The idea
Back in December 2023, I made a tiny horror trailer for fun with the kids from the family I used to au pair for. They loved it so much they wanted to make something longer, so in December 2024 we went for it properly. The story: a boy left home alone, two robbers who think the house is an easy target, and maybe something else lurking that nobody planned for. Since we only had one day to shoot, I got ChatGPT to bang out a rough script overnight — in hindsight, not my best move.
How I made it
Shot entirely on an iPhone 15 Plus: no crew, no lights, no mic, nothing. One day of filming, one day of editing, almost everything handheld, barely any retakes because we just wanted it done. The kids played multiple roles each, which somehow gave it more charm than it had any right to have.
Re-editing it
I found the old footage again in 2025 while taking a storytelling-through-video module at university, and figured I'd see what I could actually do with it now that I knew a bit more. Went back into DaVinci Resolve, gave the two storylines different colour grades (cold and desaturated for the robbers, warm for the boy), reworked the sound design, and trimmed it from seven and a half minutes down to six. Kept the ending just as ambiguous as it always was, mostly because I didn't have the footage to make it anything else.
What I took from it
Learned way more the second time around than the first. Mostly that "just for fun" projects still benefit from having a shot list and more than one take, because re-editing with almost nothing to work with is painful. Still rough, still a little cringe, but it was the kind of project where I could definitely play around with things I had never used before and carry them into the next one.