Whispers of the Woods

This film...my god where do I even begin?

Well it all started with a dream I had one night, long ago. Back in 2005. It was about Little Red Ridding hood of all things. It was very vivid and probably the most influential dreams I have ever had. I always wanted to make my films, but i had trouble with coming up with ideas to apply my own take to the medium. Until I had this dream. It impacted my entire take on how I wanted to do video. The content of course has been done to death, but that wasn't what made the dream so stand out. It was the sound and the visuals. I had the same dream again, three nights in a row two years later. On the last day i met the person who I would later cast as the main character. I took the sign and decided to make the short.

So I set out, with no previous experience, and made this short trying to recapture that dream. With nothing but a crap camera. The initial shoot was incredible. Most fun i had ever had doing anything creative. At first i thought i could get the whole thing shot in a few days. Those days became weeks. The weeks became months. Scheduling nightmare.

Around spring of 08 i got it shot and it proceeded to sit untouched for months. By this time i had realized that I had an editing nightmare. Making a coherent piece with what i shot seemed impossible and it was way too late to do retakes. Then around the end of summer, after i shot my second short film i began to edit both. After both were near complete, my computer crashed and i lost everything edited. Luckily i still had all the raw footage, but seeing months of work go down the drain made the already frustrating experience. It sat untouched for a year.

I did finish my second short film around summer of 09. It was a miserable, embarrassing failure and I HATE everything about it. Bad script, bad acting, bad bad bad. But i didn't think that at the time and seeing that finished fueled me enough to finish Whispers. I did do a few re-shoots, with a puppet. And after becoming tech savvy the editing issues seemed to disappear. I began to be able to flesh out a better vision of that dream. I finished the final cut around February of 2010. It was an amazing personal accomplishment.

Whispers got screened at a local around April of that year. I decided to send it too a few festivals, and it got into one in September of 2010 and it got it's own IMDB page. I probably should have tried harder to push it further, but after years of work i was exhausted and ready to put it out to pasture and start on something new.

But still, seeing something I began work in High School actually grow into something that got anywhere is massively rewarding. Albeit it was a small success, its still one of the greatest things I have ever made. If not the greatest.

Maybe one day I will let it out of its cage and put it online.