As some of you may know, every year the YouTube Space puts together an amazing set for Halloween and booking time to shoot on it is quite competitive. My wonderful producer friend, wmilam, and I submitted a pitch for a short film and not only got approved to shoot, but also got selected to be a part of an exclusive writing workshop (that we aren’t allowed to talk about in print yet? but if you watch the campaign video, you can find out more about it and who’s behind it) to really make sure our narrative is where it should be, and also to grant us more access to the set and equipment than we would’ve had otherwise.
What we’re making: Basically it’s a dramatic post-apocalyptic short film about three friends who are spending their last night together after one of them got infected by the virus wiping out their world and will die in the morning.
Oh, and it’s pretty gay.
This is our set:
Why we’re making it: Have you seen a lot of gay horror films? I had been tossing around the idea of writing one even before Whitney approached me to come up with something for this set, and we’re pretty psyched to follow through with it.
On a personal level, it’s been a long time since I’ve written something specifically that I wanted to write. If you know me, you probably know me from working on The Lizzie Bennet Diaries, and that was a lot of fun! we told cool stories! i’m happy with some of it! But it’s always different working on someone else’s vision vs working on your own.
I’m also directing this film, which is something I haven’t done since college, because I let myself fall prey to the “haha women aren’t directors, why try” mindset, and that was really stupid. Fortunately, it’s never too late to correct idiocy, and I’m excited to get back to doing something I actually quite enjoyed.
Okay, so what about the money: We hate crowdfunding. I think everyone does. I LOVE getting people involved and invested in what we’re doing, but asking for money is a bummer. However, getting a free professionally crafted set and access to free equipment saves us literally thousands and thousands of dollars, so this is probably the cheapest we’ll ever be able to make a short film for, unless we straight up don’t pay cast and crew, which is shitty and we’re never doing that. $5k is the absolute minimum we can do this for. It’s underpaying our talent and crew, not getting quite the things we need to make this what we’d like it to be, and just praying nothing goes wrong. Ideally we need a couple thousand more than that, even, but we’re committed to making this, so we’ll do what we can.
But will it really happen: Yes! Being in this writing workshop means we’re on a specific timeline we have to meet. Our script will be basically locked this week. We’re casting next week. We shoot October 8th and 9th. We have to turn in a final cut the week of October 19th. And we go live on YouTube the week of Halloween. So this will be a super fast turn around for a short film, especially one done through crowdfunding. Two months! Hooray! (Yikes……)
Anyway, thank you for reading! Please check out the campaign if you haven’t already. Please share if you feel so inclined! And if you have any additional questions, please feel more than free to contact me directly and I will do my best to answer!
Haha. The irony is strong with this one. Rachel: posting a crowdfunding appeal. Me: contributing to a horror film.
Yet here we are.
Rachel’s writing was my favorite thing about the Lizzie Bennet Diaries. I’m looking forward to seeing what she does here (and directing! zwounds!). Go Rachel and Whitney! Go Zack!
This entry was posted by jbc on Tuesday, September 1st, 2015 at 11:45 am and is filed under Tumblr.
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