PICNIC - a short film
Back in 2017, DOPE Creative Director Danny Cork created THE NIGHTMARE EMPORIUM, a horror film festival in which participants are assigned a prop which they must include in a short film.
When one of the filmmakers dropped out at the last minute, Danny asked me if I wanted to bang out a film to fill the void. Not only was I busy making my own film (the award winning CAT BOX) for the festival, but I was also shooting one of the other films, consulting on several of the other scripts, and acting in the interstitials that would tie the submissions together into a complete feature length movie. (And by the way, Danny wasn’t just organizing the festival, he was also writing, producing and directing said interstitials.)
With barely a week before submissions were due, I said, “Sure, let’s do it.” Momentum has a way of pushing the boundaries.
After a few beers over dinner on a Thursday we’d come up with the idea for PICNIC, a found footage film from the early 60s about two couples on a picnic that run into some trouble when they accidentally run over a man in black. By Saturday we’d cast the film, found a vintage car, drone operator, and location scouted, and on Sunday we had the film in the can.
Check out the film below, and we’ll take you behind the scenes after the credits have rolled.
Watch PICNIC by clicking the image.
Casting was a cinch. I was the man behind the camera filming the entire folly, so we didn’t really have to think about that role at all (and I must admit that my legs were perfect for the climax). I’d worked a few times with Troy Lund who plays our driver, and Troy has a mid-century vibe to him so he was a no-brainer for us. For our “dates”, I had worked frequently with Victoria Knox and Lisa Coronado at our director’s workshop (the Focus Ring), and they also both had a great 1950’s Americana quality to them, and they were happy to join our experiment. For our “man in black”, we wanted someone intimidating in size, so we turned to the Big Man himself, Zach Prewitt, who is talented filmmaker and editor as well. All the cast provided their own wardrobe and makeup.
The most difficult part of the project was finding a vintage car… or so we thought. “Dear Social Media…” Within 30 minutes of reaching out to the local film community we were connected to Sonny George, and one e-mail later Sonny was onboard to help us as well. There was just one catch, his beautiful car was a manual transmission with the gear stick on the column. A little tricky to drive if you’ve never done so before… and Troy had never done so before. The solution was simple: Lisa sat in the passenger seat, Troy sat in the middle, and Sonny drove the car; we simply framed him out of every shot.
The entire film was captured with the Filmic Pro app. on our cellphones, except for the drone footage during the climax. The film was shot at Seattle’s Discovery Park on a busy afternoon. Once again, a little trick… frame out everything that looks like a fun Sunday at the park for a modern family.
I recorded one green screen shot of my legs flailing after the creature scoops me up. I filmed that on my porch, while awkwardly reclining horizontally on a dining chair. I have to say my favorite part of the whole film is the detail of having lost one of my shoes in the scuffle. To me, those are the type of details that enrich the entirety of the story.
We were now ready to bring the film into post-production. All of the blood effects, green screen composition, the government signage, and creature elements were handled by our good friend Andra Hatter whom I’d met when they were the first camera assistant on CAT BOX (connections, baby). My job was now to make modern digital media resemble vintage 8mm film.
I first edited the film as a story. Once the story was in place, I sped up the footage by roughly 20-25% so that it moved like film running at 18 frames per second vs the modern 24 FPS. Next I was determined to keep the running time to 2:30 of content, which is the run time of a 50’ roll of 8mm film. This included chopping up the film into short bursts of shooting. If you’ve ever worked with a constraint of film vs unlimited media, you tend to be far more selective about what you film.
The camera falling to the ground was a basic post production “zoom” effect along with rotating the footage to simulate the fall. I wasn’t sure that the effect would work until it was cut together with the final shot, but I think it works great. The final shot of the film had to be reversed in post. We filmed it by starting the clip in the grass, let it run for a few seconds, then pulled the camera up into the air. In reverse, we have a camera perfectly landing in the grass to reveal our punchline.
Next up I had to “treat” the footage, over saturating the colors to reflect days of yore, and a soft filter to make it less sharp. Then I dropped some film grain on top of the entire timeline, followed up with an overlay to change the frame ratio from widescreen 16:9 to 4:3.
The very last thing we did was add traditional film leader at the head, along with the sound of a projector. The title cards were based on government title cards from that era.
All in all, start to finish this project was completed in under a week, and just goes to show what you can do with some good friends and a little imagination.
PICNIC was the first collaboration together behind the camera between myself and Danny. It was such a fun and easy experience that we thought, “Maybe we should work together for a living.”
