Dead Line (2005)

A teen left home alone during a lonely December afternoon tries to avoid a run-in with a violent escaped mental patient.

The third film I made in the Advanced Videomaking class, but in many ways the weakest of the group. Obviously, by this point I had pretty much worked out a lot of the technical issues (such as the camera hunting for focus like it did at times in The Vase), so it's probably in many ways the most technically polished of these shorts.

The plot, however, is another story. The Vase had taken me a fairly long time to make, and I didn't rush through it because I wanted it to turn out well. As a result, my third project ended up being very rushed because I had to get something done before the end of the semester.

We were supposed to make a "genre film," and I chose suspense. However, since it was so rushed, the movie ended up being pretty campy. I noticed this while we were still shooting, and decided to just go with it.

Dead Line was shot with my dad's Sony Digital8 camera, but this time I did all the editing on the family eMac, using my recently-purchased copy of Final Cut Express 2.