How I made a short film in one night | Making of ROAD KILL starring Guy Henry

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With making your own films I'm a firm believer in “do a lot with a little” so don't wait for that idea
that's going to cost thousands and thousands. Do something that you can do now with what you have available to you! I wrote Road Kill during a COVID 19 lockdown when I couldn't go anywhere and I thought, what's a very simple story that I can tell with just a house and a car, and a tiny crew and a couple of actors, and this was the result.

Road Kill is a short thriller. I would pitch it as: "an overworked but arrogant lawyer describes the terrifying incident that has just happened to him on the way home from work - but his night may not be over yet!" The finished film will be released on YouTube in the coming months, once it has finished its festival run.

Our cast is led by the brilliantly talented Guy Henry, who's known from Holby City, Harry Potter, Star Wars, Rome and Extras. I wrote the role of Richard for Guy, and luckily he enjoyed the script and agreed to do it. For the role of Tom we had the very talented Nicholas Osmond, he's done everything from open-air Shakespeare to London's West End, so we were very lucky to have him too. And then completing our cast was Christian Cascone, and he played the role of the mysterious homeless man. I think half of directing really is casting because if you get it right, then the actors will bring so much to your roles.

For this film we had a really small crew, partly because we were filming towards the end of COVID restrictions, but also it just meant we could work really fast. I definitely wore more multiple hats than usual. I was producing, so I was organising all the logistics, I was directing, so I was worrying
about the performers, and I was also doing the camera and the lighting, all of the technical stuff to do with that. And I was basically editing in my head as well! So quite nerve-wracking. But the plus side was that it saved a lot of time explaining what I wanted.

We had gone and shot the POV driving shots the week before, but other than that, everything in the film was shot on a single night in January from about 5pm to 11 pm. When the actors arrived, the first thing we did while we were waiting for it to get dark was to just have a discussion about the story and then do a proper read through. And we read it through at least twice and talked about how we would want to play it.

For the exterior scenes by the side of the road, we actually got a really good result by using a red gel over one of our LED panel lights. And we set that up pointing upward into Guy's face
and it just gave this really eerie glow as he comes around the side of the car.

It is quite scary making a film at that breakneck pace, because if you discover later that something totally didn't work, you’re not really going to be able to get everyone back together to do it again very easily. I think the biggest challenge when making an independent film is that you're up against time. You don't have long to get everything you need, and so you need to just have planned absolutely everything you can!