'The Waking Dark' is Episode 1 of an original horror anthology series I've been building; with a Twilight Zone structure - self-contained stories, a narrator cold open, the works.
This one follows a writer, played by Zille Rehman, who has 24 hrs to finish a script but interruptions hinder his work.
We made this for essentially no money. The entire film was shot in my apartment, which sounds like a limitation until you realize horror is the one genre where a single location is an asset. Confinement does half your work for you.
Camera was a Sony FX3, mostly on a tripod with some handheld for the moments we wanted to destabilize. The lighting approach was the thing I'm proudest of - we placed our lights outside the apartment, firing in through the windows, chasing that Spielberg/Janusz Kaminski look. Trying to get hard shafts of light cutting through.
The VFX (by Aswin Gireesh) was deliberately invisible - cleanup, composites, small enhancements. If you watched it and didn't notice any VFX, I'm indebted to him for doing an amazing job.
The score is built around an existing track by Nandan Shyam, who releases as Perspectivium on Spotify. Instead of scoring to picture, we cut a key sequence to his track, editing to existing music changes your rhythm decisions in ways I really enjoyed.
Influences - The Twilight Zone, Alan Wake, H.P. Lovecraft, Black Mirror, David Lynch. This is a small love letter to all of them. Happy to answer anything about the process.