Story: A man wakes up in an unfamiliar place and must make his way through, but something is watching.
Background: This was my second time competing in the Five Day Film Festival. My first year was a struggle since I had never made a film in such a short period of time, but things went much smoother this time around.
Creation: My genre was horror and in a story sense, I went for the usual: Man does not know where he is and horror ensues. But the twist is the ending and especially the cinematography. With Earlton I composed the shots to make them look like one continuous shot. Not only that, but the view constantly switches from Third Person to First Person seamlessly. With Earlton, I wanted to try new things, especially in the sound department. All in all, it paid off.
Pre-Production: Since I only had two days to prepare. I wrote up a script immediately after finding out my genre was horror. I composed my shots in a shotlist, bought all the props I would need, and made A LOT of calls to people to see who could help me out. When it comes to finding a team, that’s always the hardest part of making a movie for me. With that all complete, the third day was spent filming the movie.
Production: The film did not take very long to shoot. Since it is made to look like one shot, there were only a total of nine shots. But careful work was put into making the setting look convincing, dressing up the character, and planning our movements accordingly. Everything was made to be as tight as possible and with the huge amount of prep work, things went very smoothly.
Post-Production: Editing was fairly simple. I just had to piece the cuts together so everything transitioned smoothly and didn’t break the one shot effect. The real challenge was creating frightening sound effects. The mixing involved using copyright free sounds and effects I recorded on my own and putting them together to make scenes more interesting and scary.
Premiere: The film was shown alongside several other short films made for the competition at the Ambler Theater in Pennsylvania. The judges who are supposedly compromised of people in the industry that are rather big selected my film for Best Sound Design. It was a huge honor being up there as a winner with these other fantastic films and I hope to do it again next year.