I see your point about Cassie taking up her guns to save Garrett, but that hinges on how strong the audience thinks their relationship is. I saw Garrett as more of a work acquaintance than a real friend to Cassie. Now, if she was knocking boots with him I’d think differently, but she left town for a long time and didn’t bother to contact him or tell him where she was going. Not to mention they bickered constantly. Lucretia gave Cassie a second option, “Be gone by tomorrow and never return,” which made more sense to me, given Cassie’s new life philosophy.

I’ll never forget when Colin first told me you had offered us the opportunity to score a short, indie vampire film. We were so excited, we couldn’t write enough material fast enough. When the project got bumped up to a full-length feature film, I knew it would drastically change the time commitment and the amount of work we had to do. But I love writing, recording and editing music and I knew it could be challenging but still fun at the same time. I decided to stick around and see how far the rabbit hole went.

After all was said and done, I calculated that each Minute of video took between one and two Hours to score. Now condense all that work into a 21 days. That’s not including time spent writing and recording music for the film before the actual scoring process, or the time I spent on set acting in the movie, or the time spent helping out behind the scenes on shoots, or my ADR sessions, or the upgrades to my computer, or the time spent on the final mix with the director (which later got scrapped and re-mixed) or the time I spent cleaning the hum of appliances out of the kitchen scene audio…

All told, I spent well over a hundred hours on PFD, probably closer to two hundred.

Was it worth it? Absolutely. Scoring PFD really stretched my musical creativity and added immensely to my audio recording and mixing abilities . But beyond that, I now have a better appreciation for good movie production, especially good sound, film score, and ADR. I understand why Howard Shore is a demigod of film scoring. I know how fun it is to be behind the scenes on a real movie set and make things happen by pushing yourself and pulling miracles out of your ass at one in the morning. I know how hard it is to work on a ten-second snippet of audio for days, and realize once it’s perfect that no one will notice or even care. And I know the looks on people’s faces when I tell them I helped to make (and starred in) a vampire movie.

Would I do it again? That depends. A short film intended for youtube, like a music video, or a book trailer, or an episode of The Guild? Definitely. (Especially if I get to touch Felicia Day’s ass.) But a full-length motion pic? Probably not. Not for free, anyway. After working on several 48-Hour film festivals, 24-hour film festivals, music videos and other short projects, I’ve come to realize that shorter projects are way more fun and rewarding to work on than movies. They are easier and faster to make, they get viewed more often, and they don’t get compared to Hollywood films done by professionals who spend more on office supplies than the entire production cost of PFD. The extra time/quality/effort spent on a feature film ends up being more work, less fun, and doesn’t result in a product I’m *more* proud of, but I had to go down the rabbit hole to find that out for myself.

I have no regrets working on PFD, and I’m pretty amazed at the results of how much we were able to do with the Stone Soup philosophy of everyone pitching in to help make the best film we could with the resources we had available. If Stone Soup ever contemplates another project, let me know. Especially if Felicia Day is involved…

-Zero

I was just working on my 2010 VFX Demo Reel and TD resume and, while looking up some references, came across this review. Can’t believe I hadn’t seen this before!

I more-or-less agree with your review. Yes, the end credits were definitely an exercise in padding, to say nothing about the “My-God-Can’t-We-Finish-This-Now?” font. Also, my focus on trying to tell a comic-book like story (complete with cheesy dialogue) distracted from how important the fight sequences would be. Still, given the limitations, it could have been worse.

That being said, I do have to address this:

“She seems to intend to live and let live and “do right by herself” and she “doesn’t need guns anymore” but this is inconsistent with the end of the story, and nothing during the story makes me think this would have changed.”

The reason she finally took up arms again was to save her friend. She also denied coming back to her old life two times in the story. This was designed to follow the Campbellian “Call to Adventure” model, where the hero denies the call twice, and finally succumbs when given the right catalyst.

Aside from that (and your complaints about the score; I loved it then and, as of my last viewing in 2008 down at school, I loved it then) I agree with what you’ve written here.

In the half-decade since the movie was shot I’ve been lucky enough to screen it out of the region, for people who had zero connection at all with the project. It was immensely gratifying. Seeing strangers laugh, lean forward, and get engaged with the story was almost worth the pain of the production. Sure, all of the flaws were still there, but they didn’t kill the movie. As rough as the final project is, in the end the movie doesn’t stink. For that, I’m extremely happy.

Now, for the million dollar question: Would I do it again?

Absolutely not.

You put it well: It was, in the end, the whole thing was butter scraped over too much bread. Good intentions in this case took me down a genuinely hellish road.

Fortunately, it wasn’t for nothing. The experience led to my writing for “Videomaker” magazine, and ultimately to my training at the DAVE School. Add in my for-pay video editing and VFX projects, and “Pray for Daylight”, in the end, turned out to be just one long, painful thesis project for the Stone Soup Films School of Hard Knocks.

Thanks for the review, and thanks once again for the part you played in the production.

– Tony Bruno