The last man on Earth finds finds a child survivor via his make-shift radio and must figure out where the kid lives before it’s too late.
The above is the logline to our debut feature film, The One Survivor Of Conifer. It's a thriller. A drama. A mystery. A horror. And was nearly impossible to create.
I'm Curt Dennis. I cowrote, directed, and am now editing, the film. I've seen way too many drafts of the script and way too many drafts of the cut. I'm one part of a group of film students who, in summer 2018, went in over their heads creating something we thought would be challenging. We spent two months writing, prepping, and producing (in between classes and work) a script that we only had 5 days to shoot.
I've always been interested in zero-budget filmmaking. We all start somewhere, right? And I've always liked reading about the challenges people face when creating films. Because we all learn somewhere, right? Well, I've now made a zero-budget film, and I've had to overcome challenges, so I thought I'd share them here- from getting the project off the ground, to writing a "5-day-proof-but-still-exciting" script, to the challenges of working insane hours with zero sleep, I wanna share them all.
I'm proud of what we went through. Proud of the final product. And proud we got it complete.
So here's how we created Conifer.
MARCH - A short film called Me And You wrapped production. It was written and directed by Lorenzo Fedon, and if you look through the credits, you'll notice... that a lot of people who helped create Me And You ALSO helped create The One Survivor Of Conifer. Including Lorenzo Fedon, Conifer's script supervisor.
That's because we all met on Me And You. It was our first project as film students. And once that film wrapped, we apparently had caught the bug- we wanted to do another project. A short film. We had no ideas what to do, just that we wanted to do. So I went off and wrote a script.
MAY - I finished the script; it was around 15 pages. I brought it to the team, and we found a stretch of 5 days, end of August, that we could skip school and make the film. Everyone would be in London, we could take off work if needed, we weren't actually needed in the classroom- it was perfect.
So we settled: end of August, we would make the film.
Next, we made a crowdfunder. The script was titled, The Unsurvivable Town Of Conifer, and we needed £6,000 to make it happen. We thought, between everyone, we could crowdfund £6,000! It'd be easy. We had already crowdfunded other successful projects, why would this be any different?
We had a good script, good credits, a good crowdfunding video that I wish I could link to but it's deleted now- the only thing we didn't have was the money.
After a long weekend of filming, getting a Kickstarter ready, realising that Kickstarter was incredibly difficult to international people, switching to IndieGogo, making graphics, and coming up with rewards, we launched our 30-day campaign.
We made social media posts. Asked our FFFs (Friends, Family, and Fools) for money. Advertised on the web. And by day one, we already had some backers! That £6,000 was as good as ours!
JUNE - We raised £50.
We raised 0.83% of what we needed. And for you not-numbery people, that means we raised less than 1% of our goal. We had no money and no way to make our film. But we promised ourselves we would film at the end of August. We had already taken off work, cancelled and rebooked flights- it was going to happen.
So I dissected the script. I changed it into something we could realistically manage on zero-budget. And in doing that, I noticed, once brought back to the basics, there was enough story to sustain a feature length production. Throw in some more world elements, and 60 minutes was a piece of cake. Hell, even 90 minutes wouldn't dilute the story.
I told the crew. And that's when we asked ourselves "could we actually make a feature film?"
Up until this point, our only experiences were on short student films. I had written and directed one. Max, the producer, had produced a handful of them. A lot of the crew's experience came from working on them months before. Johnny Maya, our lead actor, had only worked on short form content. None of us had the experience for a feature.
So we said "fuck it" and decided to do it.
JUNE-AUGUST - Between the months of June and August, we ended up writing no less than 7 drafts of our script. We produced the story as we were writing. We wrote the story in locations we had, with props we either had or could afford, and with a team that was prepared to go through "Hell Week" with us.
We'll get to Hell Week in a minute.
We did this while juggling school work and work-work; we even filmed another short film during this time, Infected Love. It was two months of non-stop stress and meetings and discussions about how we would film, what we would film, if it would be legal, how to keep the crew happy, planning for anything and everything that could go wrong.
And by the end of August, we had legally secured our two locations. We had a script that we could shoot with a story we wanted to tell. We had our actor, our crew, our props...
AUG 20-AUG 24 - ...And began Hell Week. Over the course of the 5 days, we filmed a 76 minute feature. We used 2 EX3 cameras with tripods, a ZOOM recorder, and a boom. That's it. That's all we had access to (though in a few scenes, we did get to use Canons. Sweet!). The film was shot on EX3 cameras, in the middle of London, near traffic, with no radio mics, lots of wind, no power, no lighting, lots of sun, some shade, but no way to control the elements.
We shot from sun up to sun down every day. Personally, I was sleeping 3-4 hours a night just so I could be on set the next day. The food was scarce, as were the liquids. There were no outlets to charge our phones. It was either really hot or raining.
That's why we dubbed it "Hell Week".
But somehow, we pulled it off. We made a feature film all because we couldn't raise enough money for our short film. We made a feature film in 5 days because we made a promise to ourselves that we wouldn't let that week go to waste.
It was tough, and the film still has a long way to go before being completed, but it's still something we can't wait to share.
There were lots of challenges along the way in pre-production, production, and post-production. Lots of challenges to overcome to make this film. Lots of challenges going on even today as I write this blog post instead of doing the sound design on Scene 3.
And I'll detail every one of them in future posts (feel free to follow us on Instagram or Facebook to know when those happen). From how we made the script, to how we shot it, to how we used the 5 day constraint to our advantage; from losing shoot time, to missing footage, to rewriting on set; hopefully to help others, hopefully to give an insight into how films get made, and hopefully to make everyone excited to see...
