how I made an Award Winning Short Film

This is how I co-wrote, directed, shot and edited my fourth short film The Vice. I love filmmaking, one aspect especially is cinematography. Lighting, framing, camera angles. The inspiration behind this film started after I'd seen two films in particular. The Tragedy of Macbeth shot by Bruno Vilbonil and In Cold Blood shot by Conrad Hall. It was then I decided I'm going to make my own black and white film. At the time I was in contact with a writer from London, K. He'd seen my last short film The Ogress. We got to chatting and I said, so I want to make a black and white short film. It's going to have two actors, one location and it's going to be a horror film. Script writing. K sent me a few story ideas which we narrowed down into one we both liked and then we began. K started the first draft and once he was done he then sent it to me and I took my turn. Weeks and months went by. This process did take some time but we'd schedule in a zoom call every four or five weeks just to catch up on the script. More and more months passed by until finally we had it. It's ready to shoot. But first, pre-production phase. I created some mood boards, storyboarded the script, went through the script and bought any props I needed or made them myself. And finally, mid-test shoots to practice the lighting and camera angles. Chapter two, production phase. Thursday 2nd of March 2023. This was the first day of shooting. It was me, lead actor Dave and my friend Jamie helping out. We filmed all the shots from the script that took place in the kitchen. Day two we filmed all the shots that took place in the living room and on day three Akil aka Death joined us on the shoot and shot all the dialogue scenes with Dave. And that was it. A nine-hour shoot across three nights. Now all we needed was the intro to the film. This however would have to wait seven months. Why so long? Well, life happens. I had jobs, I had other paid work to do and before I knew it summer had pretty much begun. The introduction to the film where we needed heavy rain, well that opportunity had kind of gone. So the only thing I could do was wait. In the meantime, I edited everything I had shot. I went over the edit and fine-tuned every detail. I also did a test shoot for the intro scene to make sure that when the time came I knew the blocking, the camera angles and the lighting. After what felt like a lifetime of waiting, October was finally here. I was about to hear the good news. The weather is set to turn much much more unsettled. Heavy rain overnight. There's going to be a very showery weekend. We went out and shot the scene. The rain came down. It was perfect. It was a wrap. Now that I had the music from the composer, this really leveled up the project. And because I had now pretty much finished the edit, all I had left to do was adding VFX rain to all the windows. Like this. Hopefully this video gave you a quick insight into what it takes to make a short film. If you want to see the final results, click the video here. I'll see you in the next video. Peace.