A very scary encounter at UC Santa Cruz :0

Production notes:

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The first of a two-part project created for the Film 170B class I took at UC Santa Cruz. The prompt was to create a 3 - 5 minute "long take" narrative film—that is to say, the entire thing had to be one continuous shot. Me and my collaborator, Bueno, figured a found footage format could work well for this assignment, so we settled on the idea of a horror film featuring a mutant slug creature (inspired by the school's mascot, the banana slug). We originally envisioned the whole story to fit into one film, but because we later found out we each had to turn in our own projects, we ended up splitting the script in two and called part one Bueno's film, while the second was mine. The shoot itself was a bit of a bumpy ride as we were filming in a public space with people walking across the bridge constantly, so there were numerous false starts and close calls as we did our best to avoid getting anyone in the shot. On top of that, we experienced some issues with lighting and focus, a fogged-up lens, and Bueno even failed to hit record on one of our attempts. And most hilariously of all, another of our attempts was interrupted by a random girl who'd found a newt on the ground and felt the need to show us right then and there. But eventually, we got a take that was acceptable enough and went with that. Editing was technically not allowed for this assignment, though I just couldn't resist a few touch-ups and stitching together some of the better variations. I did it as invisibly as I could though, so the professor wouldn't notice there was any post-production involved. And later, for the YouTube edition, I did a little bit of extra sound design and put together some creepy sound effects for the Slugman creature itself—which, ironically enough, became one of the more memorable aspects of the film. In the original cut I turned in for class, the Slugman is mostly silent, other than one little vocalization (timestamp: 1:53) performed by Andrew, the guy in the slug mask. Though as I recall, even that kinda had to be squeezed out of him, since he seemed a bit embarrassed by the performance.