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The Making of an Indie Horror Film - The Hog, Part I
Welcome to the DOJO!
It’s another exciting week here in Southern California. And by “exciting” I mean “really freakin’ hot!” Earlier this summer I promised my beloved wife I would refrain from using our airconditioner as much as possible. It was an easy promise to make back in early May when the weather was a balmy 75 degrees. Now that it is early July and it’s hotter than Mila Kunis, I’m very much regretting that promise.
In an attempt to stave off my upcoming heat stroke, I’ve decided to start documenting the development of my next low, low, low, low, (you get the idea) low budget film. It’s a horror flick (or, perhaps, comedy-horror is a better classification) called “The Hog” (WGA #1184043), which I originally wrote a few years ago. I had been given the task of writing the sequel to a terrible little movie called “Tail Sting” — the sequel was called “Tail Sting 2″ at the time, however it was eventually released as “Stinger” in most of the world. Unfortunately for everyone involved, I really hadn’t done a whole hell of a lot of screenplay writing at that point. I had come up with the story for “Bite Me, Fanboy” and then co-wrote its screenplay, done extensive re-writing on the “Judge Dredd” screenplay for Shoreline Entertainment and written a bunch of comic books, but that was the extent of my writing experience.
Heck, I went to art school and was thankful I could even read at all! The thought of sitting down and writing out 120 pages of text for a screenplay was a bit daunting. In an effort to become more familiar and, hopefully, more skilled with the process, I decided to bang out a low budget horror screenplay in advance of doing “Tail Sting 2.”
Initially I had intended to write a straight up, serious, hardcore horror movie. I’ve worked on tons of the things and, at least in my head, know what works and what doesn’t. Most horror movies suck ass and aren’t scary, so I wanted to do it right. The thing is, I’m really not quite right in the head. What started out as serious creature feature quickly turned in to something else. What began as “Jaws” morphed in to a story much closer to “Jaws meets Porky’s.” I don’t know if it was my inexperience as a writer or if I should attribute it to my mental issues, but my hardcore horror movie became a strange mix of a horror movie and a college sex comedy. Not a parody like the “Scary Movie” franchise or “Saturday the 14th” or the “Saw” movies. It was closer to “Shaun of the Dead” where the characters from a comedy turn the corner and wind up running for their lives covered in gore.
Writing wound up going very quickly — I think I wrote “The Hog” in about 3 weeks and the “Stinger” screenplay took about a month. I did discover pretty fast that the majority of the writing process gives me a headache. I enjoy coming up with the story and outline, and I like the final 1/4 or so, but that middle section is painful for me. To this day I get that same headache about 20 pages in to every project I work on…and it has Excedrin written all over it.
I’ll go over the writing process I use for pretty much everything (from the Disney TV stuff to these low budget horror flicks) at a later date. Maybe someone out there will have an idea on how I can ease my mental pain without over-the-counter pain medication.
Having been stuck writing for TV and animation for most of the last couple of years, I am very interested in getting back and directing another low budget feature. So, I decided to dust off the screenplay for “The Hog” and give it a new draft to punch things up a bit. With the pitiful state horror is these days, I believe now is the right time for a different kind of horror flick to come out and, if nothing else, I think shooting “The Hog” will be a total blast to do.
Over the next weeks, months or God-only-knows how long, I’ll be detailing my efforts to get this film made. I’ll talk about budgeting, the search for financing, pre-production, production itself and then post. From there I’ll tell you everything we go through trying to get distribution and eventual release for the film. It’ll be fun, it’ll be painful and it’ll be informative for those of you interested in all the little details of filmmaking and putting together an indie or guerilla film.
We’ll be doing the majority of our casting and recruiting here online as well, so feel free to send over headshots or resumes if you’re an actor or crew member.
In the meantime, feel free to post any questions or comments here on the Film Sensei website. Oh, and if I get enough requests I’ll post the full screenplay for “The Hog” for download here as well. Make sure to stop by later this week for my ramblings on budgeting for the film.
Until next time, keep on shooting!
-Mat N., the Film Sensei
http://www.FilmSensei.com
Mat,
That’s great news!
Please post all the gory details here.. esp. about the shoot rig and post prod.
So do you have a timeframe yet?
-Shaun
July 10th, 2008 at 5:29 pm
I’m hoping to shoot before the end of the year…Sept-Oct is my preference, but we’ll see.
I’ll probably be shooting with an XHA1 as the primary camera with an HV20 as the second unit. I finally received my TwoNeil 35mm adapter and can’t wait to play with it. The thing should give some excellent results but I have two initial problems with it. First, getting information or answers from the maker is a lot like pulling teeth. He’ll answer but doesn’t answer fully enough to really clear up your questions. I usually wind up asking 5-6 follow-up questions before I get things figured out.
Second, it doesn’t come with everything you need. For an HV20 if you want to use an Achromat, you need to order a 55mm Opteka, a 55mm to 57mm step up ring to attach it to the adapter, a 43mm to 55mm step up ring to attack it to your HV20 and an extra Nikon Ring3 tube to get the distance to the focusing screen correct. And, as I said above, the maker doesn’t tell you this in any easy fashion…you have to ask a long series of questions to get to the answer.
Once all the extra bits arrive, I’ll post some footage from it.
Mat N.
July 15th, 2008 at 5:15 pm