Thorner recce for Harvest

 

I’m currently in the depths of production on Tergo having just passed the second sequence over to TLB for sound.  However, while Tergo has been my life for the past 18 months I have begun to plan my next short. The newly registered Pallas Pictures will go into preproduction on ‘Harvest’ over the next few months. After dipping my toe in the world of all things robot I wanted to move onto Horror. I had a quick dinner over the summer and asked the guys to think about what scared them the most and to start ruminating on a horror concept. The only stipulations were that it had to tap into a primal fear and it had to be based in Britain. Ryan and Neil came up with a really interesting concept, a kind of modern Frankenstein where the monster is not the creature but the master who has created and is controlling it. I felt this had a lot of possibilities so over the last few months we have met up to discuss the broad strokes and build upon this initial premise.

If Tergo has taught me anything it is the need for planning with a firm grounding in the practicality of shooting.  Harvest’s main set piece will be an allotment (this nailed the brief for me as it is quintessentially British). Over the Christmas break Ryan and myself took a trip up to Thorner in West Yorkshire to have a look at the allotment that Ryan’s Dad leases. It proved the perfect combination of quaint and creepy. We are yet to approach the committee that run the space but I’m sure good Yorkshire folk will be slightly more welcoming to the novelty of a small film crew than the ‘long in the tooth’ Councillors of the Capital.