This is an unfiltered behind-the-scenes breakdown of a $20,000 short film and, honestly, the part that still feels kind of wild to say out loud: we got a streaming service to greenlight and finance it. I walk through how Fear Pix (an indie horror streaming service) found my horror shorts and my annual horror short film contest, reached out, and basically said, “What ideas do you have? We’d love to fund one for our platform.” Every short I’ve made before this was self-financed, so this was a big shift—and a good reminder that if you keep putting the work out there, doors actually do open. From there, I get into the real production stuff: we shot 10 pages in two days, leaned into the existing fluorescent lighting in the “seedy purgatory” video store instead of fighting it, and built a lot of the scares practically. We used a RED Raptor XL with Iron Glass lenses, and when we needed extreme close focus for possession shots, we hacked it with my Prism Lens Effects Free Form adapter plus the Macro Effects filter. I also break down little on-set problem solving—like creating a more chaotic strobe by mixing different light manufacturers so everything wasn’t synced and giving us black frames. It was stressful, ambitious, and one of my favorite directing projects to date—especially because I was directing more dialogue than I ever have before.