Spiritus

Since the blog has really kicked back into full gear, there has been little time to talk about projects completed here at To Tony Productions. For the next few weeks, let’s take a journey back through the vault to reflect and discuss on the projects we’ve worked on.

Kicking things off is Spiritus, which was made as part of the 2011 Towson University 72 Hour Film Festival.

The requirements for the festival included:

• Prop of at least 5 balloons

• Line of dialogue “You’ll shoot your eye out”

• Character of a Pee Wee Herman impersonator

For anyone familiar with these festivals, you don’t find any of these things out until the day of the festival, so you’ve got to quickly scramble making the story happen. That first night, we all crowded into a single space and just hashed out ideas.

The biggest influence on the project was the fact that we had a whole abandoned house to film in, as my grandmother’s house was sitting vacant after her passing a few months prior sadly. So, we knew we wanted to make a horror film.

It’s been so long that I don’t remember who wrote the initial treatment for the story, but I think it may have been Hector Khuon and Tony Fazio who led the charge in that department.

After that point, I remember it being a total blur. We filmed all at night and the house still had so many trinkets in it there was a real ghostly vibe around everything. There was one room where the lights loved to flicker on and off from a bad electrical connection, but everyone swore it was haunted.

The story itself though deals with a man who, through flashbacks we see, is being visited by the spirit of his dead girlfriend who he killed for saying no to his proposal of marriage. She takes her revenge, and the story ends with her spirit at rest.

It is kind of amazing watching the film now and seeing the many notes of B horror films and The Evil Dead styling that are in the short, but also where there is a simple story that is told rather effectively. Really though, the lot of us were really young (21 or younger) and just made it all up as we went along.

For the festival itself that year, we ended up winning Best Picture and Viewer’s Choice, a moment that felt amazingly validating at the time for us all. I can still remember the entire group screaming and cheering when the announcement came through the intercom.

That night we celebrated with food at the nearby Bill Bateman’s restaurant on the Towson campus at the time. Things were electric, and it was to this day one of the coolest achievements I’ve experienced as a creative filmmaker.

Doing research on the film I found a blog which featured the piece from back in 2011.

Cheers!

Daniel Hess

All photos were taken by Mairo M Ferreira

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