The Woods Themselves

It's dark, it's crazy, it's gritty, it's wildly creative, and while some will say it's impact has faded over time, I still find it shockingly violent. Sam Raimi's 'The Evil Dead' is one of my favorite films, and when I saw the Deadite Of The Day Contest post on bloody-disgusting.com I immediately set to work. I hauled an old prop out of the attic and gave it a complete makeover. A new head, a new arm, a new paint job and a whole lot of angry molesting tree roots. On the weekend, I took it into the forest and filmed it. I got eaten alive by mosquitos and nearly smashed the camera into several trees, but it was great fun. And since The Evil Dead was one of the movies that inspired me to try out filmmaking, I felt I owed it to it.

I quickly edited the footage together with audio samples from The Evil Dead, uploaded it to Vimeo, and sent it off to bloody-disgusting.com for consideration on Monday night. My parents woke me up early on Wednesday morning with exciting news. The article pretty much speaks for itself, so click below for the link:

Needless to say, it was incredible to see myself of Bloody Disgusting. I've been checking their site daily for two years, so it was nothing short of surreal to see my name and prop on their headlines. And I keep thinking about all the people that may or may not end up seeing it (do horror directors check Bloody Disgusting?).

Anyway, here's the video, titled 'The Woods Themselves' - my love letter to Sam Raimi's original 'The Evil Dead'.

Building

After two months of doing nothing whatsoever followed by two months of filmmaking, I'm happy to say that I've come full circle and am now working steadily on props again. My room stinks of PVA glue, I've got black paint under all my fingernails, I've collecting tree branches and hoarding them in my room, my carpet is covered in tiny bits of sticky masking tape... just the way it should be.

I'm working on a couple of new props for 'The Backs 2013' as well as a top-secret project that is soon to be revealed. Till then... teaser photos!

Skeletons

I've always been a huge movie fan, and I've always been fascinated by the film-making process. I never rent a DVD without watching the special features. I love reading interviews with my favourite directors, and I'll often rewatch movies with the commentary on as I work on props or other such things. I never really thought about making my own movies until I saw The House Of The Devil. I've warbled and raved extensively about this film before, but for whatever reason, it really struck a chord with me. I made a few (very) short films since then, mostly just shot by myself on one night. And I found that I liked doing it quite a lot.

Over the past while, I've been working on making a 'proper' short film. I wrote a script, drew out a storyboard, built props and makeshift camera dollies, and convinced my dad to play the lead (and only) role. We worked till late many nights - it's worth noting that it's summer over here, which doesn't help when you have to film everything after dark (a quick shout-out to my mother and sister, who'd let us kick them out of the living room nearly every night for filming). After many, many hours of filming, re-filming and re-re-re-filming, we finally finished. I've spent the last week or so writing and composing music for it. When I say writing, I mean poking at the piano keys until something nice came out, and when I say composing I mean putting my sister's laptop on top of the piano and recording from the tiny in-built microphone straight into iMovie. Overall, it's been a fantastic and fun experience, albeit with an enormous amount of help from my dad, who happily and enthusiastically complied with my stupid perfectionism, proved to be quite knowledgeable about film-making and let me advertise him as a remorseful child murderer on the internet.

I'm thrilled to announce the beginning of my (very) amateur 'production company' Geisterbahn Pictures, and to debut my first film - Skeletons. It's set on the night before Halloween, and revolves around a reclusive haunter who gets a late-night visit from what appears to be a trick-or-treater.

Get yourself comfortable, put on some headphones and enjoy...