u/Inevitable-Lack-2514

I couldn't afford a DP so the lead actor and I co-DP'd the film together. I would setup the shot while he worked on lighting. Would definitely have loved to have someone to lighten the workload, but happy with how it turned out.

We shot on the c70 with a LowCon on basically every shot to give it a more... for lack of a better phrase, film look. I know that's such a general thing to say, but the movie takes place in the mid-90s, so we wanted to move away from a crisp, digital look. The goal was to have the movie look and feel like something you'd find on VHS at goodwill. I even toyed with the idea of doing a VHS release.

Trailer: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BXJYxnvOFbo

Full movie: https://tubitv.com/movies/100051267/the-girl-in-the-woods

I figured the stripped down version was better than nothing at all. So we shot with essentially no crew, kept the setups simple so we could move fast, and did all the effects in-camera. We shot the entire film in just under three weeks over the summer.

Premise: Living alone on the edge of a secluded forest, widowed farmer Malcolm Gardner keeps to a quiet routine, until a strange ten-year-old girl emerges from the trees, revealing a hidden world lurking just out of view.

Reviews have been all over the place. Some great. Some okay. A few talk about how the movie clearly was made on no money (in a negative way), which is kind of a bummer. I wonder what those people would say if Kevin Smith released Clerks today. Or if they've seen movies like Primer or Following, which Primer in particular was a huge influence for me. I don't know. Maybe people aren't watching no budget films anymore? I'd love to hear your thoughts.

You can watch it free here: https://tubitv.com/movies/100051267/the-girl-in-the-woods

One last thing... our movie deals with some actual scientific theories placed in real world circumstances. One reviewer nailed the exact experiment the film was based on, but a few others have said they had no idea what happened at the end. Compared to Primer, I thought our concept was easy to understand, but did I go too far/not explain enough?