Director: Michael Matsui
Cast: Sophia Andrews; Heather Lynn; Tom Andrews.
Country: United States
Synopsis: Sophia, 9 year old, is pursued by an entity in her home and the terror is experienced from the imaginative perspective of Sophia. An imagination where all of her nightmares come to life, and what normally brings her comfort is personified into horror.
How was the "You're On Your Own, Kid" project born?
There are elements of the story that are inspired by unique childhood experiences I had growing up. I grew up obsessed with horror movies such as Jaws, A Nightmare on Elm Street, and Evil Dead. So a combination of my childhood trauma and horror movies were the perfect concoction for what I believe made a unique and intriguing story that was very personal to me. Also the challenge of a horror film closely following a pre-teen child is attractive to me, where a lot of movies have to feature more adult characters for talent/budget restraints, I didn't have that problem in a short format.
A great shooting technique, what tools did you use?
I kept it extremely simple, in fact I believe as simple as you can get. I stabilized my Red Komodo cinema camera on a first generation DJI Ronin and recorded audio using a Rode NTG3 mic mixed into a Zoom F6 recorder for the benefit for 32 bit float aka, crisp clean audio no peaking. I exclusively used Sirui's 24mm anamorphic lens as I longed for the cinematic anamorphic style. This lens being budget friendly yet high quality was a win win for the production. I edited the film on Adobe Premiere which I have been using since I was just 13 years old and that will likely never change. I love Adobe Products. But that is really it in a nutshell! I suck at coloring and composing music so i outsourced to Dale Sumner (Opus Melodi) for music and Chris Dietrich of Company3 for the coloring work. They both killed it and were pivotal to the film's success.
What was the most important lesson you learned while shooting your film?
So I actually had just lost my fulltime job prior to pre-production on this film. I lost it all and the pandemic hit so life was rough. I hunkered through, filmed the movie and things came to an absolute stand-still for a while. I was able to finish the film in 2023 but became so depressed about how I didn't have the energy or time to finish the film, I almost wiped it from my hard drive in early 2023. It wasn't until I fooled around with sound effects and music scores from Epidemic Sound that it reinvigorated my excitement for finishing the film and I simply went head first and got it done. I guess the lesson here is you never know when you're going to have a potential banger, just finish your project and put it out thetr. We are often our harshest critics.
What about your future plans?
Market You're on Your Own, Kid, get it in as many festivals as possible. Get some awards and use the hype from this film to hopefully crowd fund my next project to have a bigger budget and higher quality. I also have been networking a lot with other filmmakers and industry professionals making many great connections. I hope to keep making films, as long as I'm doing that im satisfied.
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