DSC00740.​mp4

DSC00740.mp4 is a found-footage horror short shot entirely in first-person view during the winter semester of 2024, my first real-footage film project after working almost exclusively in 3D up to that point. A modern take on the analog found-footage look, titled after the raw, unedited camera file it came from, filmed deep in Tannermoor forest.

The trailer we cut afterward, tighter and better paced than the full short itself:

And the full short:

The story follows a group of friends who head into the forest for a survival challenge: how long can they last out there. One of them turns out to be far more dangerous than a bad camper, deliberately poisoning another with toxic mushrooms, which sets off a desperate chase back out of the woods. The final twist reveals someone else entirely behind it all, the one who talked their friend into the poisoning in the first place.

Filming happened in deep winter, which made just getting the crew and equipment into the forest its own challenge, and left very little daylight to actually shoot in. The shoot also grew far more ambitious than originally planned: a drone for aerial shots, a Blackmagic camera on a gimbal for the smooth first-person movement, and all of it shot in 4K.

We'd originally planned to cast acting students from the Anton Bruckner University, but most of them dropped out shortly before the shoot. That left us playing the main roles ourselves, improvising most of the acting on the spot.

Behind the scenes on set:

Looking back, it's not the strongest film we've made, but it was an enormous undertaking for a first attempt at real-footage filmmaking, and everything we learned about shooting practical footage, something none of us had real experience with before, made it worth every cold hour in the woods.