Back in the spring of this year, 2021, myself and a group of some of my fellow film students began work on a concept for our first feature film together. My friend, Wyatt Bumbarger, headed the production as our writer & director, and came up with a script for a horror film called A Deer in the Woods.
“When a group of amateur film students set out to shoot a horror film in a secluded cabin in the woods, they slowly begin to realize they may be trapped in a horror film themselves.”
Soon after, we finalized the rest of our cast and crew positions and we were off filming sometime in mid-april. I had volunteered to be the gaffer, or chief lighting technician, for on set work as well as the lead editor in piecing together the final product. The technical and logistical problems of shooting a feature length film with legitimately no budget has been nothing short of a nightmare, but our team has made it work. I remind myself often that as young creatives we may not have the advantage of unlimited resources or the budget of a Hollywood production. However, our one advantage is TIME. There’s something to be said about putting in the hours and trying to be thrifty with what we have in the hopes to make something greater than we originally could have imagined.
But now it has come down to me. As we grow nearer to finishing principal shooting, I have begun to feel the pressure on me as the editor to bring things all together. The saying goes that a film is actually written three times. Once in the screenplay. Once during shooting. And lastly in the editing room. It’s thereby my job for the final rewrite. In the coming weeks, I will be collecting and storing all the Terabytes worth of raw footage, and with this has come a lot of nervousness. This is the first feature film I have ever worked on. I know that it is still only a student run production, but I truly want this film to be something that we all can look back on and be proud of.
In the next few months I will be sharing my journey in editing this film with all of you in hopes that you will maybe gleam some interesting insights about the process for your own work. I am sure that I will be learning so much along the way and the lessons and experience gained from working on this project will be far more valuable to me than working as a production assistant on any multi-million dollar production.
If you are at all interested in supporting our production I’ll link them here, but regardless thanks again for reading and look out for more.
Indie GoGo - A Deer in the Woods
- Matt Nickolaus