Tuesday, March 17, 2015

The Long and Short of It


So how did this whole The Hunter’s Anthology thing start?  I thought you were working on Trust Us.  Did you ditch that idea?  These are the questions that must be burning in your mind right now.  Okay, maybe not, but I’ll answer them anyway.  Yes, I am working on both.  Always better to have two things cooking than one, so I’m trying to better my odds.  You know the kind of people us filmmakers have to be.  We’re not quitters, remember?!

So anyway, here’s the story.  Even while working on Trust Us, I’m always writing and jotting down ideas.  Sometimes these ideas work best as short stories, and these short stories tend to work best as short films, and these short films turn out to be great for showcasing my directing skills.  So, how can I cover both options?  Easy, by writing a feature made up of a collection of short stories.  That way, I can do one, I can do two, or I can do the entire thing!  It all depends on how much money I can raise.

I love supernatural thriller anthologies like The Twilight Zone, Tales from the Crypt, and Amazing Stories. They’re fun.  It’s such good Saturday night movie marathon material.  You know, sitting on the couch eating popcorn until 3 in the morning type of stuff.  Thriller anthologies are made up of short, cautionary tales, and I find the best ones have clever twist endings.  Turns out a bunch of the ideas I jotted down fit this criteria.

So if I’m going to make some short films and put them together as a feature, I also figured they should be connected in some way.  What if a small group of people are trapped together somewhere, each starring in their own personal tale?  That’s how The Hunter’s Anthology really started.  I took popular supernatural plot devices and put my own unexpected twist on them.  For example, there’s one about a fortune teller, but it’s called The Fortune Maker.  Ah-ha… you see what I’m doing there?  I have one about making wishes, another about a love potion... you get the idea.  So many people like these common plots and so many people like to hear it a million different ways.  Without giving away my endings, I certainly did my best to break the archetype stereotypes of the genre.  (“archetype-stereotypes!” Can I do that? I just did!)

Finally, I just needed something to hold all these tales together.  What if one of these characters was evil?  Say one of them was a demon and the rest were in danger?  Well, there you go, now we’ve got ourselves a mystery for the main story wrapped around the others to keep everyone invested throughout.   Who is the demon?

As we know from various anthology movies and TV shows, our “wraparound” story is almost always run by a “storyteller.”  So why not make our storyteller a friggin’ badass demon hunter who goes around like a detective, sniffing out demons?  Well, that’s exactly how I came up with Mac, the main character of this story and the only character featured in The Hunter’s Anthology: Prologue we shot almost two months back.  Perfect way to set up a link to our trailer.  Please help support us by checking it out and following these links:

If you missed the teaser: http://youtu.be/Fcz5yHa4d9I
Official Facebook page: www.facebook.com/Thehuntersanthology
Twitter: @HunterAnthology

Tell the world… JOIN THE HUNT!!!

Next time: how The Hunter’s Anthology: Prologue was conceived…

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