The Film Cult
Posted by
nightskysf
Posted on: 07/19/08
The Film Cult
www.TheFilmCult.com
In late January of this year, I pulled together a cast and crew of nearly thirty people and took two days to shoot this film, "The Film Cult". I paid for the production out of my own pocket, a $325 budget in total.
The Film Cult is actually a collaborative film club/group that I started with some other Academy of Art Students in October of last year. An opportunity for SF Bay Area filmmakers to come together and share ideas, work together, and recruit cast and crew for new projects. "The Film Cult" short film will serve as the intro video for the entire group. Kind of like a commercial, to show the Bay Area what we're all about.
I've found that with every film, either everything goes wrong, or everything goes right. In the case of this film, everything went absolutely right, far beyond expectations.
SYNOPSIS: "The Film Cult" is a three-minute short, about an underground cult that sacrifices a woman on an altar, removing her heart and feeding it to their god. At the end of the film, after the girl has been left for dead, we see her eyes open and hear someone yell "Cut!" We see the girl get up, the cult members are revealed as cast and crew, and we see that the entire thing was just a movie. Pan up through the ceiling, and rise through the surface to see the Golden Gate Bridge.
LOCATION: My original hope was only to find a creepy basment-looking place for the shoot. Something that looked like it could be underground. David Carter, my music composer for the film, told me of a warehouse in Oakland with a creepy underground look. My roommate, Joe, and I headed over to the warehouse to have a look. Yes. Dark, creepy, dirty, big, perfect! But that's not all. A section of this warehouse was storing eight huge statues from Burning Man. Huge, creepy statues made of scrap metal. One of these statues was a headless skeleton sitting cross-legged, holding a huge bowl in its lap. In front of this statue was a stone altar. Perfect for a human sacrifice! We got permission from the manager and artist to shoot, and were able to use the statue in our film! In addition, during shooting, we found that the bowl in the statue's lap was meant to hold fire, and we were able to sacrifice the heart to a huge bowl of fire. It looked INCREDIBLE!
CAST/CREW: I recruited most of my cast and crew from The Film Cult, and any one recruited from outside the group were asked to join. Our lead actor, Ward Abronski, played the Cult Leader, who cuts our sacrifice's heart out. He did a fantastic job, and reminded me of the killer from the "Saw" movies. I held auditions for the role of the Sacrifice, but no one matched the image I had in my head. So, of course, I ended up playing the Sacrifice myself. I had never acted and directed a crew this big at the same time, so it was a bit overwhelming. However, I had a wonderful assistant director, Jason Ryder, who I've been working with in film for nearly five years now. With his help, we were able to get it done. In addition to the Cult Leader and I, we had 9 actors playing other hooded cult members. Many of them were my friends, and my little sister Sierra played a role as well. In total, cast and crew was about 28 people. The most people I've directed so far!
PROPS: I bought a beautiful dagger for the sacrifice scene at "We Be Knives" at Pier 39 in San Francisco. When I was looking around in the store, the man behind the counter asked, "Can I help you?" to which I responded, "Yes, I need a dagger that would be good for a human sacrifice." He hesitated, looked at me suspiciously, then cheerily gestured, "Well those would be over here." The human heart to be sacrificed was far too easy to find. I was originally planning to use a latex or rubber heart, but was disappointed by their lack of realism. I was told to find an animal heart and a butcher shop. I made some phone calls, and found myself a butcher shop in Berkeley that sold cow hearts. I went, and asked the man for a cow heart. He went to the back for a few minutes, fumbling around, and came back out with a huge red frozen hunk of meat the size of a basketball. "That's it!?" I gasped. "It's too big!" He looked at it, an responded, "Want me to cut off 1/4 of it? I told the man what I needed it for, and he said that a pig heart would be most similar to a human heart, and that I could find one at any Chinese butcher shop. Sure enough, in China Town in Oakland, I was able to get a beautiful fresh pig heart for $1.30.
POST PRODUCTION: The hardest part about making a film: finishing it. We got the film shot in two days, and now nearly six months later, I have yet to edit it! I had started a rough edit, and had edited all the special effects scenes, when my boyfriend Ruben accidentally deleted all of my footage about a month ago. I'm going to have to start all over, but I'm determined to finish the first edit by the end of August. The entire film is in black and white, with the exception of the heart, which is bright red. At the end, once the Sacrifice wakes up, everything goes to color. The photo below is an example of this effect.
All in all, I think that when completed, this will be my best film thus far. It will occupy the home page of The Film Cult website, and will serve as an introduction to all Film Cult Productions made in the future!
nightskysf
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