Hell Night, my junior thesis film, is currently in post-production.
When I completed the first rough cut of the film — which can’t exceed 10 minutes, including credits — it turned out to be 14 minutes, without credits and the very brief opening scene that I have to re-shoot. I’m very happy and proud of the work, and very grateful to my cast and crew, but now the hell of it is that I have to cut almost half of my film in order to make it adhere to the runtime limitation.
This is the first time I’ve been in the situation of making a film that ran so far over the time limit that I feel cutting it down will negatively impact the story. I knew when I wrote the script that it would run a little long. So I worried during production, but I really wanted to tell the story I wrote and stay true to my vision.
I’m getting some great guidance from my professor and, with his help, I feel better about how the edited version of Hell Night will turn out. Right now, I’m editing the full (“Director’s cut”) version which I’ll be entering in a few film festivals, thanks to the encouragement I’ve received from him. Once that’s done, I’ll take a scalpel to it and cut it down to LMU requirements. For the last two weeks, I’ve been composing the score and creating the dialogue-free sound track.
In the last blog post about Hell Night, I refrained from posting any pictures that would give away much about the story. WARNING: The photo gallery below contains some quasi-spoiler shots (so, if you’re spoiler-phobic, don’t look at the pics too closely until after you see the film!), as well as the official movie poster.
Again, I want to sincerely thank my cast — Anina Youroukova, Erik Reedy, and Andrew Nunes — and my special guest star, Fr. William Fulco, who appears regularly on The History Channel show, Ancient Aliens. Thanks also to my crew – AD Melissa Kaufler (who also took most of the great production stills), DP Garrett Harris, ACs Spencer Sharp and Matthew Ballard, and grips Nick Ertola, Anthony Smith, and Sam Irwin.
OK, time to get back into the inferno, er, editing bay …