The Dog House (Short Film)

▶️ Watch on 3Speak

This is a short film I made about a year or so ago with some friends I went to college with, and some mates I met while working as an extra on Vikings: Valhalla. While it was a lot of fun making this, there were a couple of things that went wrong for us. I'll go through some of the details of the film in this post, and I'll go through something of an evaluation/ review in the later post about the film.

The Concept

It was a great production to work on and was a concept that came completely out of nowhere while chatting with a few people on set. See, the reason they wanted to produce something like this was that they were looking to get into doing some stunt work and needed a showreel of some sort to show what they could do.

The original idea was to create a general showreel with no story, but I decided to write a script so we could all get something out of it. We knew what we had access to in terms of location, actors, crew, and equipment so turning that into a story became pretty easy in a way.

The producer of this film had a community hall where he used to practice sparring with another one of the actors, and since they were on good terms with the council they knew when it was available and not. Knowing that the weekend was free, they contacted the people and got us access to the location for the short film. It being an old rundown church of some kind, I had this idea to make the film something of a post-apocalypse, where this biker gang has taken over this church. I love dystopias, so having this undertone was really interesting to me and allowed me to think of some cool ideas for the film, sadly though, not all the ideas worked out.

What The Film Needed
A budget...

The crew - of 5 - needed to get up there, so we loaded up all the gear, props, and everything else into the car and took the journey which took about 2 hours to get to the location.

In the car we had parcels of Cocaine - Flour and Talc - and an AK-47 - a real weighted replica - along with knives, Glocks, and a lot of camera equipment... if we had been stopped by the guards we had been in a lot of trouble. The rear window was completely obstructed for the journey with everything we brought, and then ourselves included, luckily we didn't get stopped because this particular weekend was the only one we would be able to do this shoot as the place was fully booked out thereafter.

It cost us around 1,000 - 1,100 Euros. Including everything we needed to buy for it, food, an Air BnB, Petrol, etcetera. It's a lot of money to spend out of our own pockets, but we were happy to do it because we had a good feeling about this production.

The Plan For After Filming It

We had some ideas concerning the films release post-launch - but sadly because of some issues with it we weren't able to achieve what we wanted - the idea was to finish, edit, and enter it into some film festivals afterward to gain some traction and approach some funding agencies about getting a grant to do it bigger and better.

The festivals weren't possible because of numerous issues we had with the film, and while we were thinking of using it as a proof of concept to approach some people, things changed, and we all moved on to other projects leaving this one behind.

I believe that with a few thousand Euros we could make this again, but much better. Using the same actors, same crew, plus more people. The 5 of us on the crew worked our asses off, doubling, and tripling up just about every job there was - it was great we were able to do that, but mistakes were made because people couldn't focus solely on their position.

Somethings That Were Missing

While there was a lot that didn't make it to screen, and a lot we really needed which we didn't have access to. I think our biggest missing piece to make this come together was Extras, I wanted to put out the word to get 10-20 people up there, but because of how out of the way the location was we had to reconsider that aspect.

Imagine it like this. The church is a post-apocalyptic biker/ raider gang hideout. It was meant to be alive with degenerates in the background, who all run away as the fight breaks out between the gang and the main character. As an example, this was Luke Skywalker walking into Jabbas Palace to confront Jabba. That's the kind of vibe we wanted to go for, but sadly, due to everything, we couldn't do that.

The film is good but could have been so much better. We were supposed to have a further 4 crew members there, but one by one they all dropped out. One of them who dropped out was supposed to provide a Black Magic camera for the production, which left us shooting the whole thing on a Canon DSLR. Along with the Black Magic, he was going to provide a monitor system to view playback properly before moving on to the next scene. Also, our cinematographer backed out last minute, and he was going to provide some more lighting for us to use... which we needed, especially in the outdoor shots.

These changes called for a complete change in who was meant to be doing what and left certain positions blank. We had spent a few weeks leading up to it in meetings and doing rehearsals which essentially were wasted, apart from the actor's rehearsals. Obviously, people backing out is a problem, but we overcame it even though most of these back outs were on the day. We thought on our feet and carried on, which is the benefit of having people there who had all worked together in the past.

The Actors

The actors were all amazing and really gave it their all. Even taking the initiative to help out with a number of jobs when they weren't in a scene, and waiting patiently and quietly as other scenes were being shot.

We honestly couldn't ask for a better bunch of people to work with, and I'd personally love the chance to work with them all again and do this story justice. I do feel that the story is interesting and with a few elements that were left out of it we could really make this something spectacular.

The main thing would be hiring a larger crew, so we could guarantee their availability for at least 5 days, as opposed to the 2 we were lucky to get. As well as this, it would be a better idea to just rent the equipment we require, as opposed to relying on people to provide their own.

Source

Conclusion

I was able to touch on a few of the issues and problems we ran into, but I'd like to go into more detail about some of the major issues that were just too big to talk about in this post. I'll cover some of those problems in a later post as an evaluation/ review of the production.

Regardless of the issues, let me know what you think of this short film.

▶️ 3Speak