Home was a great learning experience for me. It was the first narrative project that I completed on my own, with the help of my insanely awesome cast and crew on set, of course. My ghost, Jay Spencer, was even willing to go barefoot in 20 degree weather for the sake of production value. I ultimately decided against it, but the dedication is truly rare.
The initial concept for this project was to create a tone. I wanted to make people feel... weird. From the initial concept I came up with the idea to do a completely bare bones ghost story. I like to think I succeeded on both counts.
I got a very late start on this project because of difficulties finding a location. Although it was quite stressful at the time, I really learned a lot about the work that goes into pre-production. I now have a new appreciation for producers.
The first cut of the film received mostly horrible reviews. It had a dialogue track over it
The most interesting part of the re-editing process for me was the question, “What do I owe the audience?” For a long time I thought that I didn’t owe the audience anything and thus I should just make the film that I want to make. And in some ways I still think that. However, I had shot a couple things after Home, and I just didn’t feel as attached to it by the time I came back to re-edit it. So I figured, “Why the hell not, let’s just make this enjoyable.”
This iteration of the film is about half the length of the original, but hopefully double the quality.
Let’s get weird.
