Working with Holy Sheet
Holy Sheet is a micro budget Indie film team in Portland Oregon and they are known for making extremely creative short films mostly based in the horror/comedy genres. I had seen a few of their short films when digging around the internet looking for other Portland creatives and I really liked what I saw. The writing is snappy, the direction is engaging and you can tell there is a lot of intention in each element of their films creation. As a new portlander I have been looking to build my local film network and I was very excited to get an opportunity to work with Holy Sheet on the sequel to award winning “Pumpkins Attack”.
I happened to check Facebook right when Holy Sheet put out a call for extra help. They had signed up for Guignolfest 2022 and were preparing for the shoot that weekend. I reached out and got placed as the Gaffer for the shoot date. It’s always a gamble when signing up to help on a set with people you have never even met before, especially in a high stress situation like a film race. I had no need to be worried though as the Director Mike Ghoul, Cinematographer Jaime, Audio Specialist Joel and Writer Joe all turned out to be very smart/fun/easy people to work with. Guignolfest is a 72 hour film festival where teams are expected to write, film and edit a whole horror short in 3 days. The teams are given a prop, a line and a theme that needs to show up in the film, and the final runtime can’t exceed 6:66 minutes. Holy Sheet were given environmentalism as their theme and they slapped together one hell of a script.
Because we only had two short days to film, the days were fast and hectic. I mainly worked with Jaime and Hayes quickly setting up and moving the lights as the shoot moved from the kitchen to the stairs to the backyard to the kitchen to the basement, to the stairs, to the basement to the kitchen to the road. The lighting was supposed to be very expressionistic and eye catching, not necessarily realistic so it left plenty of room for creativity. We had a lot of light to work with thanks to Holy sheet’s lights, my lights and the PA Hayes Tufts lights. We threw color up over every scene and used a lot of soft and hard light to create some pretty cool effects. I had a great time improvising as we quickly ran from room to room getting as much done as possible. I would have loved more time to really set up and monitor how the lights looked but I’m overall happy with how it went even if it was rushed. Both shoots ran really late into the night but I’ve gotten used to that being the case 99% of the time when filming.
In the end all of our hard work payed off. only one week later the cast and crew sat in a sold out theatre watching all of Guignolfests wonderful short films. The energy was high throughout the night and the crowd cheered with every blood splatter, yelled warnings to the characters on the screen, gasped at the double crosses and laughed at the absurdity of situations. I was very impressed by the quality of most short films shown that night. Making any film in 72 hours is a difficult task and my expectations were shattered again and again. Finally “Pumpkins Attack 2 - Still attacking” popped up on screen and I got to see what those tired/caffeine fueled days produced. The lines were funny, the acting over the top in all the right ways, the kills were cheesy and wonderfully gooey, and the lights actually looked pretty good! When awards started being handed out I thought we might win best script, best director, best effects, best makeup maybe one of the best films but I was surprised to find that we won best lighting and 2nd runner up overall!
Every person who worked on “Pumpkins Attack!” donated their time and talent to make the film the best it could be. It was a very difficult project, and a very exhausting process but I was impressed by the hard work and commitment from everyone involved. Overall this turned out to be a very inspiring project that introduced me to many wonderful people, I would definitely do another Guignolfest and I look forward to working with many of these people again in the future.
