Like "Night Light," this film has yet to be announced as of February 2021.
I mentioned in the "Night Light" page that myself and others were adapting Tiny Horror stories into micro-short films. "Don'T Drag Me" is one of those adaptations. The script was one of the earlier ones I wrote but it was the one I was most eager to see come to life in a cinematic medium.
My approach to making this film was much more precise and had far better planning than any short film I've ever made. I gave myself just over two months to prep a film that was to be around a minute in length. If I were to apply this method of "two months to prepare one minute" on a 10-minute short, it would take 20 months to do pre-production. But why did I take my time with planning this short? Well I knew this film was going to be a VFX heavy project. I've had CGI to some extent in each film I've made, but not like this. I took a lot of time storyboarding every single shot to show what I was aiming to accomplish visually. This helped my Director of Photography, Logan Bennett, with lighting and framing up each shot as close as possible to the storyboard references.
Speaking of crew, for this film, I knew having a full crew was essential to getting everything done in time and to ensure I'm not cutting any corners. However, I kept the covid-19 pandemic in mind and only got the key crew members that I knew would be absolutely necessary. In total, we had less than 10 people. As I just said above, I hired a Cinematographer to handle the camera and lighting so I can focus on directing and getting each story beat needed in each shot. My good friend, Logan Bennett, stepped in to do just that. I should also shout out Adam Gegan, who works with Logan at Take2 Productions, for letting us use his Sony Fs5. Other crew includes the Assistant Director/Script Supervisor (Jonathan Wymer), Sound Mixer (James Gary), Makeup Artist (Beverly Eve Hegmon), and Alex Ayres and Greg Clarke as camera assistants. Casting the film was easy since I wrote the role with my friend, Tony Dupar, in mind. There are two other roles in the film who are played by Ricky VU (from Enchantress) and Alex Ayres. I also put myself in the film but I'm gonna keep it secret until the film comes out :)
Like "Night light," the filming only took 4.5 hours. Doing a lot of preparations really helped streamline the process. Editing was, for the most part, easy, but my computer issues also plagued the post-production of this film. I have been steadily working on the VFX to get them right, I hadn't done intense VFX on a film before, so it's been slow but the results are worth it. I look forward to hitting the export button for the final time on this film. My goal is to release this and "Night Light" together since they've been simmering for the same amount of time. I will update this page as soon as I can.