It’s a Taiwan restaurant famous for it’s Xiao Long Bao. Without going too far off topic, I highly recommend the restaurant and plan to visit it again some time. On the last day of our trip we started coming up with some ideas for what our movie could be about, we never came up with anything concrete but got some good ideas out.

Right from the start of the unit we were assigned a book to read, because of course we were. This time around it was the original Frankenstein written by Mary Shelley. The book was kind of slow, and was much more sad than I expected. The story was a lot about the internal struggle, which isn’t the basic Frankenstein story every kid knows. If you want to read more about my experience with this book and it’s movie, you can read that post here.

As well as watching the movie of Frankenstein, we also watched both Halloween, and Get Out. Both of which I really enjoyed, especially Get Out. If you want to read the posts about the two movies, just click on the title. Coming into this unit, I was excited for the project itself, but was dreading all the learning about horror that would come with it. However I was pleasantly surprised to enjoy watching all 3 of the movies, and just generally get interested in the topic. Horror truly was not my thing, and now it still isn’t something I love, but I’m not terribly against watching a horror movie now.

Now onto movie development. Unfortunately, I don’t have a movie to show you. Here’s what happened. After we left Seattle with a full staff all with responsibilities, we settled on an idea and let the script team get to work. They finished a plan relatively quickly, however there was some delay in getting critique on this and the project was almost somewhat postponed for a week or two. Once we finally got some feedback on the script, there were a lot of changes to be made. After a few more rounds of critique, the executive producers and key creative team, had a script they were happy with. We were right near the end of November and the project was still only just starting. A story board was created, and I began on our Call Sheet for the first day of filming. Apparently when we discussed at the start of the unit that you would have to give up valuable time, it wasn’t made clear enough to most people, including myself. Our plan was to be done filming by December 6th, so that post production would have about a week to edit. The first day went fine, we filmed a couple scenes which was all that was planned. However the shots didn’t actually look that good, so we had to scrap most of that days footage. The following day was going to be our big day where we filmed the majority of the movie. As the creator of the call sheets I can confirm I was much too ambitious. I was trying to make too many people’s schedules line up for filming and that called for a major day. I believe on this day we shot at most a third of the planned scenes. From there I believe we had another day of shooting where everything was a mess once again, and we required executive producer intervening.

We were told that we weren’t ready to continue filming, and had to go back to planning. This was when we had a giant role switch. Highlighted by an almost entirely different key creative team, we all lost some roles and gained some new ones. I was no longer the 2nd assistant director or director of photography, but I did keep the role I wanted most which was the very undesirable editor. The reason I consider it undesirable is the work load, it really was the role I wanted and I enjoyed doing the editing of different scenes that were shot. We had a new timeline to finish filming by the start of the winter break. Unfortunately that didn’t happen. We didn’t get everything shot and we were without a few scenes, which shouldn’t sound too bad until you hear what scenes they were. We had no ending, at all. After lots of talks with the producer we decided it was the best idea to turn what we had into a trailer, rather than trying to save what we had done in post because there just wasn’t anything we could do. So with the help of our music supervisor, visual effects supervisor, and the oversight of our Post-Production supervisor, here is our finished project:

After the conclusion of this project I now have a huge respect for movie production companies. It also makes a lot more sense to me at why it takes so long to make a full scale movie. I have a good friend who’s father is a movie producer and 2nd assistant director and after concluding this project I realized how crazy it was that I didn’t think to talk to him about movie production, or more specifically what being a 2nd assistant director entails, seeing as that was my job at the start of this project!!!