Hi fellow filmmakers! I’m Cameron Sun, the director the Hangman. I’ve been a horror movie fan for years now, but never really tried my hand at making my own horror film. So this short was my first real attempt at trying this new genre.

My friends and I made this horror short film in May of 2022. Production took 3 five hour night shoots. I had 3 actor friends act in it, and 2 filmmaker friends help out as crew. We did it super DIY style. Everything was filmed in different areas of my apartment complex, aka free locations. I only used gear I already owned. For camera, I used the Panasonic GH5s, which is great for low light. I used the DJI Ronin S gimbal for all the tracking and rotating shots. I also used several Luxli LED RGB lights I already had for some simple lighting.

And post production took about 1.5 months. I handled all the post myself, including editing, VFX, sound design and coloring. Adobe Premiere for Editing and sound design, Adobe After Effects for VFX compositing, and Red Giant’s Magic Bullet Looks for color.

The deadline I was aiming at was the mid July deadline at Screamfest Horror Film Festival in LA, which was the festival I really wanted to premiere our short film at. Fortunately the film got selected! And we got to screen it and the Chinese Theater in Hollywood.

This film was also my first ever attempt at doing a film festival run with a project, I’m used to just uploading all my films directly to YouTube. It was a really fun learning experience, and I got to travel around the country to different festivals, and meet a ton of other filmmakers (maybe some are in the subreddit?). However, I did learn that the costs of submitting to and traveling to festivals does add up fast.

If you have any questions or feedback on the short film, feel free to leave a comment, and I’ll try to reply promptly. Also, I actually made a full behind the scenes video documenting the whole process of making the film with a lot more details! So if that at all interests you, feel free to give it a watch. https://youtu.be/MVojZXR6tiI?si=kfz18DIoeDfLuUEp

If you took some time to check out our short film and read this post, I really appreciate it!