The brief
An original horror series we are building in code, starting with episode one. Every body in the city turns up at 2 a.m., right after last call, under a streetlight that died at the same minute. A detective named Vale thinks it is a cult, and he is right. They are feeding something.
The episode had to work as a vertical short, hold attention to the end and show the horror through staging and aftermath rather than gore.
What we made
- Last Call, Episode One: Lights Out, a 63.5 second vertical cut at 1080 x 1920
- An 84 second long cut in a 4:5 frame, kept as the alternate
- A creature that reads in one line: its neck arcs into a dead streetlamp, with a black lens for a face
- Sets, people, the creature, the tape look, the on-screen text, the score and the sound effects, all made in code
- An end card that asks viewers to comment for episode two
How it works
The episode plays as recovered tapes. It opens on one frame of the creature lit by lightning, then cuts to a street camera at 1:59 a.m. with one instruction on screen: watch the lamp behind her. A red circle marks the lamp, and it dies three seconds later.
Evidence photos come as fast flash cuts, one detail per line. Midway, on the line about two o'clock on the dot, the footage rewinds in slow motion, freezes and brightens, and shows what was standing behind her the whole time. A bulb goes black from the inside while Vale describes it.
The sound is synthesized too: rain, breathing and footsteps, with creaks and tape static under them, timed to picture. Every line of text sits in the parts of a vertical frame that the big video apps leave uncovered.
What we threw away
The first version ran 84 seconds with a long title card and slow evidence shots. We cut it to 63.5 seconds, took the title card down to about a second, turned the photos into flash cuts and built the mid-episode rewind as a spike in the middle. The 84 second version stays as the long cut.
Limits
This is our own series, not client work, and nothing here is a result. Episode two is not built yet.
The four character voices are synthetic voices, not actors. The creature behind her in the replay is subtle on a small screen, which rewards a rewatch but means some viewers need the red circle. The people are built from code shapes, so they hold up in shadow and at a distance rather than up close.
