Yours truly showing off some serious clap board skills.
I don’t always talk a whole lot about my day job over at ol’ Polymyth Productions here, but I figured that I’d be amiss if I didn’t mention some of the more interesting stuff we’ve been working on. Take for instance, Teenage Ghost Punk, a feature length film written and directed by Mike Cramer that we just finished up.
You can probably guess the general gist of a film with a title like that, but just to be completely clear, the movie follows a family who moves into a house that’s haunted by a teenager… who is a punk… who is a ghost. Daughter falls in love with ghost, shenanigans ensue.
Director and writer Mike Cramer with two of the leads.
This is one of those projects where Polymyth is hired to bring another person’s vision to life. We provided Mike a director of photography and a crew to help him develop his story. I personally assisted with script development and producer duties.
One of the things that makes this film fun is a distinct sense of place. We shot in a historic house in Oak Park, Illinois (that’s where Hemingway went to high school y’all) and at a series of authentic locations in the area. The house may have been tiny, and not the best for an entire film crew to invade, but it ended up bringing an awesome sense of authenticity to the project. The people who lived through our brief occupation are saints.
The sun is never enough.
Our fearless director of photography Derek Cox got to stretch his wings a bit with some seriously dramatic lighting. To create an interior daytime scene that still had a ghostly vibe, we arrayed a small army of lights outside the house and had them blasting through any window we could find.
The director of photography Derek Cox is the captain now.
We’re getting ready to send this bad boy off into the crazy world of film festivals, so wish us good luck and hopefully there will be a ghostly visitor to your town soon that isn’t Casper. (Side note: doesn’t it feel inevitable that there will be a gritty Casper remake at some point in the near future? Discuss.)
In the meantime, you can check out the trailer below:
Teenage Ghost Punk Teaser from Polymyth Productions on Vimeo.