It Started with a Whisper
The Road to Projection
As the lights dimmed and a hush fell over the movie theater, a voice leaned in and whispered in my ear, “I want to make a short film.”
The trailers had just ended, and the 2016 movie Split was about to begin. The voice belonged to Evan. We’d only met the year before, and I don’t think either of us had any idea what kind of odyssey we were about to embark on.
Making a movie always felt like one of those things you fantasize about, but never actually do. It was a dream, sure, but it didn’t feel like something people like us could really pull off.
But when Evan said that to me, something shifted. That garden wall suddenly looked scalable.
“Let’s do it,” I said.
For days after that night, I kept checking in to see if he was serious. And he was. And he showed me just how serious. Evan had spent years quietly collecting gear — building an arsenal in preparation for exactly this moment.
“Alright,” I said. “Let’s get to work.”
But he had one condition: we had to shoot on 16mm.
Another garden wall came down. Shooting on actual film? Was that even possible? Picture a glowing 16mm camera descending from the heavens with a harmonic “aaahhh” in the background. Among Evan’s gear was the Arri SR3 HS.
Over the next few months, we wrote the script for a short thriller called Seeker. And, like any first-time indie filmmakers, we cast our friends in it.
Enter: John Soul.
John and Evan were longtime friends. They made music together. (Oh yeah — forgot to mention: Evan had been making hip-hop for years before we met.) When we told John what we were doing, he wanted in. So we cast him to play the lead character named… John.
In 2018, we released Seeker. And, hopefully, you’ll never see it.
There are some cool moments, but it’s easily our worst work to date. And that’s how it should be. If the first thing you ever make is also your best, something’s wrong. You’re supposed to grow. We wanted to go up — not down. And we did… slightly.
We followed Seeker with Pokers in 2019. We stepped our game up a bit with that one. But we still cast our friends. The film was about four assassins playing cards. And not a new face in sight. Evan, John, and I played three of them. The fourth was played by another friend — also named John — who had also appeared in Seeker.
Probably the second-worst thing we’ve made.
That said, years later it did inspire an idea we’re really excited about. But that’s for another time.
Then came The Crumbling in 2020. And this is where I think we hit our stride.
Yeah, John and I were still in it — but this time, some people actually got paid to work on it. That’s progress!
But we were still making one big mistake — and we didn’t even realize it: our short films were just too damn long.
The Crumbling was 18 minutes long, for God’s sake.
We didn’t really know how to make a short film. We were basically making tiny, cramped features.
Time to change that. Enter: the Super 8 camera.
The next year, we released No Trespassing. Five minutes long, exactly. In black and white. Now that’s artistic!
Even though The Crumbling and No Trespassing were released in 2020 and 2021, respectively, we shot them the year before. While we were in post-production, we were also getting ready to shoot a western (oh la la). Production was scheduled for April… of 2020.
You can guess how that went.
We didn’t shoot it. At all.
While we waited for the world to reopen, we decided to make something small. Just the two of us. But what?
“Hey, I had a pretty scary dream last night,” I thought.
Boom. In late 2021, we released Evil’s a Foot.
Around that time, as talk of the western started to come up again, our friend Joe asked us: “When are you going to make a feature?”
A feature? We can’t make a feature. Can we?
“Are we ready for that?” I asked Evan.
“Will we ever feel ready?” he responded.
“I want to make a short film” became: “I want to make a feature film.” And my answer stayed the same: “Let’s do it.”
So we scrapped the western. (By the way, if anyone needs some old west wardrobe, hit me up.)
We got to work. John Soul said we could use his house in Pennsylvania as a location, so we tried to build a story around it. Actually, we built several. But only one stuck:
Projection.
91 pages of a psychological horror with a story we struggled to keep straight. We worked on Projection for three years.
The details of making it is a story for another time. But we’re thrilled to finally share it with the world — or at least with anyone who’s willing to watch. Stay tuned.
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