Untitled Feature Film

A couple months ago I started putting together this part of the website to showcase news and information concerning a new feature film that I’m making. After a few weeks, I’ve become so immersed in the pre-production that I haven’t been able to do much with updates. I realised this in the last few days.

I apologize for that.

Right now we’re working on the German translation and it’s so far gone very well. Thorsten Hergasz, who worked with me on translating the Mad Tea Party into die Verrückte Teestunde back in June 2007 is once again helping. Once this process is over we will begin the storyboarding. I am going to guess that it will be about January before we get into the storyboarding.

I will be looking for some actors to fill a few roles. That information will be available in January. I’ll be looking for men and women of all ages and sizes.

I wish you all a happy holidays!

-Ceven Knowles

Today I worked on getting the budget together for the website and now there is a new BUDGET page so that you can see what is needed, how much it will cost and why it is needed.

I’m working on a few more things to update you with through the week so please keep checking back!

-Ceven

Hallo Everyone! – Gruß!

I’m very happy to announce that I will be directing my first feature film! After Other People’s Mirros, Anderecast, and several other short video projects I finally feel ready to tackle a big one! So let me give you a little bit of information about it…

At this time, the film has no working title. I don’t know how that will come out but am confident that eventually my “Eureka!” moment will come. In the meantime I’ll just call it Untitled Film #1.

Origin:
Back in the beginning of September this year I decided to make a Halloween Special for Video Unbekannt. It was to be one of my typical 5-10 minute shorts on nice old Hi8 specifically intended for the website. I’d always wanted to make a horror film and have been waiting for the right moment to hit. It was an easy decision for me to definitely want to go in the direction of hardcore gore- not that it’s bad, but there’s already so much out there that it just isn’t attractive to me right now. After watching several old episodes of Tales From the Darkside, Tales From the Crypt, and reading countless movie and book summaries on Wikipedia, I felt comfortable enough to write my own original story. I sat down and just wrote as it came to me over two days. At the end I was staring at a 48 page rough draft- clearly not a 5-10 minute film! I wrote a revision, then a second and sent it out to various people I know for a test reading and critique. The response was very good and helpful. After a few more revisions I finally had a very thick script. I showed it to a few people who said the right things and decided to take it from there to the next step.

Genre:
At first I meant for this script to be a straight-forward supernatural horror. My initial inspirations came from films like Roman Polansky’s Rosemary’s Baby, Robert Wise’s 1963 The Haunting based from the book The Haunting of Hill House by Shirley Jackson (an all-time favourite of mine), and Dario Argento’s Suspiria. As the revisions went on I began to sidestep from my original idea and became more interested in building cinematic suspense. To say it’s a horror film isn’t exactly correct, but to say it is suspense is also not right. It fluctuates somewhere in the middle with a little comedy just for kicks.

Story:
This is a story about a gay American man who is a high school English teacher. After a bad break-up with his boyfriend he confides in a Belgian lesbian friend of his who went to University with him about his desire to finally getting around to writing the book he’s been trying to write and could never do. She convinces him to move to Berlin for a year and try a different atmosphere, get away from the job he doesn’t like and work on writing his book. Once in Berlin, he looks for a nice quiet apartment and finds seemingly the perfect one. He soon finds out that he’s not living alone.

That’s all I’m going to say about it right now. The rest you are going to have to see for yourself.

This has been a very long first post, so I’ll go now and continue working on the production script. Hopefully in the next weeks we can get into the storyboarding. I’ll be updating with some photos of locations and some acting bios soon. Please keep checking back for updates!

Also I’m looking for help in budgeting this film and am willing to sell producer credits as well as shares based upon donation amounts. The film is going to cost me roughly 7000€ to produce. I’m setting up the Paypal account this evening for anyone who wants to donate. I would also suggest that anyone who wants to donate 500€ or more should contact me so that I can give bank details and forego the bigger Paypal fees.

Have a great night!
-Ceven Knowles