A Tap at the Window - Short Horror Film (2018)

A short horror film about a young woman who’s haunted by a mysterious creature tapping at her window.

We’re huge fans of horror films like “The Ring”, “The Grudge”, “The Conjuring”, “The Shining”, and “It Follows”. After watching several great short horror films on YouTube -- including “Lights Out” and “Dollface” -- we decided to shoot our on own horror movie. We shot this project with some students from UC Davis and a young woman we met at the Sacramento Horror Film Festival.

Shot in over 100F degree weather, inside a tiny apartment and over three consecutive all-nighters, this was one of our most grueling shoots ever.

We shot this film with the Sony A7s and Rokinon DS Cine Lenses. Learning from mistakes from our previous short horror film (“Death in C Minor”), we made it a point to try to properly light and white balance all of our shots. We were also careful to keep our ISO levels below 1600 in order to reduce the noise/grain in our footage. All this made it much easier to Color Correct and Color Grade in the editing room.

Some of the scenes were lit by a CFL lamp which caused annoying flickering in our footage. We were able to reduce the flickering by adjusting the shutter speed, but we were never able to completely eliminate it. Fortunately, we found a deflickering plugin that helped smooth out the footage in post -- though the plugin added a ghosting effect to the footage (see the end of the film, when the creature closes the window and turns around to leave).

Another challenge we ran into were the scenes of the actress outside of the window. We called them the “infinite darkness” scenes. The main issue was that our actress’ hair was dyed bluish-green, which caused the greenscreen to bleed into her hair. This made it extremely difficult to mask the actress from the greenscreen. Our VFX artist (Jack) spent countless hours manually rotoscoping the mask, especially around the actress’ hair.

Despite the challenges, we still had a lot of fun shooting this short film. It was a pleasure working with our actresses (Cindy Pham and Dru Blohm-Craig), assistant director (Crystal Chen), makeup artist (Sherry Vang), and voice actress (Sherri Vang). We hope you enjoy our short horror film (“A Tap at the Window”). We’re planning to release more horror movies in the future, so please share and like our work and subscribe to our YouTube Channel!

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Starring Cindy Pham and Dru Blohm-Craig
Makeup by Sherry Vang
VFX by Jack Vang
Voice-overs by Sherri Vang
Assistant Directors Crystal Chen and Steven Vang
Written & Directed by Jimmy Ren and Jack Vang

Filmed with Sony A7s
Rokinon DS Cine Lenses (14mm, 24mm, 50mm)
DJI Ronin DSLR Gimbal