I shot five short films the summer before last for a miniseries I’m making called Summer Stories. It’s hard to comprehend how I did this, considering that this past summer I only managed to shoot one short, but basically I just didn’t sleep much and spent every weekend on day-long shoots. Editing these films has taken much longer than shooting them did and I still have two shorts to finish up, but here’s my most recent completion, The Square of Grass.
It’s a very atmospheric, mostly silent short about a secret cult who must guard a mysterious square clearing in the woods. I went for a lo-fi 1970’s home movie look, shooting with my Blackmagic Pocket Cinema Camera for it’s Super 16 film aesthetic and I used a plastic Holga lens to replicate the cheap plastic lens of a vintage home movie camera. I also used a Holga Fisheye adapter, which added extra softness and distortion to the edges of the frame and I added a 16mm film grain overlay in post for extra texture. Unfortunately YouTube’s video compression makes the grain hard to see but in a full resolution uncompressed video format it looks pretty glorious.
I’m pretty happy with how The Square of Grass came out. It was all shot in the space of a couple hours in just a few locations and the story is fairly simple if intentionally cryptic. I wanted to capture the tone of a silent horror film mixed with the feel of finding a mysterious old film reel in an attic, and I think I succeeded. Enjoy The Square of Grass!