After shooting the first two shorts, I found that Directing all day after hauling a small apartment worth of gear to the set was just not a great way to get good results, and Prey wasn’t really any different, however I did plan and recruit a crew and handled it more like a legitimate movie set, and it was so much better to have a team handling things around me, that let me focus more on what was in the frame as opposed to what was out of it. I think that showed through a lot more on this film, but also it was a lot of fun just having the comradery of a team on set, and having those experiences shared, I could really see myself going further and doing a larger scale production in the future. The whole cast and crew were amazing, a time dear to my heart.

There were two elements that I didn’t get to shoot the way I wanted that would have really elevated the film, the first was the opening shot, the establishing shot of the film. You want to make that shot count to really bring the viewer into the world you created, and we just had no time to shoot it. We had one day at the Satin to get it all shot, and those establishing shots we’re the last thing we were going to shoot that night. The opening shot, the city, the club was not indented to be CGI, but the actual club entry. We would have had the girls enter the club from the parking lot after a long crane pan down, and walk through a crowded room, cameras behind, and that would have set up the cowboy pimp in the back and his crew. I wanted to get lots of neon and movement through the crowd, injecting a lot of personality into that first scene. Instead, we just get the CG club exterior and then cut right to the bartender. I even had an overhead shot dolly shot planned to give it a kind of Bladerunner feel.

The second element was the interaction in the last scene between Mark’s character and Lylah’s. It “almost” works, but there’s this moment in there where he’s going on with his monolog, really savoring the moment trying to frighten her before he makes his move, and he realizes she’s not giving him a real reaction to his menacing behavior which prompts the line, “What the hell is wrong with you?”, but at close to 4am, we were all just beat, and I wasn’t able to dig deeper into that transaction. There was supposed to be a subtle reaction shot that really sold the Vampire being more amused that frightened, and at the time I thought I had it, but it was missing in post.