This is a trailer for the best horror movie concept of all time: a werewolf with a gun. The explanation I like most is that the werewolf can’t stand the taste of blood, but still has a desire to kill, so a ranged weapon (like a gun!) is his obvious choice. The version we shot is more like it’s a serial killer who’s totally demented, goes around town dressed like a werewolf terrorizing people, and eventually murders them, too. I have 20-30 other variations that are just as profound.

This is the first thing I’ve shot with my GH2, so it was kind of a test run. I usually avoid shallow depth of field because it’s so overused, but it really does look nice. I mostly used it in the scenes with the little girl. It was creepy enough as it was, so I wanted to separate her from what was happening and use her more as a symbol or an idea of innocence and childhood, rather than an actual, defined person. Had I shot this on my video camera, I would’ve needed to be across the street shooting through the car to get this shot (see - focal length).

This, on the other hand, is the type of focus my stuff usually has:

Nice and deep. Not trying to prove anything. I’m no Orson Welles, but this shot’s pretty solid. The insane werewolf terrorizing the viewer in front of a skewed society, and it’s all in focus.

 

The audio’s a little iffy for me, but given our time constraints and the amount of people we had to work with, the sound came out really well. I don’t know of any audio tools that remove cricket noises, but there are literally billions of crickets yelling all at once everywhere you go around town this time of year, and we could not get away from them. The wind noise during the “It’s a guy in a mask” scene drives me crazy, but that’s why people don’t shoot movies in Nebraska. It was blowing 15-20mph when we shot that, and with the werewolf on boom, the results aren’t bad.

 

The dialog and other audio is all secondary to the song anyway. I wanted that to be the driving force behind the video, and I think it is. It almost hypnotizes you. I used to listen to it on repeat with my eyes closed and try to picture the entire movie. It got pretty scary after 30 minutes or so. 

This was also the shortest time I’ve spent shooting a project like this. It took half of one day and most of my lunch break the next to get everything we needed. That includes reshooting the final scene because the first one came out way too dark (maybe I’ll be able to light scenes with Droids after I hack my GH2’s firmware, but not yet). This also has a sizable cast for how short it is. Eight people appeared in it, plus we had to find new actors for the reshoot of the final scene. We had a couple friends around either day, and, of course, prop master S. Lee Adamson from Gnerd provided the gun. All in all, this 2 minutes and 23 seconds is the combined effort of 13 people. And that’s what it’s all about.