Feelin' Bad

Don’t you hate it when you come back from a business trip and a weaponized flu virus has turned your neighborhood into a deathtrap of voracious, homicidal cannibals?

I created “Feelin' Bad” for the PDI/Dreamworks Animation Lo-Tech festival in 2006. The rules were:

1. 3 minutes or less (not including titles)
2. No CG!
3. The main character must deal with a grilled cheese sandwich.

The third rule begs the story to be a comedy, so that’s exactly what I DIDN’T want to do. I wanted to try my hand at the Suspense/Horror genre and found out that it’s tough to build tension in 3 minutes or less. Consequently, the film’s 8 minute running time disqualified it for prize consideration, but was included in the festival and received a lot of positive attention.

A big lesson I learned from making this film is that creating suspense is harder than it looks. Audiences are pretty sophisticated when it comes to being scared and it’s truly challenging to find the right combination of the composition, lighting editing, acting and music that will successfully make a moment work. Linger a few frames too long and the audience knows its an obvious setup, yet too few frames and the audience may not even notice the detail you’re trying to show.