Category Archives: Short Film

Behind the scenes on The Halloween Kid!

Here’s the behind-the-scenes featurette for The Halloween Kid! Filmed and edited by Jamie Hooper of Fingercuff Productions, it’s a pretty  comprehensive look at the making of our little fairytale, including our voice-over session with Sir Derek Jacobi and music score with composer Christian Henson.

Enjoy!

The Halloween Kid World Premiere

The first public screening of The Halloween Kid has just been announced!

The Halloween Kid will premiere at the prestigious International Children and Young People’s Film Festival in Malmo, Sweden, in March.

I’d never thought of it as a children’s film while we were making it, but once someone had suggested the idea, it seemed to make sense. Like the works of the people who inspire me (in this case, geniuses like Edward Gorey or Guillermo del Toro), it mixes fantasy and the supernatural in a way that seems suitable for children. And the lead is seven years old.

To celebrate, we’ve put together a little teaser trailer!

Behind the scenes on The Last Post

*** SPOILER WARNING – Have you watched The Last Post on Vimeo yet? ***

The Last Post was self-funded and shot in one crazy 12-hour day in a West London hospital, on the Red One.

Pre-production went by very quickly. I’d written the script months before, and between the moment we decided to shoot the film and the day we actually stepped foot on set, we had barely three weeks.

Our first challenge was casting. Darren Bransford (Hollyoaks, Psychosis), who plays Jean, was first on board. A fantastic actor and a great friend, Darren was a no-brainer. His character appears only for brief moments, but it was essential that he would convey the right emotions as he represents Colette’s past, her regrets, and her nostalgia.

Darren’s task was rather thankless, as he could only be seen for a few seconds without his mask. But on the plus side, he did get to wear a cool uniform…

The wonderful Jean Marsh (Upstairs Downstairs, Willow, Return to Oz, The Changeling) was suggested and approached by our casting director, Manuel Puro. A true francophile, she seized the opportunity to play a French lady, with a slight accent. She was also absolutely fearless in her portrayal of an elderly lady: while Jean is, in real life, quite stunning and glamorous, she was happy on set to have our makeup designer, Jane Stiefel, add grey to her hair and give her an ageing, unflattering makeup.

I’d been a fan of Kimberley Nixon (Fresh Meat), who plays Nurse Sophie, since I’d seen her in Black Death. She was my first choice and said yes straight away, luckily. Her chemistry with Jean was wonderful.

Another challenge was to turn the hospital ward we’d found into a cosy nursing home room. It required some changes to the script (the ghost originally appeared in the garden outside, but the view through the window made it impossible) and the work of production designer Caroline Story, who collected an impressive amount of elements that helped give the impression that this was a place where Colette had assembled the things that mattered most to her.

This is what the ward looked like when we first recce’d it:

And during the shoot (with DoP Gary Shaw to the right):

As the story was inspired by my own family, I brought some personal items – pictures of me as a little girl reading books with my dad, for instance, can be seen early in the film.

Also, as Colette is supposed to be in her eighties, and she was a teenager during World War I, the story had to be set in the 1980s. While we didn’t want to turn it too obviously into a period piece, we had to make sure nothing in the room would seem too contemporary. This also explains the very old-fashioned nurse uniform our costume designer Aoife McBride chose for Sophie.

We dressed the ward the night before the shoot and pre-lit as much as we could. Shooting a 10-page script in 12 hours is pretty damn near impossible (it’s the equivalent of shooting a feature in 9 days), so we had to make sure we had as much time for actual filming as possible. We had to move on to a different set-up every 20 minutes on average – meaning that not only did the actors never get more than a couple of takes and had to be on the ball all the time, and that the director of photography and his very small team had to light each set-up very fast, but also that I’d have to make decisions quickly and decide if we had the shot, without the luxury of getting one more for safety.

We also had to know exactly what we were shooting and in what order; there was very little space for improvisation on the day. I’d storyboarded everything carefully, and 1st Assistant Director Simon Hedges (right on the pic below) drew up a schedule which respected story order as much as possible, while limiting the amount of lighting work and set re-dresses.

The other clock we always had to keep an eye on was the one in the background of the room – did you notice it? The time had to be adjusted for each scene.

One of the most difficult scenes to shoot – especially for Jean – was the one at the window, where Colette reads her lost love’s last letter. Being given only a few minutes to collect yourself for such an emotional moment is a pretty insane challenge, so we straight away made the decision to resort to fake tears. Jane applied tears in Jean’s eye (a fairly uncomfortable process) as soon as the camera rolled, just before action; and Caroline dropped tears on the letter on cue.

An essential crew member you may have spotted in the credits, by the way, was James Webber, 2nd Assistant Director on this film and producer on The Halloween Kid. He’s here, looking very mysterious, next to sound designer Nigel Albermaniche:

In the end, we managed to make our day without dropping more than a couple of non-essential shots. The ending, which we had to shoot last because of the bigger re-lighting work involved, had to be shot very quickly; in the edit, I wished we’d had a bit more time…

Sadly we never got the time to take a cast and crew photo.

Just like for The Halloween Kid, Neil Marshall edited the film – although here he did it on the Avid while Halloween Kid was edited at home, on Final Cut Pro – and Christian Henson composed a score which really gave The Last Post its soul.

The Last Post

The Last Post, my very first short film, starring Jean Marsh, Kimberley Nixon and Darren Bransford, is now online!

You’ll find the link below – I really hope you enjoy it. We were lucky enough to screen it in 15 festivals over the past 6 months, including a fantastic screening at the London FrightFest, and at Fantasia in Montreal, as well as in Sitges.

The Last Post is the story of Colette, an old lady in a nursing home, who is visited by a mysterious stranger no one else seems able to see…

Expect atmosphere and nostalgia rather than scares and gore, by the way.

Here’s what the web said:

“A successful, contemplative mood piece, as touching as it is effective, and hopefully a mere taste of what this promising director might have in store” (Fangoria)

“Without a doubt a piece of narrative art that can only leave you cold when you have no heart at all” (Screenread)

“A quietly tender piece, spooky, saddening and very well acted. A thought-provoking masterpiece” (Gorepress)

“A beautiful and touching debut… I look forward to seeing more from Carolyn” (Ain’t It Cool News)

“Leaves us ‘haunted’ by feelings of joy or even peace” (DreadCentral)

“Incredibly atmospheric and involving” (FanGirlTastic)

“A haunting and poignant short that oozes class and sophistication” (HorrorTalk)

Hooked: Be careful what you fish for…

We’ve just started submitting The Halloween Kid to festivals around the world, and while we wait for their replies (it could take a while…), I thought I’d put some pics from my previous shorts online.

The short film I shot before The Halloween Kid, Hooked, was a goofy 1-minute twist on the slasher film, which I filmed with a bunch of friends, purely for fun, on a beach in Los Angeles last June. I was spending a few weeks there, and thought it’d be fun to shoot something with some of the fantastic technicians and producers I knew there.

Our budget was around $200. We thought of a place where we could film for free – a beach – and an idea that wouldn’t require any major SFX, costumes, or large numbers of actors or extras, and could be shot in a couple of hours.

And since we would be shooting in a public place without a permit (think Ed Wood…), our DP Will Barratt (who shoots all of Adam Green’s films) decided to limit camera equipment to the Canon 5D, a portable monitor and a small box of lenses. Unit base was a bunch of towels in the sand.

DIY at its finest. We even had to give up on the monitor at some point, because we couldn’t risk getting the batteries wet once we started filming in the water.

Of course, things didn’t go smoothly. The first problem we encountered was that by complete chance, we’d chosen to film on the one day of the week the El Segundo Junior Lifeguards train on this usually deserted stretch of beach.

So our menacing fisherman, RA Mihailoff (Leatherface), suddenly found himself surrounded with dozens of kids. You can see a few of them in the background of this pic:

Thinking on your feet and solving unexpected problems is one of the best parts of filmmaking… So for a full hour, we shot close-ups, and we didn’t waste any time.

Things got tougher still when time came to film our mermaid (Clare Grant, of Team Unicorn fame). The waves had started to grow stronger by that point, and Clare found it extremely hard to stand waist-deep in the sea. On several occasions, we had to jump in the water and go rescue her before she got swept away.

This is why the film doesn’t exactly have the epic aquatic battle I’d originally envisioned, or long, lingering shots of our beautiful mermaid…

Needless to say, we were all drenched by the end of the shoot. And sunburnt!

Left to right: costume designer Oakley Stevenson, producer Theresa Eastman Schifrin, Clare Grant, RA Mihailoff, Axelle Carolyn, editor/runner/partner-in-crime Neil Marshall, lighting and sound marvel Annette Slomka and director of photography Will Barratt.

Missing here are music composer Joseph Bishara, and VFX artist Jamison Goei. We’d originally hoped we could do the effect practically and create a really cool monster, but decided that in the very few hours we’d have to shoot and in the windy and wet conditions we’d have to work, it’d be madness.

At the end of the day, we rewarded ourselves and the cast and crew with a Mexican meal. Hurray!

The film can be seen on the FearNet website. It’s pretty funny, if you keep in mind the guerilla conditions we filmed it in…

Merry Christmas!

And so… The Halloween Kid post-production is finished. We screened the film for the cast and crew last night at a plush central London screening room, and it looked great on the big screen. The adventure is far from over though, as we start approaching film festivals and submitting the film around the world!

Thanks again to everybody who invested, spread the word, took an interest or worked on the film this year. May your Christmas be merry, and 2012 bring you success and spookiness.

And our Halloween Kid narrator is…

I’m incredibly proud and happy to announce that legendary actor Sir Derek Jacobi has joined the Halloween Kid team! Sir Derek recorded the narration for the film today, and he was such a joy to work with. As a kid, I’d seen him in a Channel 4 miniseries, Mister Pye, which had absolutely terrified me – an idea which ties in nicely with the themes of the film.

I truly cannot wait for you all to hear it!

To celebrate the nearing end of post-production, here are a couple of new stills from the film!