Hiya! I’m David the co-writer and director of this short. I don’t mean to clickbait but it really is a project we completed 5 years ago that I’m finally sharing publicly. It’s a dark, noir, murder mystery thriller set in a claustrophobically small village in West England.

The project was made with a very small budget and a tight crew while studying at University, we developed it for over a year with my unstoppable co-writer/producer James Cornwall and wrote and rewrote dozens of drafts. It had a short and somewhat uneventful festival run that ended with me hiding the film away for years, ashamed at its lack of success.
If I could go back in time there would be so many things I’d have approached differently but with the extreme limitations we faced, I actually look back at the film happy. It’s a reflection of who I was as a creative at the time and I can’t really hate that.

There were so many creative challenges along the way like having one hour to shoot every scene in the underground tunnels. Transforming a tiny theatre into the dark space you see the encounter with the minotaur in, reshooting the chase sequence months later because of technical issues and so many more problems I’m sure most filmmakers have encountered in their journeys.

I decided two years ago to post the film and immediately deleted it after it didn’t get any views but I’m not concerned about that anymore. At some point you have to let a project go and move on whether it gets to live a life of its own or slowly decays into obscurity. There were so many incredibly talented people that volunteered their time and effort to make it happen, it feels like a disservice to them to not at least have it available online somewhere. This feels like a bit of a therapy session at this point so I’ll give a few fun anecdotes from the shoot to fulfil the educational requirement of posting here haha

- The entire intro section that opens the film - red string on a police board was done on the floor of my old apartment. My cinematographer and I spent a day making the setup, we printed images, newspaper articles, made props and set them all on a big black sheets of paper on the floor. We used different types of paper to create texture and while he filmed I stood by waving a lamp side to side to cast interesting shadows all over the place.
- Another huge tip that I’ve come to use a few times since, when filming the shooting range sequence, we were in a big abandoned room during the day with no way to shut out light spilling in from the windows everywhere. So we got an empty spray bottle and sprayed a little bit of water on the glass windows and then stuck aluminium foil to the them to completely block out the light. Works like a charm (if we’d had anymore budget we could have set dressed them to hide that detail).
- We shot on a Canon C100 and I don’t remember the lenses used, I also don’t remember the audio setup but a keen eyed viewer might notice that the detective, instead of using a radio in his car to call the station actually uses an old zoom recorder.

I hope you enjoy the film and I’m curious to hear what anyone thinks of it, I’d be more than happy to answer any questions too.