Long Exposure from Adrian Atwood on Vimeo.

This short film is a suspense/slasher concept. It’s also a love letter to my camera. I developed the concept around the time that I was doing a lot of timelapse and long exposure photography. I was also spending some time shooting video of landscapes, like the Mt. Pollux video I shot last winter. I knew I wanted to juxtapose the serene beauty of the idealized wild with the frenzied blood bath that nature really is.

A few crude storyboards I made “Long Exposure” scenes

We had to re-shoot a few sequences. The first attempt to shoot the stabbing scene didn’t pan out so well. There were some nice shots, but the sequence as a whole wasn’t working in context of what the (lack of) budget could pull off.  Night time crept up quickly and cut short what I had planned to capture that day. So we walked away with no usable footage, but a better understanding of how and what to shoot next time. Here’s the original stabbing scene.

I made the fake blood from scratch. There were two batches made. Both of the blood mixes were made with corn syrup, red and purple jello powder, and chocolate syrup. One contained liquid detergent, which made the mix easier to wash out and less sticky. The second batch was edible, which was important because I had planned to get shots where someone was going to cough up blood.

The bag o’ blood mix