Behind the Monster
A detailed behind the scenes look on the making of A Monster in the House.
How it all started…
After the first few weeks of quarantine (2020 has been a crazy year), Dustin pulled out some old scripts in an attempt to at least try to be productive, even though he was stuck at home. One script stuck out to him, and the ideas began to flow.
Pretty early on, after the first few drafts of the script were written, we decided to launch a crowdfunding campaign to help us get the funds we needed to make this short film a reality. Before diving in, we researched the market and how to run a successful crowdfunding campaign. We spoke with individuals and groups with shared interests on how best to market the idea and get the best return for our efforts.
After weeks of preparation, we finally launched our crowdfunding campaign on IndieGoGo since you get to keep whatever is donated, even if you don’t hit your goal. We knew we could make this film cheaply if we had to, but we wanted to keep from compromising as much as possible in order to make the best film we could make.
The campaign ran for 6 weeks. We didn't want it to run too short so it would continue to be on people’s minds, and we didn’t want it to run too long so people wouldn’t get too tired of seeing it everywhere. This turned out to be a good decision, even though we had to take a week and a half off of posting in the middle of the campaign in order to keep us from feeling burned out. It was during that time we saw a major dip in donations and contributions.
Crowdfunding is a full time job in itself. It’s time consuming and difficult, but if you plan on doing it, you need to make sure you find the time and energy to do it correctly or else it won’t be worth your while.
Our Crowdfunding Video
And then, there was pre-production…
All the while planning our crowdfunding campaign and finalizing our script, we decided to move forward with finding location options as well as casting. We knew that locking these things down would make for great crowdfunding updates as the campaign went on, and if we didn’t tackle this, the timeline would be extremely compressed due to uncertainty around COVID.
Casting was much simpler than expected. We posted a casting call to a few different local acting groups on Facebook, and we had plenty of online auditions. Some we’ve worked with before - some we hadn’t. We were extremely lucky the cast we chose found interest in the project and wanted to be a part of it, even during a pandemic (which brought about it’s own difficulties with planning).
Finding a house was much more problematic. I’m originally from South Carolina where large, plantation-style houses can be found on almost every corner on the countryside. That isn’t the case here in Florida. We searched for weeks, trying to find the right house, not too old, not too extravagant, not too modern, and somehow fit the layout we needed to shoot our script without having to rewrite too much. After speaking to many places we weren’t excited about and a few others we knew were certainly out of our budget, we were lucky enough to come across the Deen House in Lakeland, FL. The place is full of history, and it still contains it’s antique charm without seeming out of the realm of possibility that someone would still live there. We were able to go in for a few hours in order to scout the location, and then we made the necessary changes to our script before booking it.
Then there was the monster. We obviously wanted it to be scary and realistic, also knowing we would be lighting it in near darkness to obscure any imperfections. Luckily, we teamed up with the wonderful Mar Negro who helped us design the creature. We found that we could save some money by buying Halloween latex masks and repainting them. We held two fitting days for our creature (Aaron Sturgess of Walking Dead, Creepshow and Stranger Things) so we could modify the suit as needed before the production dates and to get a screen test to see how the monster would look with our cameras.
Gathering the crew was a much different experience that brought its own challenges. We had to limit ourselves on the size of the crew in order to practice safe CDC recommendations because of COVID. We also didn’t have any additional funds in order to hire crew members since we didn't hit our main goal in our crowdfunding campaign. This meant we had to call in a lot of favors from our filmmaker friends who might be interested in helping us out just for the fun of it. In the end, the crew couldn’t have been more perfect for the job, and I can’t thank everyone enough for all of the hard work they put in to make the 4 days of shooting so enjoyable and exciting, even as the stress mounted…
Original Screen Test
The week before production was set to begin, we held our final fitting. With the costume at 80% completion, we tested his movements, lighting, and look with our RED cameras.
Day 1 of Production - 14 Hours
The first day of production ran about as smoothly as it could. Our main focus was building and shooting the attic set piece, which we constructed in the main hall of the house. It took considerably more time trying to figure out the lighting than we originally thought, but that comes with the territory. Unfortunately, we weren’t able to do a second scout of the location with our Director of Photography (Shadai Perez) beforehand so all he had to go on were pictures and descriptions. The first day was quite a bit of figuring out the house and how to best utilize our crew.
Naturally, we began to run a bit behind in the first day. We had to cut a few shots and rework some scenes. We even needed to call back Brayden Benson (our young Adrian) to return the following day to finish his scenes when he was supposed to wrap the first day. Luckily, we had planned ahead, knowing that things might get hectic, so our fourth day of shooting was reserved for any pick-up scenes that would need to be moved from a busier day. Little did we know how much we would need it…
Day 2 of Production - 14.5 Hours
Day two, our focus was to complete all of the scenes with just Adrian (MJ Mattiaccio) and Sarah (Chloe Marie Rhoades) without the Monster. This was a lot, and we knew that were were going to be some scenes moved over to day four, especially considering we also had to add Bradyen’s postponed scenes at the end of the day.
We started the day moving fast, hitting a few hiccups in the middle of the day concerning lighting. You see, the entire film is supposed to take place at night, but the place was filled with windows. We had to black out all the windows in the house with black plastic. Then there was the issue with the giant, stained glass window coming up the stairs (which is a major element that needed to be shot). We had to diffuse that window with everything we had because we didn’t want (or have he resources) to black it out since the light coming in gave it the texture we wanted.
We got what we could with MJ and Chloe and finished off Bradyen’s scenes before calling it a (late) night. At this point, day four was already mounting up with pickup scenes, which was starting to concern us since the hardest day (and the day we were most looking forward to) was coming day 3 - Monster Day.
Day 3 of Production - 20 hours
Here it was! The day we were all waiting for. We got going early, trying to set up everything we could while Aaron and Mar went to work putting together the monster. The plan was to shoot a few of the shots with MJ and Chloe before Aaron was finished getting his skin on, and then we would go back and shoot the monster stuff to finish those scenes before moving on. We ran into a major problem when the monster took much longer putting together than we anticipated. In order to hide any creases in the costume, Mar had to cover Aaron in latex which just couldn’t dry fast enough. We did what we could to try not to break down lighting setups and continue finding other scenes to film in the meantime, but our resources started running thin, our options decreasing.
Once the Monster was completed, he looked amazing (better than we could have anticipated honestly). He was tall and terrifying, and when he was shot through the right lens with the right lighting, we knew Mar had done something special. It may have put us a bit behind, but the extra work was worth the outcome.
Another issue we ran into was having to completely rework a scene because we just couldn’t get it to work right with the layout of the house. Dustin and Tori discussed it over and over trying to figure out a solution before one was finally agreed upon. It took close to 6 hours just to prepare and shoot this scene alone since it was more of an action scene involving many moving parts. This put us drastically behind for the day, but the only thing we could do was keep going.
We finally wrapped the day at 3am, with some of the crew having left at 1:30am since they had an hour drive back to Orlando. The day was exhausting, to say the least, and by the end of the day, we were all in pretty rough shape, sleep deprived and overworked. But the jokes kept coming and the laughs never stopped. The entire crew had a part in keeping us all together without falling apart on a day like this, and we can’t thank everyone enough for their work and their amazing attitudes. Honestly, thank you all from the bottom of our hearts.
Day 4 of Production - 18 hours
This was it - the final day of production. We had to get it all today or the film wouldn’t be able to be completed. Taking a look at all that had mounted up for the day and the shotlist that was put together, Dustin and Tori started work early in the morning to figure out what could be cut and reworked. The task was overwhelming.
But after a few hours, it was easy to notice that something about that day just clicked. We might have been tired and exhausted, but the entire crew was hitting the ground running. The shots kept getting checked off one after the next, and we were getting some truly incredible stuff, even with content we had to cut for time.
We finally wrapped at 11pm (which was much earlier than we had anticipated that morning) with cake and ice cream, jamming out to a playlist of all the songs people would randomly start singing all week (shout out Dick Crites for being an amazing PA). We were able to finishing tearing down and packing up our equipment around 2am and headed home for some much needed rest, knowing we weren’t going to be touching this footage for at least a week.
Teaser Trailer
Post Production
We began editing a few weeks later, getting a first cut together relatively quickly. We noticed there were a few pickup shots that would really bring the piece together, and we could probably fake them at a different location so we wouldn’t have to spend more money to rent out the Deen House again. These couple of shots will be filmed in another few weeks, and after that, we will have picture lock. At that point, we will be ready to send it over to the composer, begin sound mixing, sound design, and color.
The film is truly looking fantastic, and we are all extremely happy with how it is progressing. We are hoping to have a finished version in mid-December, just in time to submit to a few festivals, and then have a premiere for cast, crew, friends, family, and certain contributor classes here in Orlando. Once it has finished it’s festival circuit rounds, we are going to release it online for everyone to see (hopefully as early as October 2021).
We will continue to keep you updated along the way through our social posts and IndieGoGo updates. Stay tuned for more information, and thank you so much for you support!
