Video transcript
CApture Film Festival 2025 – Student interview – 02. Over the Hill Behind the Tall House

[intro music]

JACOB: I just had the ideas in my head from inspiration from other films I've watched, such as 'Donnie Darko' and 'The Lighthouse'. And I drew them out on a piece of paper, and, yeah, just experimented with the camera and did a bunch of shooting. And I just really tightened the pace in the edit and really cut it down. Because starting off, we had about 100-plus gigabytes of footage.

DAVID TODD: How did you prepare for that role?

BEN: Well, it was pretty hard. I had to watch obviously, films like 'The Lighthouse' and 'Donnie Darko' to be prepared. But what I did is I just did a bunch of attempts. And we just kept going till we found it right, you know?

[inspirational music]

JACOB: Well, I used Premiere Pro and After Effects to edit and do some little touch-up VFX shots. Because there were cars and stuff in the background that I had to get rid of. And then I colour graded on DaVinci Resolve. But yeah, I did a day-to-night, which is basically filming in the daytime and making it look like night-time.

So yeah, just tutorials, stuff like that, experimenting to see what works. It's quite ambiguous. I like it to be left up to viewer interpretation.

I would definitely say just watch a bunch of films, find what you like, and just experiment. So the films you like, just recreate shots and see what you can do with that. And yeah, just try it out.

[triumphant music]