But speaking of guerrilla shooting, that’s what we’re speaking of today! Every once in a while, our script requires access to a public space where we’re not able to get access or permission to film. And I look at those scenes and think, who would’ve written this, knowing full well it would be inconvenient to shoot!? (It was me).

Luckily, the person who was me only created this problem on two occasions. The first of which was a brief scene set on a subway platform, which we filmed this winter without a hitch (but with some odd glances). The second location on the other hand, we knew was going to be harder to pull off. The script required, nay, demanded a three minute sequence involving some screwball antics set in a grocery store. We left it to shoot last, hoping that some connection would come through, granting us unrestricted filming permission at a supermarket super happy to have us. But with all other shooting on the project nearly wrapped, we decided it was time to bite the bullet, and last weekend, we had a much more ambitious guerrilla shoot. Reader, it could not have gone better! EEEEEEEE :)

We’re hardly the first to take this approach. In 2016, director Sean Baker famously filmed the final scene of his film, Florida Project on an iPhone at Disney World. In an interview with The Hollywood Reporter, he said “It’s not against the law, it’s just against the rules, and sometimes you have to break rules to make a film.” We took this sentiment to heart while shooting at the grocery store, and now I’m here to report back with tips and tricks to make your next guerrilla shoot as smooth as a seal, which is notably not a gorilla, which is notability not spelled the same way as guerrilla.

Scout in advance

Scouting was so key to our success. Before we shot, I visited a few different potential locations, taking note of:

• General busyness at the times of day we wanted to shoot

• Out-of-the-way nooks and crannies where we would be the least likely to be spotted

• Nearby places that could serve as backups should we be asked to leave

• Vibe. It’s a little hard to put into words other than, “Does the staff here seem like they’d ask us to leave., and if so, how nicely would they ask”

These factors helped us determine which store was going to meet our needs best. Then, the morning of the shoot, once the cast had gathered, we sent in a scout (my very sweet boyfriend, Joe, for whom we are eternally grateful) to double check what areas were getting the least foot traffic, and confirm that the coast was clear (enough).

Ask for forgiveness, not permission

Film is such a close-up and personal medium, that it’s easy to pick up on insincerity. For that reason, to make all the effort you're going through worth it, you have to get comfortable with the discomfort, and full send. You might only get a few takes, and you certainly don’t want to waste time on a bad one.

Should you have to ask for forgiveness, a trick I picked up from Caroline is fronting as a student film, so break out your old (or new, I don’t know your age) college merch. People are far more understanding when they think a student filmmaker is just trying in earnest to finish their assignment.

Keep your crew small

Of his Florida Project crew when getting the Disney Land shots, Sean Baker said, “he headed to Disney World with [co-screenwriter] Bergoch, cinematographer Alexis Zabe, acting coach Samantha Quan, the two [actors]. ‘You can’t even call what we had a crew…We were like a family group taking a vacation.’” The smaller your crew is, the easier it becomes to blend in to your chosen location.

For our purposes, it was just Caroline with her camera and shotgun mic, our cast of four, and Joe running interference. Having half of the cast dressed like cat burglars maybe undermined my point about blending in, so learn from my mistakes, and use as naturalistic costumes, dialogue, and actions as you can.

Start with your most essential shots, and move FAST

We started with our wides, so that if we had to make a quick getaway, we would have usable footage where all of the characters can be seen. Only once we had what was absolutely necessary to cut together a passable version of the scene did we move on to coverage that would add variety, visual interest, and the things we generally like to seen onscreen.

We also kept all coverage to a minimum of about three takes, to ensure that we were moving as quickly as possible. We took solace in the fact that this scene can and will be saved by editing and ADR, and therefore, we weren’t too precious about what we filmed.

Come with plan A, B, and C

Adaptability is the name of the game in guerrilla shooting, both in preparation and in practice. While putting together the shooting sides, for example, I ended up moving a fair amount of the scene outside, so that we wouldn’t have to overstay our welcome at the store. On the day of the shoot, we had a backup store a few blocks away that met less of our criteria, but would work in a pinch. These two factors gave us so much more flexibility and peace of mind that if something fell through, the shoot could still go on.

BE KIND

Saving the most important one for last here. By filming in a public place, you are inevitably inconveniencing people. Waiting to roll until patrons have walked through, following directions by authorities of the space if given, staying out of the way, and going above and beyond to make sure no employees of the space get in trouble are all paramount.

We were pretty quickly spotted by grocery store staff, who so luckily and so compassionate were willing to laugh and look the other way. The store patrons ended up being our biggest fans; several passersby were excited to be a small part of the shoot, and wanted to learn more about the project. Who knew our attempt to go unnoticed would turn into a somewhat successful publicity stunt!?

Well, that’s all folks. I certainly didn’t take my own note on brevity, but luckily this is a post and not a shoot. Enjoy, and do with all of this what you will :)

xoxo,

Leorah

Today is an extra special Wednesday because it is the titular Final Girl’s birthday. HAPPY BIRTHDAY, LEORAH!!! 🎂💘🎉

Hilariously, I am secretly writing this while sitting on a Discord call with her as Jake edits the pilot of Final Girl, and she has absolutely no idea. She probably thinks I’m typing up some incredibly serious Wednesday thinkpiece about the importance of good lighting, proper pre-production, or why everyone should be labeling their hard drives correctly. Meanwhile, surprise! This week’s newsletter is actually a Leorah appreciation post.

Leorah is truly the best friend and creative partner a girl could ask for. We have recently been informed by her 22-year-old coworker that the phrase “creative partner” is apparently cringe, but unfortunately for her, that is exactly what we both are and I refuse to stop saying it. Making Final Girl together has involved approximately one million phone calls, Discord sessions, voice memos, script conversations, production disasters, tiny victories, big victories, and moments where one of us has had to convince the other that whatever problem currently feels like the end of the world is, in fact, probably fixable.

And because birthdays are the perfect excuse to brag about your friends, I would also like to politely remind everyone that Leorah has an entire hour-long stand-up special called Dress Up, which she produced herself and which you can watch right here! If you like her in Final Girl, you should also experience the extremely specific joy of getting to watch her be completely, unapologetically herself onstage for an hour.

Dress Up is actually a huge reason Leorah and I became friends in the first place, because I helped her edit the special. Although, if I had to pinpoint the exact moment I personally decided we were going to be friends forever, it was when I told her she absolutely had to read the ridiculously long New York Times Magazine article “Who is The Bad Art Friend.” Most people would have politely said, “Oh yeah, I’ll check that out,” and then never thought about it again. Leorah actually read the entire thing and texted me her thoughts the next morning.

That was basically it for me. I thought, okay, perfect. You are stuck with me forever now.

So happy birthday to the titular Final Girl herself, one of my favorite people to make things with, tour a comedy variety show with, send 400 texts in a row to, and spend several years making a web series with. I love you very much, Leorah, and I hope everyone celebrates your birthday today by watching Dress Up and preparing themselves to eventually watch you get put through absolute hell as Emmy Lytle. 💕

Til Next Time,

Caroline

Post-show depression is very real. Ask any theatre kid, especially one in middle or high school. Better yet, look at the multi-paragraph long caption on Instagram post they made in loving memory of their spring musical. Shocker, Shakespeare-obsessed teens have both a flair for the dramatic and a way with words. It made sense of course to feel such big feelings about the end of a show, and it’s not just about the insane amount of hormones any given 15 year old is dealing with.

Growing up doing theater, your life in neatly parsed into “show seasons”: fall play, spring musical, a summer stock gig if anyone needs a spare Von Trapp child, and then the cycle repeats. Each show ending is synchronized with the changing of a season, a farewell to friends you may not see in other extra-curriculars, a finite passing of time.

Working as an artist in adulthood is far messier, you may start out a year in an absolute creative dry spell, then start juggling multiple projects at the same time, see a side hustle blow up, just to get cold-shouldered by your career all over again. It’s easy to feel thrown out of whack when the time to say goodbye to the last project and prepare for the next isn’t built in to the rhythms of the year.

As we prepare to shoot some of our final pickups this weekend, I’ve been bracing for the impact of really, fully wrapping Final Girl. It’s a huge milestone, but it’s so hard not to focus on the what next? So creatives, specifically actors I guess, (but if you’re here and you’re reading and you’re having a good time regardless, I’m not gonna tell you to stop) here’s the list I’m making for myself to smooth out the end-of-project career transition. You can use it, or critique it, or scroll to the bullet point you like the most and ignore the rest. You can even like, subscribe, and repost, but only if you’re feeling saucy.

A Creative’s Guide to Kicking Yourself Back Into Gear After Your Project Ends

By Leorah Wood

1. Rest (But For Real)

My mom used to say that burnt cookies don’t count as calories. There’s similar use of logic that makes sense to me, which is that is rest doesn’t count if you’re feeling guilty about it. Reader, I almost always feeling guilty about rest. But trust me, if you’re resilient enough to have chosen this career path, there is no world in which you rest so much that you don’t return to actively pursuing your career (this is my biggest guilt/anxiety, comment yours below!).

Rest is very good and very necessary. It helps you get the old project out of your system, while still properly storing all of the things you’ve learned into that funky little noggin of yours. Rest allows you the time to catch up on texts and emails, and reconnect any friends, family, or acquaintances you may have accidentally ghosted while in the creative trenches. So do it just for a little. And no guilt.

2. Refresh Your Materials

This is only if you’ve done Step 1. If you have not done Step 1, do not pass Go, and most certainly do NOT collect $200.

Ok, congratulations on resting just a little bit, which I’m going to assume you did, as I continue in good faith.

The great news about finishing a project is that you probably have brand new materials. BTS photos? Slap em on your website. Footage? Throw it in your reel. Monologue you crushed? That’s yours now, audition with that thang.

Even if you don’t have all/any of the above after finishing your project, you still have the takeaways you learned about yourself as a creative, and yourself as a brand. It’s impossible to make something without learning something about yourself. So take the things you learned, and use those. Maybe the last job helped you realize a new type you want to play moving forward, and you want some updated headshots that reflect that. Maybe it taught you about the kind of collaborator you want to be, and that informs who you want to reach out to for future opportunities, and how you want to reach out to them.

However you can, mine it, and then…

3. Find a New Passion Project

…move on. Think strategically about what you want your next career move to be. I’m going to use myself as an example here because that’s actually the whole point of this blog. Wrapping Final Girl, my goals for next steps are two-pronged:

As an actor, I want to find representation. I’ve spent the better part of the last year leading a web series, and I know what it takes. Now, I want to find the people to be in my corner, and fight for me to be a part of other cool and smart and funny projects. It’s sometimes difficult to feel any passion for the business side of this industry, but I’m excited about the next phase of my career, and am therefore trying to channel said excitement into this new goal.

As a maker of things, I want to get back into writing. I was drafting scripts for Final Girl over a year ago at this point, once we started filming, my focus shifted to acting and producing. Writing is now starting to feel like a muscle I forgot to keep exercising, and it feels like high time I start dreaming up new plots. I want to be able to share the new narrative that’s lit a fire under me whenever I’m hit with the dreaded “So what’s next?”. In fact, I’m hoping it will make the “So what’s next” not so dreadful after all.

4. Find a New Project That You’re Not Too Passionate About At All

Hobbies that don’t need to be commodified, and side hustles that you can commodify without major stress are so helpful to feeling balanced and not insane. This summer I’ve been really getting back into embroidery, specifically deeply time consuming pieces that no one asked me to do.

I’m also trying to get back into the swing of content creation, which slowed down when I was just too busy and creatively drained. Now that I live with my boyfriend, I did have to get over the humiliating hump of him hearing me record a TikTok in the next room and restart the hook 50 million times (far more embarrassing than the occasional overheard fart, trust me). But luckily I have so little shame left, and scripting and editing on this micro level has been a refreshing practice to return to.

5. Be in Conversation With Other Artists

I’m saving the most important one for last. For the love of god, TALK TO PEOPLE. This is different than watching videos other actors make online because they are hardly ever commiserating or affirming so much as they are humble bragging, and there’s only so many “self tape that got me a callback”s we can watch before we lose our minds to the algorithm (and before you call me a part of the problem for posting my self tapes too, those don’t count because none of them went viral).

Actors are pack animals, we’re built to do jazz squares in herds, that’s why auditions are called cattle calls. We do and feel our best when we get to gab with other people who get it. When you spend time with your community, you the celebration of success is doubled and the frustrations of failure are halved and wait this is just sounding like wedding vows. But for real, talking with other people who are in a similar stage in their career helps you feel like you are on the right track, and not alone. Which by definition you are not, if you are in conversation with another human being.

Alrighty,

I hope this helped, and if it didn’t it’s because I wrote it far too close to the deadline, when I was feeling quite sleepy. If you did read this and resonate with it though, I’m proud of you for finishing your project, and I’m excited for whatever you do next.

xoxo,

Leorah

Caroline here, on the tail end of shooting our very ambitious little project, Final Girl. Maybe it’s the recent full moon in Aquarius, but I’m feeling particularly grateful that I’ve documented so much of this process through this Substack. It genuinely brings me so much joy—and pride—whenever someone I know subscribes and reaches out to tell me they’ve used one of my extremely specific process breakdowns to help guide them through something of their own. Please, always keep creating! I am here to cheer you on.

A wise man once said that the next project you make will always be your best one because you inevitably enter it carrying everything you learned from the last one, making you a stronger filmmaker in the process. I’ll be honest: I cannot remember who actually said that, or whether it came from a colleague, an interview, or some inspirational quote I found online. But it has stuck with me ever since.

At the moment, I’m working inside our LucidLink servers and doing an assistant edit for our incredible editor, Jake Helton. Essentially, I’m creating “selects” of the different line deliveries from each scene and organizing them onto timelines so the actual editing process can be much more streamlined. If anyone is interested in a more official breakdown of what that process looks like, please let me know!

I’ve always said editing is 80 percent the most boring part of filmmaking—right up until the final 20 percent, when it stops being about pure assembly and becomes about bringing together all the finishing details. The VFX, color, music, and sound design finally arrive to realllyyyyy put the cherry on top, and suddenly editing becomes the most fun part of the entire process. So, essentially, what I am doing for Jake right now is taking on the middle 30 to 50 percent of that extremely long and boring journey. How much fun is that?!

Another funny thing: a few months ago, I was genuinely worried I wouldn’t have anything to follow Final Girl with. When you’re a creative person, there can be this constant pressure hovering over you, asking whether you actually have the chops to call yourself a creative at all. The industry is full of pretentious guys insisting that if you aren’t waking up every morning and immediately writing ten perfect screenplay pages, you could simply NEVER be a real screenwriter. How dare you even consider calling yourself one in the first place!

Obviously, I do not subscribe to that belief—but I would be lying if I said I never fall victim to the imposter syndrome it creates. All of that is to say that I’m really happy to report that, somewhere over the past few months and throughout this final stretch of our larger shoots, a flood of creativity found me again. I think Final Girl genuinely revitalized my love of making stories come to life, and I feel more connected to the scrappy independent filmmaking community than ever before.

In fact, if you happen to be in Brooklyn this week, I’m helping my friend Carlos produce his scrappy indie film, WE LOVE YOU, GET UP. We’re throwing a double-birthday-party-meets-movie-shoot this Thursday, and everyone is welcome to attend! We shot another scene this past Tuesday, and he somehow managed to rope me into appearing on camera, which was also very fun.

I also recently had the pleasure of working on another friend’s set, where I took some promotional photos that have now officially been published! The short film stars Jack Cameron Kay and Rafael Cebrián, whom you may recognize from some of your favorite Netflix shows!

But don’t worry—I’m still running around and day-playing on larger productions too. I recently had the distinct honor of working in the costume department for one of my best friends, Anne Marie Rocconi. I’m not going to lie: I’m a little scared to name the exact production because of the sheer amount of NDA-pushing involved, but it was a big one! It’s always exciting to move back and forth between those massive sets and the tiny, scrappy indie world. I learn something completely different from each, and right now, I’m feeling especially lucky that I get to have a foot in both!

I’m not sure that I’m quite ready to share everything that’s been taking shape creatively, but for the first time in a while, I’m no longer worried about what comes after Final Girl. There are new stories, collaborations, and ideas beginning to find their footing—and I’m excited to let them unfold without rushing them. For now, I’m just grateful to feel creatively energized again and very curious about where all of this leads next.

All that’s to say, I’m excited for the day when I can finally sit down and watch the finished cut of Final Girl (which is probably closer than I realize!! Ahhh!!) and reflect on every part of myself, my story, and the lessons I learned along the way that caused it to take shape. And whatever comes next, I hope it carries a huge piece of Final Girl’s energy with it: the scrappiness, the ambition, the collaboration, and the sheer belief that we could figure it out as we went.

Til Next Time,

Caroline

In those archives, I found posts from both me and Caroline about media that inspired us in the early days of pre-production. Looking back at those posts, all of the inspiration has remained somewhere in the DNA of the project as it works its way through post production. That being said, there’s a lot of new comps that have come up throughout the making process, and I thought it’d be interesting to share those as well, on the other end of shooting.

Comeback Comedies:

Yes, Final Girl is a camp horror dark comedy. That’s how we’re marketing it. But in at its core, it’s structured far more (at least in the present-day timeline) like a comeback comedy. Our titular character wrestles with the fact that she misses the fame she once had as the tragedy of the week, and seeks to regain that status. Caroline and I often talked about the imagery of the peaked-in-highschool football star who was constantly lamenting about the “glory days.” Sub in a final girl missing the initial media frenzy of her tragic case, and you get something weird and new. These are some TV shows that get messy with the comeback format in exciting and inspiring ways.

The Comeback

This one is perhaps quite literal given my framing. Lisa Kudrow’s post-Friends project is a mockumentary about an aging sitcom star’s second shot at fame, and the lengths she will go to be taken seriously in an industry that has long moved on from her. It is a devastating watch and I can handle about an episode a week, so I’m still working my way through the first season. The Comeback is an absolute masterclass in warming the viewers up to a supposedly unlikeable/self centered character. Kudrow’s performance sells the show entirely, and makes me wish I had watched it before Final Girl filmed to see how the pros dance delicately between selfish and endearing.

The Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt & The Fall and Rise of Reggie Dinkins

These two Robert Carlock projects (the former co-created with Tina Fey, the later with Sam Means) are both about reinvention in the public eye. Kimmy Schmidt follows an ever-optimistic doomsday cult survivor, as she tries to put tragedy behind her, and carve out a new life for herself in NYC. In the case of Reggie Dinkins, a football player has ruined his career by placing sports bets on himself, and, after living as a hermit in the suburbs of New Jersey for many years, attempts to ingratiate himself with the public once more. The two stories mirror each other in a way; Kimmy wants the media to leave her alone so that she can have a normal life, Reggie wants to disrupt his comfortable suburban existence in favor of a return to the public eye. Final Girl winds up somewhere in between, with our main character, Emmy, wrestling how much selling out is worth the cost of fame.

Both Kimmy Schmidt and Reggie Dinkins also contain an element of (almost) magical realism that is something of a Tina Fey trademark. Against the backdrop of New York City, absurd things happen, and the only necessary explanation is “they just do.” Backpacks talk, puppets are people, every hater looks exactly the same because they’re played by the same actor. This lesson in ignoring the rules of reality, and allowing ourselves to verge on cartoon-ish helped us figure out Final Girl’s blend of humor.

Camp Thrillers:

As we moved our way through production, we were constantly negotiating the balance between silly and serious. If it’s all jokes, the emotional moments won’t hit as hard, if it’s all suspense, the audience forgets they have permission to laugh. The below are two wildly different films, but both have such a clear sense of identity, allowing them to mix the genres expertly.

Send Help

Caroline and I watched this together just last week, and kept turning to each other to say “This is so Final Girl!” When a dowdy employee and her fuck boy boss are the only survivors of a plane crash, roles reverse as survival skills take precedence over business savvy. Directed by Sam Raimi, horror and comedy are blended perfectly. In fact, comedy is used as a tool to lull audiences into feeling that everything is alright, and that the tension has subsided, only for it to return tenfold when you least expect it. Without giving too much away, this film is an ode to supporting women’s wrongs, and what’s more Final Girl than that?

Werewolves Within

Based on the classic game Werewolf (or Mafia, depending on who you ask), this comedy horror tells the story of an seemingly idyllic town where residents are picked off one by one by a werewolf in their midst. Directed by Josh Ruben of CollegeHumor/Dropout fame, with a cast of career-comedians, this one leans full camp. Unlike Send Help, this is a comedy in the shape of a scary movie. The horror elements intentionally lean into tropes, mining jokes out of the audience’s expectations. It’s a lovely thing to pull from as we hone the balance between genres in the editing process.

Vintage/Vintage-Inspired Music:

While writing Final Girl, I was listening to a lot of 2000s and 2010s Teen/Alternative Rock, because it really helped me tap into Emmy’s feeling of being stuck in the past, still listening to the music that was popular in middle and high school. Somewhere throughout the process, I’ve sonically traveled even further back in time, pulling influences from the 40s and 50s. Notable mentions here are “Hard Hearted Hannah (The Vamp of Savannah)” which tells the story of a woman whose greatest want is to see men suffer, and “Run, Rabbit Run!” which I rediscovered when it was recently interpolated by Mollie Elizabeth for her creepy circus pop single, “Run Rabbit.” There’s something classic and, in the right light, creepy about this era of music. It helps me get in the mindset of the evergreen, ode to the classics, kind of comedy we’re trying to create.

I’m all done writing because my head is empty, but hopefully, I’m leaving your watchlist full. Maybe even your heart. Thank you as always for tuning in to our ramblings, and we’ll see you next week!

I’m happily rotting my brain while copying spreadsheets, but there was a time when my old reliable background noise of choice was true crime podcasts. Clearly the years of gore exposure via airpod seeped into my psyche, as two of Final Girl’s antagonists are themselves true crime podcasters. In my initial pitch deck for the project, covered in my last post, the podcast My Favorite Murder was listed as a comp/inspiration. When Caroline and I first starting talking about Final Girl, true crime in the media was a point we kept coming back to. When we questioned how this story would be served by our voice as a team, we frequently discussed (and this is neither new nor groundbreaking) how true crime fans? buffs? are predominately women.

I sat down to write a post exploring the connection between the gender and genre, but I don’t want to beat a dead horse (though how did the horse die? And what happened to the horse’s phone records? All this and more on the next episode). So maybe we start there, in familiar waters, and see what we discover along the way. Also I’m probably going to talk about what Final Girl contributes to the conversation because I made it and I’m obsessed with it.

Don’t get me wrong, I did some preliminary research on my initial intended topic. I found a think piece from Psychology Today, and was surprised that while there were many points I agreed with, the author’s overarching point just felt off. The writer, Scott A. Bonn, theorized that women were drawn to true crime as a result of their empathy, both for the predominately female victims, but also as an effort to understand the motivations of the perpetrators. To me, this approach feels both too broad, and too narrow. It an an umbrella to say “women as a whole tend to be more empathetic,” followed by the want for individual safety by trying to understand the inner workings of a killer’s mind. Maybe I’m reading too far into things when a (well meaning, I’m sure) male author speaks on women as a whole, but the take felt oversimplified.

The next article I read by Kate Rope (yes, these are the first two Google results, AND I’m not gonna mess with MLA citations either, you have to dangle the promise of a high GPA and a gold star for me to do that), did have a similar set of talking points, but they were grounded in the female experience in a way that added so much more depth. The article touched upon women coming together to solve cold cases abandoned by the authorities, individuals attending crime conventions for safety tips they could pass on, describing these actions as a way to be the hero rather than the victim.

From the picture Rope painted, I started to surmise that true crime is not about the individual, it is inherently communal. As women, we study stories as a means of learning how to keep each other safe, and we work to protect the memory or find justice for those who were harmed. Culturally, I’ve seen a discussion of gossip taking a similar shape. Something belittled as a way women superficially communicate with each other, when in reality, gossip has been around forever, and can be used as a powerful tool to keep each other safe. Who should and shouldn’t be trusted, what to expect in an unfamiliar place or situation.

Like anything under capitalism, the ways we protect ourselves and each other can be commodified. It’s easy enough to wrap true crime up in a shiny package, knowing there is a built in fan base, and sell it off without consideration of the victims or their families. People have managed to make true crime their livelihoods, which starts to skew the ethics of the genre. And it’s not just podcasters. This spring, an interactive experience entitled Mind of a Serial Killer opened in NYC, showcasing the work of infamous serial killers. It features recreated crime scenes covered in blood, and bound and gagged dummies replicating the way some victims were restrained. In an obviously biased (though it’s a bias I agree with) negative review for The Guardian, Alaina Demopoulos shares that the victims are hardly part of the narrative, save for a small scrolling list of names at the end of the exhibit. Surely at this point, we’re just glorifying serial killers, right? This begs the question, you’re directly profiting off of tragedy, how do you do it the “right” way?

It’s often hard for me to tell what can be considered morally just in the tangle of profit and good intentions, and for that reason, I’ve stopped engaging with nearly as much true crime as I used to. My uncertainty on the topic is all over Final Girl. While yes, our podcasters are good ol fashioned bad for the sake of being bad, selfish, and ignorant antagonists, and the character of Tom, a journalist, is staunch in his by-the-book ethical beliefs when reporting on crime, Emmy, our protagonist, sits somewhere in between. Having been the victim of a horrific crime herself, Emmy has been both taken advantage of by the true crime machine, and tried to use it for her own profit and gain. The season explores what happens when the media devils and angels sit on her shoulders, and force her to forge her own path.

I could never fully condemn true crime as a genre, that’s throwing the baby out with the bathwater. And, while we’re on the topic, the podcasters in our show are not based on any individuals in the space, they’re just an amalgamation of all the worst parts of true crime, mixed in with goo from the single brain cell Caroline and I share. All that being said, it is disheartening when an interest that I believe to be rooted in women keeping each other safe has been commercialized to the point of making that intent unrecognizable.

That uncomfortable intersection (incoming high horse alert) is why we tell stories. And, why in telling our story, we wanted the lens Emmy offers to be far from perfect. While the nature of Emmy’s circumstances are (hopefully) not relatable to the majority of viewers, I do hope there is honest reflection to be had watching some struggle to be better and more empathetic, even when the forces at play seem to be rewarding the opposite. I also hope it’ll be really funny. I hope a lot of things. Now with the editing process in full swing, I’m excited for the chance to shape and further grapple with these key themes in the narrative.

Here’s to investigating the gray area!

xoxo,

Leorah

Happy Wednesday! It’s Caroline reporting to you live while ankle-deep in Post-Production. Yay!

Maybe it’s the recent full moon getting me to reflect a lot recently, but I’ve been thinking a lot about some of the best moments of shooting final girl this past year, and it got me thinking about the moment that happens looooong before the first day of shooting. Before the call sheets, before the script, before the frantic texts asking if anyone knows someone with a vintage sedan or an office with floor-to-ceiling windows (and, while we’re at it, if they’d be willing to let us use it for free as a favor). It’s when the movie first happens in your imagination. Where else would be as special to watch it for the first time, after all?

Not consciously, of course. It arrives in flashes: a line of dialogue you hear perfectly before you’ve ever written it down, a look exchanged between two characters, a beam of sunlight catching someone’s face in exactly the right way. You collect these little moments over weeks or months until, without really noticing, you’ve assembled an entire film that only you have ever seen. It’s complete—or at least it feels complete. Every shot works. Every performance is exactly what you hoped for. Every emotional beat lands because there is nothing yet to contradict your instincts. The movie hasn’t had to negotiate with reality.

When I first started making Final Girl, I thought my job was to recreate that movie as faithfully as I could. Somewhere over the last year and a half, though, I realized I had misunderstood the assignment. The movie in my head wasn’t something to preserve under glass. It was simply the first draft of a conversation.

People talk a lot about the disadvantages of making films with no money, but I don’t think we talk enough about one of the strange advantages. Our schedule wasn’t dictated by a studio calendar or an immovable release date. It was dictated by when our actors were available, when someone could lend us a location, when we could scrape together enough money for another weekend of shooting. At the time, those gaps often felt like obstacles. Looking back now, I think they became one of the greatest gifts the project ever gave me.

On a larger production, there often isn’t much opportunity to become a different filmmaker while you’re still making the same movie. The machine has to keep moving. Prep rolls into production, production rolls into post, and before you’ve had time to reflect on what you’ve learned, the film is already locked. There’s something undeniably exciting about that momentum, but I also wonder what it asks artists to sacrifice. When every day is about staying on schedule, how often do we get to pause long enough to appreciate that we’re quietly getting better at the thing we’re doing?

Our production never moved that quickly. Every few months we’d come back together to shoot another chapter, and by then I’d spent months making mistakes somewhere else. I’d worked freelance jobs. I’d watched films differently. I’d taught documentary students who constantly reminded me that authenticity almost always beats perfection. I’d sat beside editors and cinematographers and producers whose ways of thinking slowly seeped into my own. I’d discovered techniques I couldn’t wait to try and habits I hoped I’d never repeat. By the time we rolled cameras again, I wasn’t quite the same director who had wrapped the previous shoot.

I think about our first Tennessee shoot all the time. I’ll happily admit that I knew far less about lighting than I do now. Thank God for our gaffer, Conner Wood, because so much of the atmosphere in those scenes exists because of his instincts rather than mine. He taught me to stop looking only at what the camera could see and start looking at what the light itself was doing. At the time, I leaned on him constantly. Now I find myself walking into locations and noticing windows before furniture, thinking about color temperature before I think about lenses, asking what emotion the light should create instead of simply whether the exposure is correct. I’m still learning—hopefully I always will be!—but I can actually feel the toolkit getting heavier every time we shoot.

That’s the part of filmmaking I wasn’t expecting to fall in love with.

When I first decided to make a feature-length project on an almost nonexistent budget, I imagined the reward would be finishing it. Releasing it. Finally getting to watch the complete thing exist outside of my own imagination. Instead, the reward has been realizing that every production day quietly leaves me a little more capable than I was when I arrived. Somewhere along the way, the project stopped feeling like a test of whether I was already good enough to direct it and started feeling like an education in the kind of filmmaker I wanted to become.

I was talking to my friend the other day and he brought up Michelangelo*, and he said something that hasn’t left my mind since. He likes to imagine Michelangelo halfway through carving one of his sculptures—not standing back to admire the finished work, but covered in marble dust, solving one tiny problem after another. It made me realize that someone doesn’t dedicate years of their life to carving stone unless they genuinely love carving stone. Not the unveiling. Not the praise. Not the finished sculpture sitting behind velvet ropes centuries later. The carving itself.

I wonder if that’s true of every artist.

We spend so much of our lives chasing the finished thing: the premiere, the gallery opening, the publication date, the release. We talk about the product as though that’s where the fulfillment lives. But I’m starting to think the fulfillment has to be found somewhere much quieter. It has to be in noticing that you’re communicating with actors more confidently than you were six months ago, or that you finally understand a lighting setup that once intimidated you. That you can solve problems today that would’ve completely derailed you a year ago. Because every finished piece eventually becomes fixed. Every film gets picture-locked. Every sculpture leaves the studio. Every novel gets printed.

The artist doesn’t.

That’s the part we get to keep.

Looking back now, I don’t think the greatest thing Final Girl gave me was a web series. I think it gave me the rare privilege of growing alongside the work instead of waiting until it was over to realize how much I’d changed. The movie that first lived in my imagination will always exist as this perfect little time capsule of the filmmaker I was when I dreamed it up. But I’m grateful we didn’t stop there. The version we’re making now belongs to someone with a few more mistakes behind her, a few more tools in her belt, and, hopefully, just enough curiosity to keep learning on the next one.

Til We Meet Again,

Caroline

*full disclaimer, my friend was not comparing himself to Michelangelo.

Leorah reporting to you live on this Wednesday (not actually live, I wrote this post in advance on Monday because I’m responsible like that). If you thought we were done talking about pitch decks after Caroline’s brilliant and very helpful last two posts, you’re WRONG. We have a final installment. I’m tagging in for a denouement of sorts. It’s less of a come down and more of a let down…that’s right, we’re talking about MY first pitch deck for Final Girl, made in 2017 to pitch to my classmates in a film intensive. This was before I had access to Canva or my fully-formed frontal lobe, so brace yourself.

For a quick refresher on what pitch decks are, and what our pitch deck eventually looked like, check out Caroline’s posts here and here. Then come on back because I’m being very brave and sharing what is essentially a bad first draft.

If it’s so bad, why share it at all? You may ask. Because I think it’s important to show that every project starts somewhere. Before I found collaborators with actual know-how or any resources to speak of, I had a vague idea and a shitty powerpoint. Here we go:

COVER PAGE

Ah yes, the title slide. They say a picture is worth a thousand words but this one is maybe worth one. And there’s two words on the picture, so that’s really saying something. Here you see excellent employment of the Creepster font, and a visual I did Frankenstein together myself by adding cracks onto the heart. In all honesty, I don’t know why I chose a cellphone for the icon, as it’s really not relevant to the plot at all. But there’s a basic tone conveyed here, and that was my goal.

PAGE 2: THE BASICS

Here’s the first slide, the initial pitch. During the film intensive in question, my cohort had to pick four pitched projects to green light. The goal of this presentation was to convince my classmates to dedicate a chunk of our shared time to producing a 10 minute proof of concept. Spoiler alert, it worked. If you want to learn more about what that proof of concept looked like, there’s a whole post on it here.

A couple things to note here. Somehow, my initial log line made it to our current pitch deck. I’m quite surprised, I even wrote a whole sentence just now about how we changed it, and then had to go back and delete said sentence. It does very quickly tell you the core elements of the story, without giving too much away. And hey, that’s a success.

I also claimed the variety of shooting locations could be inside of our class’ studio space. That wasn’t true then, and it’s even less true now. Turns out I have a real knack for writing in locations that are hard to get for filming. At the time, this included a coffee shop, which was reworked into a restaurant when one of the girls in my cohort was able to convince her boss to let us film there. It has since been rewritten back into a coffee shop :)

PAGE 3: CHARACTERS S

Unlike the end of the horror movie, all of these characters survived rounds of cuts! These are still our main four players, who are appear relatively as described.

What’s different is not the characters themselves, but the fact that my initial pitch deck includes these breakdowns, while our final pitch deck doesn’t. This is partially because the goals of the two decks are different. In class, I wanted to illustrate the story I was telling, and assure my classmates there would be juicy roles for them if they greenlit my project.

In our final pitch deck, the goal is to explain the project in terms of mood and tone, without getting lost in the narrative weeds. This is because it was designed to share with investors, so the focus was much more on fact that we had a story, and that we were the right people to tell it. From there, the deck focuses far more on proposed execution than anything else.

PAGE 4: INSPIRATIONS

Eventually, this slide would become a footnote on the “General Information” page. A lot of these inspirations are still in the DNA of the project, joining an ever-growing list of comps. As Caroline will tell you, I live under a rock in terms of the media I consume, so at the time, this list was limited to the projects I’d already watched and enjoyed.

Either way, comps are a great way to show how you intend for the project to feel, providing a short hand of sorts. Nice!

PAGE 4: MOVING FORWARD

The plot as described above has totally changed. The A and B plots were scrapped in favor of a past and present timeline. And, Final Girl is no longer a limited series; we’re already scheming up a second season. But what I wanted to prove was that the project had legs, and gosh darn it, it does.

So there it is, our very humble beginnings. There’s a lot “wrong” with this pitch deck; it’s too sparse, it skips over production plans entirely, the “why” of the project is really never answered. BUT, it got the ball rolling. It served the immediate function of convincing my classmates to green light a proof of concept, which I eventually showed in piecemeal to Caroline to convince her that Final Girl could be something.

I touched on this at the beginning, but I show all of this because the industry, even the indie scene, can sometimes feel gate kept. You need the resources, the connections, the film smarts to be taken seriously. Those factors discourage so many people from taking the leap to make their own work, assuming they need to have and know everything all at once. Instead, I would encourage starting somewhere. There might be plenty of variables you’ve yet to nail down, but pitch the things you know to the people you know, and don’t be afraid to have conversations about the missing pieces. Our pitch deck was not created over night, and, for the record, the series that resulted certainly wasn’t either. So boot up Google slides, and start by making the bad version. <3

Two weeks ago, I talked about why I decided to create a pitch deck for Final Girl and how it ultimately became one of the primary tools we used to raise money, recruit collaborators, and convince people this strange little horror-comedy deserved to exist.

This week, I want to do something a little more embarrassing.

We’re going to open the actual deck now and we’re going to talk about it: The good. The bad. The wildly optimistic. And of course, the things that aged like milk.

Because if a pitch deck is a snapshot of a project at a particular moment in time, then revisiting one a year later feels a little bit like reading your old diary.

(Before I go into this I would like to disclose that because we went the independently reaching out to potential financiers, I built this deck targeted with that goal in mind instead of towards, let’s say, a studio I want to pick it up and produce it themselves)

So let’s start with Page One shall we!

COVER PAGE

The first thing you’ll probably notice about the cover page is that it tells you almost nothing about the actual plot! But don’t worry because that was entirely intentional.

When I started building this deck, I wasn’t interested in outright telling people what the show was about. In fact, one of the biggest lessons I learned from studying pitch decks like the original Stranger Things (Montauk) deck was that the strongest decks don’t lead with blatant information but instead with feelings and a vibe in general.

Before I wanted a potential investor to understand the story, I wanted them to understand the mood.

The challenge with Final Girl was that the tone is a little difficult to explain. On paper, it’s a horror-comedy about a woman navigating a quarter-life crisis after surviving a killing spree. That’s a sentence that communicates the premise, but it doesn’t really communicate the experience of watching the show.

I knew I wanted the deck to feel the way I hoped the series would feel.

That’s why I structured the first page almost like a movie poster rather than a presentation slide.

The title is front and center. The cast is featured prominently. The tagline, “Your Mid-20’s Can Be Killer,” sits directly underneath. Rather than filling the page with plot information, I surrounded those elements with imagery carefully selected to create an emotional impression.

Many of those images were pulled from some of my favorite horror films. Others came from ShotDeck, which I used extensively throughout development and pre-production. I wasn’t necessarily looking for images that matched the story beat-for-beat. Instead, I was looking for images that captured the feeling I wanted people to associate with the project. Bright colors colliding with darkness. Young people caught between humor and danger. Horror imagery that felt playful rather than oppressive.

In retrospect, I think I was unconsciously trying to accomplish something that filmmakers do all the time with actual movies: *visual storytelling*

A good film doesn’t usually stop every five minutes to explain its themes. It communicates them through production design, cinematography, wardrobe, music, and performance. I wanted the deck to operate in much the same way. Rather than explicitly telling someone, “This is a horror-comedy about growing up, nostalgia, trauma, and feeling left behind by your peers,” I wanted those ideas to emerge naturally through the design choices themselves.

Looking back, I still think that’s one of the most valuable lessons I learned while making the deck. Information is important, but emotion and catching their intrigue is what makes people keep turning the page.

PAGE 2: GENERAL INFORMATION

Once I’d spent the first page establishing a mood, the second page had a different job.

Now that readers hopefully had a sense of what Final Girl felt like, I needed to give them something to attach that feeling to.

This is where the logline and synopsis came in.

One of the biggest mistakes I think you’re likely to see in early pitch decks is treating the synopsis like a book report. Filmmakers often feel the need to explain every twist, every subplot, and every character relationship because they’re worried readers won’t fully understand the project otherwise. But that’s a trap. The goal of a synopsis isn’t to explain everything. It’s to explain the engine of the story and get the reader intrigued in the potential of the show/movie/book/idea.

Ask yourself: What’s the central question? What’s the thing that keeps the audience watching? What’s the idea that makes somebody lean forward?

For me, that question was never “Who was the killer?” It was: What happens after the final girl survives?

That’s the premise that excited me from the very beginning. Horror movies almost always end the moment the protagonist escapes. We rarely get to see what comes next. We don’t get to see them try to date. We don’t get to see them work a dead-end office job. We don’t get to see them become trapped in the same quarter-life crises as everybody else while carrying around this bizarre, traumatic claim to fame.

The mystery elements, the romance, the true-crime satire—all of that came later.

The emotional core was always Emmy.

A woman who survived the thing that was supposed to define her life only to discover she still had to figure out who she was afterward.

That’s why you’ll notice the synopsis spends surprisingly little time explaining the larger mythology. There’s mention of the murders. There’s mention of the podcast. There’s mention of Tom and the investigation. But the focus remains on Emmy because I wanted potential investors to understand that despite all the horror elements, this was ultimately a character story.

The comparison titles were doing a lot of work here as well.

At the time, I described the series as Psych meets Search Party. Dead To Me versus Scream Queens. Yellowjackets and Bodies Bodies Bodies. And honestly, this aged very well because these are still the exact comps I’d use. (I’ll go more in-depth on why it’s important to use comps as references for not only a vibe of your project, but also in projecting how successful the show could be in the later pages of this deck, don’t worry!)

More importantly, I tried to choose comparisons that reflected the personality of the show rather than its plot mechanics. If somebody walked away from this page understanding that Final Girl was funny, slightly unhinged, character-driven, and rooted in mystery, then the page had done its job!

PAGE 3. INTRODUCING THE SHOWRUNNERS

The bios themselves weren’t written from scratch. We both already had professional bios on our personal websites, so I pulled from those and workshopped them slightly to better reflect Final Girl and the strengths we were each bringing to the project. Leorah’s background in comedy and performance was a huge asset given the show’s comedic voice, while my experience in film production, directing, and working in television production offices helped establish that I understood the logistical side of actually getting a project made.

More than anything, though, I wanted this page to communicate that Final Girl wasn’t just a script. It was a project being led by two people with complementary skill sets and a successful working relationship. By the time an investor reached this page, the goal was for them to understand not only what the show was, but also why we felt uniquely positioned to make it.

PAGE 4 & 5: BUDGET BREAKDOWNS

At the time, our overall fundraising goal was $50,000. Looking back now, it’s funny seeing that number because we ultimately ended up shooting the series for significantly less—roughly $30,000 all in. Would I have loved an extra twenty grand? Absolutely. But independent filmmaking has a funny way of teaching you how to stretch every dollar until it screams. While the budget was incredibly tight for the scope of what we were attempting, I’m genuinely proud of what we were able to accomplish with the resources we had.

One of the reasons I chose to dedicate multiple pages to the budget was because Final Girl is essentially two productions masquerading as one. The series exists across two timelines, with one unit shooting in Tennessee and the other shooting in New York City. Because those units had completely different logistical needs, I thought it would be much easier for investors to understand where their money was going if I broke them down separately rather than lumping everything into one giant spreadsheet.

The Tennessee unit was always the more cost-effective portion of the production. We were fortunate enough to shoot on my family’s property, which eliminated a substantial amount of location and insurance costs and allowed us to put more money directly onto the screen in the form of cast, crew, practical effects, and production value. Since so many of our prospective investors were based in Tennessee, I also wanted to highlight something that felt important to me: whenever possible, we planned to hire locally and contribute back to the community that had supported me throughout my filmmaking journey.

In fact, I’ll never forget Leorah looking over an early version of this page and saying something along the lines of, “You should mention that we’re hiring locally and contributing to the local economy. Financial people eat that up.”

As usual, she was right.

The New York unit was a different beast entirely. Shooting in New York comes with a very different set of challenges and expenses, particularly when it comes to locations. Even back then, we knew permits, rentals, and city logistics would consume a sizable portion of the budget. Thankfully, one of the things that ultimately made the series possible was the generosity of so many business owners and collaborators who believed in the project enough to offer discounted or in-kind locations. Looking back, it’s hard to imagine the show existing without that support.

More than anything, though, these pages were meant to demonstrate that we’d actually thought through the logistics. Investors don’t necessarily expect you to predict every expense perfectly. Which can be a good thing, because no filmmaker ever does! What they want to know is that you’ve done your homework. They want to see that there’s a plan, that you’ve considered where the money will go, and that you’re approaching the project with realistic expectations.

Granted, some of my expectations were definitely more optimistic than realistic.

PAGE 7 - HOPEFUL TIMELINE emphasis on hopeful

This is probably the most embarrassing page in the entire deck.

Looking back, the timeline is wildly optimistic. According to this version of reality, we’d shoot the Tennessee unit, shoot the New York unit, move through post-production, and have the whole thing wrapped up far faster than what ultimately happened. For reference, this timeline projected that we’d complete the New York portion of production in Spring 2025. We only recently wrapped those scenes.

That being said, I don’t regret including this page. The purpose wasn’t necessarily to predict the future—it was to demonstrate that we had a plan. Investors weren’t expecting us to know exactly when we’d finish the series, but they did want to see that we’d thought through the process and had a roadmap for getting from development to release.

If there’s one lesson I’ve learned since making this deck, it’s that independent filmmaking almost always takes longer than you think it will. Life happens, schedules change, opportunities emerge, and projects evolve. It’s important to have a timeline, but it’s equally important to be realistic about how flexible that timeline may need to become. And that’s ok!

PAGES 8-9: INCENTIVES FOR INVESTORS.

These are pretty straightforward— I just wanted to include some incentives!

Which you don’t necessarily need to when reaching out individually and privately to investors, but I wanted to follow a typical template to a traditional gofundme or seed&spark campaign and make potential investors feel like they have options for what they’d like to invest. It also made it a fun way to say “thank you” and really show how much it meant to us!

PAGE 10: SUCCESS STORIES.

This was one of the most important pages in the entire deck because it helped answer a question every investor is ultimately asking: “Has something like this worked before?”

While Final Girl is obviously its own project, I wanted to demonstrate that there was a precedent for creator-driven web content evolving into something much larger. Shows like Broad City, Insecure, and Fleabag all started in relatively humble ways before becoming major critical and commercial successes. Their paths weren’t identical, but they proved that audiences are willing to follow strong voices and compelling characters regardless of where a project begins.

More than anything, this page was about helping people imagine the upside. When you’re asking someone to invest in an independent project, you’re not just selling them on what exists today—you’re selling them on what the project could become tomorrow. By pointing to successful examples that had followed similar trajectories, I was able to frame Final Girl as part of a larger tradition of creator-led projects that started small and found much larger audiences.

FINAL PAGE: PATH TO MONETIZATION.

The purpose of this page is pretty much exactly what the title suggests: explaining how investors might eventually see a return on their investment.

This was actually an idea that came from one of my mom’s friends, Corbette Doyle, who was kind enough to spend some time helping me workshop the deck before we started fundraising. She suggested adding a dedicated monetization page, and looking back, she was absolutely right. Up until this point, the deck has focused on the creative side of the project—what the show was, who was making it, how we’d produce it, and where it could potentially go. This page was my opportunity to address the business side of the conversation.

Whether you’re pitching investors, sponsors, or potential partners, it’s important to remember that they’re often evaluating a project from a different perspective than you are. As filmmakers, we’re naturally focused on the story. Investors are also thinking about sustainability, growth, and potential returns. By laying out a clear path to monetization and using examples of creators who successfully leveraged independent projects into larger opportunities, I was able to demonstrate that there was a strategy behind the creative ambition. Whether or not every detail ultimately played out exactly as planned, having a thoughtful answer to the question of “How does this make money?” helped make the project feel significantly more credible.

Alright, not only am I done breaking this down, but I am also getting the “near Email limit” warning at the top of my page. So this is farewell for this week- feel free to reach out if you have any questions about anything we did/didn’t include in our pitch deck!

Til Next Time,

Caroline :)

WEDNESDAY! Is that greeting enough? Anyway, this is Leorah :)

We’ve been talking a lot about our past shoot weekends now that we’re nearly wrapped, and throwing around cool film lingo while we do it. But what if you, like me before we began filming, are new to so much of this, and largely clueless about what the lingo means? If you ever though, “Gee, I wish someone would explain all of these words to me like I’m stupid,” I’m here as a former stupid person to help.

Today, I’ll be breaking down the different film crew roles and responsibilities, so that the next time you see a call sheet you can go “Ohhhh that’s what a grip does.” Yes, these are the roles that you might see on our indie call sheets specifically, so some roles might be omitted and departments might be skipped. This is just a 101 after all.

AND there’s a special twist. Because we’ve had so many amazing individuals join the ranks of our crew throughout the past year of shooting, we have some special shout outs to those people who have joined us for one day or many weeks, sharing their time and talent to make Final Girl a possibility.

Director

The director is by and large the person shaping the creative vision of the piece. They collaborate with all of the crew to ensure that that vision is clear, from the actors’ performances to the shots and camera work, and all the things in between.

Caroline has been our director for the entirety of the New York shoot (and killing it by the way, hi Caroline). During our Tennessee shoot, she was joined by James Hallock, who co-directed, and is now on our editing team as well. When we interviewed James about his work, he mused “As a director, you have to figure out how to get the performances you want out of your actors as quickly as you can.” Creating such a balance between the emotional and technical is key to a director’s work.

Producer

Producers do a lot, therefore, their title can mean a couple different things, therefore therefore, sometimes this is confusing if you’re new to film (hi, it’s me!). Some producers work in a purely financial capacity; finding a security funds for a project. That being said, other producers have a more boots on the ground role, coordinating the schedules and plans that will make best use of the aforementioned funds.

Caroline and I have worked as co-producers, alongside the talented and brilliant Rachel Helton (who also serves as also our AD, but more on that to come!) When she was interviewed, Rachel wanted to make it clear that while the bottom line is important, producers and NOT the fun police, “It’s really our job to make those unattainable ideas achievable. I’m not here to tell you you can’t blow up a car - but I will tell you how we can do it safely and in budget.” So far, thanks to Rachel, team Final Girl has been both safe and in budget, but for some reason we haven’t managed to blow up a car yet :/

Director of Photography (DP)

The DP (also known as the cinematographer) is the person translating the director’s vision into what the camera captures. They employing any combination of lights, angles, camera lenses, camera movement, and fancy tricks. Together, they work with the director to create a shot list; all of the visuals that need to be captured to best tell the story, and establish a visual vocabulary.

Our wonderful New York DP, Emily Austen, has worked so closely with Caroline (they’re also best friends, which helps) that something of a group think has resulted. Caroline even noted “There have been multiple moments where [she’s] sent me [her[ rough shot lists before I showed them mine and we had the same structure, same beats, same angles.” Also, Emily is so committed to production that one time she held a split throughout several takes so we could properly light a narrow hallway. I was going to make some work/werk ethic joke to follow, but it felt forced, so I won’t. All you have to know is that we love Emily.

Assistant Director (AD)

ADs make the world go round. They create the schedule for both overall production, and individual shoot days, and make sure that that schedule is honored. The AD will keep the day moving as it needs to, efficiency is the name of their game.

Rachel Helton has been our fearless AD throughout all of the New York shoot, and always seems to be able to spin the fact that we’re running an hour behind in a motivating way that keeps us wrapped on time.

A shout out as well to Erin McCormick, who joined us for one of our busiest days in Rachel’s stead. As Caroline put it, “She was the perfect person to keep us on track, and that trust meant I could stay focused on directing while knowing the day itself was being actively protected.”

Gaffer

The gaffer is in charge of lighting the shot, creating the desired mood and visuals; any lighting that requires electricity is under their domain. This often requires creative problem-solving, making sure that lights are out of shot, accounting for movement throughout the scene, and not going to blow a fuse.

We have two excellent gaffers to mention, who have kept spirits high and sets lit on both of our units. Conner Wood (no relation, unless he’s a long lost cousin) was an essential part of our Tennessee shoot. He’s got all sorts of tricks up his sleeve, adapting spaces so we could shoot day for night and night for day, and most notably rigging lights and a water basin to create the illusion of the reflection of lapping waves on the wall of a boat house. One of our New York unit gaffers, John White, has bounced from location to location with us throughout the year, bringing the most infectious positive energy, and being a true jack of all trades on our skeleton crew.

Grip

Another part of the lighting department, grips help shape, diffuse, and execute the lighting looks. Confession time, I did not learn the difference between gaffers and grips until I finally got embarrassed enough to google it about a week ago. Essentially (and by now, Caroline has proof read, so this must be correct) if the electrical is the gaffer’s domain, the grip handles all of the ways light can be modified sans electricity. Think bouncing, reflecting, etc.

During our most recent office shoot, longtime friend of the production, Hiram Corbett, made the trek from DC to work as our grip for the weekend. An absolute team player, quick to jump in and problem-solve, it was such a treat to have Hiram on set!

Sound

This one is maybe a bit more self explanatory. The sound person records audio on set, mixing levels to ensure that actors can be heard properly, no matter how loud of quiet the performance is. Sound people work with a variety of microphones for the best possible result, including lavaliers, which are worn by the actors, and the boom, which an operator holds on a pole throughout the scene.

Shay Duca has joined us recording sound and operating the boom on many of our skeleton crew days, every time bringing a sense of calm and know-how to set. We’ve also had the pleasure of working with Annelise Richards for a few of our busier days, and she has been unflappable despite the ever-growing number of pages we attempt to get through in a shoot. Sounds like we were pretty lucky collaborating with them both!

Production Assistant (PA)

PAs help out with any number of tasks, both on set and in the office. On large sets, they are designated to specific roles and tasks, from actor wrangling to equipment hauling to serving as a runner aiding in inter-department communication. On smaller sets like ours, a PA is essentially an extra set of hands for whatever you might need, especially during the busiest times of the day like set up and break down.

All of our PAs on Final Girl have been friends volunteering to help out for a few hours, and we are so grateful that they were willing to dedicate their weekend mornings to command-striping girl boss posters to grunge-ify a sleek Manhattan loft, for example. A special thank you to Ben Bomier, who has also been our on set photographer. He is friendly and reliable, and always the first to lend a hand (or offer a joke).

Art Director

The Art Director creates the aesthetic world of the film, dealing mostly with set and props. They dress the sets so that they fit into the world of the story, and make sure the props mentioned in the script and realized, and ready for the actors to play with.

The brilliant Maggie Sullivan has been our one-woman art department on Final Girl, working on the macro and micro levels. When we interviewed her for the Substack this fall she told us “I love pulling out parts of the script that mention the spaces and then thinking further about what makes sense for the characters and the story.” She has absolutely put that into practice, especially when it cane to the transformation of our pod loft set.

Stunt/Fight Choreographer

Yes, the name of this role might seem like it says it all, but the primary concern of the fight choreographer is actually safety. How can we convince the camera that a punch has been landed, leaving a character in agony, while ensuring the actors themselves are going home without a scratch? Often, it comes down to breaking down the movement bit by bit, making a plan for each individual moment so that nothing is a surprise. This allows the actors to feel comfortable, and the camera to be in the correct position to sell the ruse.

Our New York shoot hasn’t required any fight choreo, but we can’t say the same for the action packed slasher portion shot in Tennessee. Luckily, one of our cast members, Emily Hale, pulled double duty, choreographing an absolutely epic fight sequence.

Intimacy Coordinator

A lot of the above applies here as well—the key job in intimacy coordination is keeping actors safe and comfortable. This means both helping the actors to display the moments of intimacy requested in the script, and advocating for the actors to production should a change need to be made. Intimacy coordinators are just now becoming more of a standard on sets, replacing the older “let the actors figure it out” approach. Ultimately, this is for the best as actors are able to give their best performances when they feel safe during vulnerable moments, and don’t have to worry about any surprises.

Hope Dyra joined us to choreograph some smooches, and was so lovely to work with. Her approach centered working through the emotional motivation of the intimacy, rooting the work back to the script and the characters, and made the day so much easier.

And that’s it! I have loved learning about all the things the crew does through this experience, almost as much as I’ve loved collaborating with all of these individuals. Indie sets ask a lot of their crews, positions being double up, and the budget and time constraints are both tight. The appreciation we have for the crew simply cannot be overstated. In fact, I’ll state it again:

THANK YOU, CREW!!

And then, I’ll get the heck out of here. See ya next time!

xoxo,

Leorah

Caroline here this week, and since Leorah already covered the fact that we’re officially done with principal photography (which still feels completely surreal to type), I’ve decided to pull an uno reverse card and take us all the way back to the beginning.

And I mean the very beginning.

Today, I want to walk you through one of the first pieces of Final Girl that ever existed: the pitch deck.

Specifically, the pitch deck I built for Final Girl (entirely in Canva!)

^the title page for our pitch deck! I wanted it to look like a movie poster and I pulled some shots from shotdeck to fit the vibe of what story I was trying to tell right off the bat

If you’re a filmmaker, writer, producer, or just somebody sitting on a project that you’ve been dreaming about making, my hope is that this week’s newsletter can pull back the curtain a bit on what a pitch deck actually is, why they’re useful, and how ours ultimately became one of the most important tools we had while getting this series off the ground.

Because before there was a shooting schedule, before there were actors, before there were locations, before we’d raised a single dollar, there was a PDF sitting on my laptop that existed for one purpose:

Convincing other people that this story was worth believing in.

So... What Exactly Is A Pitch Deck?

A pitch deck is essentially a visual presentation of your project to present to either a movie studio or potential investors (we were mostly concerned about the latter for ours).

Think of it as a cross between a business proposal, a mood board, and a movie trailer that exists entirely on a PDF.

Its purpose is to communicate what your project is, what it feels like, why it matters, and why somebody should care enough to invest their time, money, resources, or expertise into helping you make it.

There isn’t one universally correct way to build a pitch deck. Every filmmaker approaches them differently, and every project requires different information.

That said, most successful pitch decks answer a handful of core questions:

• What is the story?

• Why this story/ Why now?

• What does it look and feel like?

• What other tv shows/films have similiar vibes and how successful were they? (these are called “comps” btw)

• Who is the target audience?

• Why are you the right person to tell it? (this one is my favorite question to ask a young filmmaker!)

The key thing to remember is that a pitch deck is not meant to answer every question— because technically its job is to make people want to ask more.

I think that’s where a lot of first-time filmmakers get tripped up. They treat their pitch deck like a Wikipedia page. They try to explain every character, every subplot, every episode, every piece of lore.

The reality is that nobody falls in love with a project because you gave them twelve pages of exposition.

People fall in love with projects because they can see the vision.

A pitch deck’s job is to communicate that vision as quickly and clearly as possible.

Why I Chose A Pitch Deck Instead Of Crowdfunding

One thing I should probably mention before we start diving into the actual pages of the deck is why I decided to make one at all.

For a lot of independent filmmakers, the first instinct when raising money is crowdfunding: Kickstarter. Indiegogo. Seed&Spark.

And to be clear, crowdfunding absolutely works and I think every young filmmaker should go about this method at some point. I’ve even helped friends coordinate crowdfunding campaigns for their own films and watched them successfully raise thousands of dollars and make incredible projects from it. But when it came time to finance Final Girl, I realized I wanted to take a different approach.

Part of that decision came from experience.

Having worked on other crowdfunding campaigns, I understood just how much work goes into them. Running a successful campaign often becomes its own full-time job. You’re constantly creating promotional content, posting updates, chasing momentum, and trying to convince hundreds of people to buy into a project all at once.

What appealed to me more was the idea of having direct conversations with people who had already been following my career organically.

Many of the individuals I approached weren’t strangers discovering me for the first time. They were people I’d met through previous projects, former colleagues, mentors, family friends (heavy on the family friends— you guys are the best), and people who had watched me spend years steadily working my way through the film industry.

They had seen the short films, freelance work, production office jobs, etc. The countless projects that came before Final Girl!

By the time I sat down to pitch them, I wasn’t introducing myself more so I was introducing the next step.

Rather than asking people to believe in a hypothetical future version of me, I was asking them to look at a body of work and decide whether they believed I was ready for the next challenge. Of course, those conversations still required materials.

People needed something they could review on their own time, share with spouses or business partners, and revisit after our meetings ended.

That’s where the pitch deck came in.

The deck became the foundation of those discussions, but I also wanted something even more accessible.

So alongside the PDF, I built a dedicated section of my website that essentially functioned as an interactive version of the pitch deck, so instead of emailing a large attachment back and forth, I could simply send a link or hand somebody a QR code!

Potential investors could browse through the project at their own pace. They could learn about the series, see visual references, explore character descriptions, and get a sense of the world we were trying to create. And most importantly, they could learn a little more about me and Leorah:

I included links to interviews, articles, and previous projects so potential investors could see my work in a broader context.

A Great Pitch Deck Doesn’t Lock You In

Before we start dissecting the Final Girl deck itself, I want to talk about one of the most famous pitch decks ever made.

The original Stranger Things pitch deck.

Back when the show was still called Montauk.

If you’ve never looked through it before, I highly recommend it (just click the link above— it goes directly to a copy of it I have stored in my google drive :))

What makes that deck so effective isn’t that it perfectly predicts the final show. It’s that it communicates a crystal-clear vision. Every page immerses you in the world the Duffer Brothers were trying to create. Before you’ve even read the plot, you understand the tone. You understand the feeling— which is why I’m always a huge proponent of really let yourself loose artistically when designing one, it can’t hurt to stand out!

The project that eventually became a global phenomenon is noticeably different from the project that existed inside that original deck… and honestly? The same thing happened with Final Girl. Oops.

A few weeks ago, I reopened our original deck for the first time in a while and felt like I was opening a time capsule.

Some things are exactly the same.

The core premise is there. Emmy is there. Tom is there. The obsession with true crime is there. The quarter-life crisis angle is there.

Other things are hilariously different.

There are timeline projections in that deck that now make me laugh out loud. There are distribution plans that have evolved. Marketing ideas that changed. Assumptions about production that only somebody who hadn’t yet spent two years making a web series could confidently write down.

Past Caroline was adorable.

At the time, I genuinely believed we’d shoot for a handful of weeks, move briskly through post-production, and have the whole thing wrapped up shortly thereafter.

What I honestly already understood myself but was anxious about letting investors and other creative partners know is just how much time and energy and resources it really does take to get through such an ambitious project. Like, you know where you’re trying to go, but you’re constantly adjusting your route as weather conditions change.

Basically, its purpose is to convince people that the project deserves the opportunity to exist.

What Actually Ended Up In The Deck?

Looking back now, what strikes me most isn’t what was in the deck—it’s what wasn’t.

The version of Final Girl that exists today has hundreds of pages of notes attached to it. There are character backstories that never made it onto the page, entire subplots that were cut, alternate endings, location scouts, costume references, shot lists, schedules, investor documents, contracts, and enough spreadsheets to make my eyes water.

Almost none of that made it into the pitch deck.

If you happen to be a first-time filmmaker, you might be under the assumption that credibility comes from completeness. Surely investors would want exhaustive character breakdowns, detailed episode summaries, and answers to every possible question before committing to a project! (spoiler: they don’t)

The cover page, for example, doesn’t actually tell you very much. It gives you a title, a tagline—”your mid-20’s can be killer”—and a handful of images that immediately communicate horror, comedy, mystery, and character. Within seconds, somebody can understand the kind of project they’re looking at without needing to know every plot detail.

That same philosophy carried over into the synopsis section. Rather than attempting to summarize eight episodes of television, I focused on the central question that interested me most: what happens after the final girl survives?

The more I worked on the deck, the more I realized that people rarely invest because they understand every aspect of a project. They invest because one particular idea grabs hold of them and refuses to let go.

One of the most useful tools for accomplishing that ended up being comparison titles.

I described Final Girl as Psych meets Search Party. Dead To Me versus Scream Queens. Yellowjackets and Bodies Bodies Bodies.

Looking back, I don’t know that any of those comparisons perfectly encapsulate the finished show. But perfection wasn’t really the point.

The point was creating a common language.

Nobody reading the deck had seen Final Girl. They had, however, seen those projects. Comparisons allowed me to communicate years’ worth of tone discussions in a single sentence. Instead of spending three paragraphs explaining the balance between comedy, mystery, horror, romance, and character drama, I could simply point to a handful of existing works and trust the reader to fill in the gaps.

The section that surprised me most upon revisiting the deck was the one devoted to Leorah and me.

At the time, I worried it might be self-indulgent. I wondered whether potential investors really cared about where I went to school, what production offices I’d worked in, or the fact that Leorah was a comedian.

Looking back now, I think that section may have been one of the most important parts of the entire presentation.

Because independent investors aren’t evaluating projects the same way a studio executive does.

They’re evaluating people.

A studio executive can spread risk across dozens of projects. An independent investor is often placing their trust directly in a filmmaker. They want to know who you are. They want to know you’ve finished things before. They want to understand why you’re the person uniquely positioned to tell this story.

In retrospect, that’s probably why I spent so much time building a website alongside the deck itself. The project needed to feel real, but so did the people making it.

The back half of the deck shifted away from story and toward execution. There were sections devoted to budgeting, production timelines, marketing plans, distribution strategies, and eventual monetization. Those pages are probably the most fascinating for me to revisit now because they’re simultaneously outdated and completely accurate.

Many of the specifics changed! Timelines slipped, production expanded (we were originally gonna do like 6 episodes at 10 minutes each!), distribution plans evolved, and certain opportunities appeared while others disappeared. That’s showbiz baby!

But the underlying goal remained exactly the same.

And that’s perhaps the biggest lesson I took away from the experience. A good pitch deck doesn’t convince people that everything is figured out. It convinces people that you’ve thought seriously about the road ahead, even if that road ultimately ends up looking very different than the one you originally mapped out.

The best pitch decks don’t convince people that every detail is figured out.

They convince people that the creator has a clear point of view.

I wasn’t trying to prove that I had every answer.

I was trying to make somebody read the deck and think:

“Okay. I get what this show is.”

Once you’ve accomplished that, you’ve already won half the battle.

For my next week (so.. two weeks from now!) , I’ll actually walk through the deck page-by-page and show you exactly what was on each slide, why I included it, what worked, and what I’d probably change if I were building it again today!

Because while the deck ultimately did its job—it helped us raise money, recruit collaborators, secure locations, and convince people this weird little horror-comedy was worth making—there are definitely some lessons buried inside it.

And thankfully, most of them were cheaper to learn than reshoots!

Thanks again guys, and see you next time!

Happy Wednesday! Leorah here, back in action after Caroline very graciously covered for me last week so that I could move (everyone say thank you, Caroline!). But we’re not here to talk about that, we’re here to talk about making moves. Namely, how we pulled off a two-day shooting weekend, finishing out our major on-location filming days!

Any time that I write an update like that, it feels like bragging, but in reality, it all comes from a place of awe. The feats our team continues to commit, all while working day jobs and balancing other artistic pursuits, continually amaze me. So before any further updates, I just wanted to start from a deep place of gratitude for the people that make the update-worthy things possible. Our whole cast and crew has my most ginormous thanks, and I especially have to shout out power couple Rachel (AD) and Jake (B Cam Op/Editor) Helton because in a literal and factual sense, we could not make this project without them. AND a very big and special thank you to friend of the show, Audrey Shapiro, who secured us our incredible location!

But Leorah, The Updates! You Promised!

I sure did! Here they are!

Day One

The weekend started with a real pinch-me moment as my ears were popping in the elevator ascending to the 50th floor of a gorgeous midtown office building that was serving as our set. I’ll just let the view speak for itself…

We had access to the entire floor, which gave us ample opportunity to play around creatively. In typical block shooting fashion, we were hopping around between three different episodes, each one set in the office building where where my character, Emmy, works as a temp. Side note, I did little to no dramaturgical research on the nature of temping, so we’re all going to suspend some disbelief when watching these scenes. Because we were shooting in an actual office, very little set dec was required, which was something of a luxury when we’ve spent the past few weekends outfitting locations to better suit our vision. To take advantage of the amazing windows by the entrance (and hide the lack of extras to fill cubicles), we decided that Emmy worked as the office’s receptionist. This also proved to be a big time saving move, as we could maintain a shooting setup around the reception area that could be used from episode to episode as other characters come to speak with Emmy at her desk, instead of resetting for each new scene.

Speaking of other characters, this was the first time I was the only lead cast member called for the full day, so I was definitely missing my ensemble. It was a bittersweet reminder of that yeah, our core cast really has put in the hours together, and have bonded because of it. But, we did have one scene featuring the meddling podcasters, meaning we had the pleasure of having Julia and Aaliyah back on set, if only for a few hours. And, we had some phenomenal guest stars join our cast, bringing such unique voices and wit to their characters. I always love playing opposite someone new because it keeps me on my toes; you can practice an approximation of the scene solo, but it doesn’t fully take shape until you’re making choices opposite someone in real time.

My favorite part of the day was the very end, when everyone was bordering on delusional in a way that is wholly unique to 12-hour shoot days. We had to film a montage of Emmy being bored at her desk, which will likely be 30 seconds of screen time or less in the final cut. Knowing me well, Caroline wrote time into the schedule for me to improv and ad lib, and just kept the camera rolling for a good 20 minutes. Hopefully, 30 seconds of that footage is usable, but if not, at least I got my zoomies out before bed.

Day Two

Unlike the first day, all of day two was dedicated to filming the pilot episode. While staying confined to a single episode meant no wardrobe changes (and kicking someone who was me for costuming Emmy in a body con dress), we had much more variety in shooting setups. This included a fourth wall breaking moment in the office’s generously stacked kitchen, and an ambitious walk and talk that would have left me feeling like I was on West Wing had I ever watched West Wing. In these trickier shots, we also ran up the counter Jake declared he could fix something in post (and he means it, please refer back to my statement of gratitude!).

Focusing solely on the pilot heightened the stakes for the shooting day, as we want to make sure that our first episode is strong enough to pull audiences in for the rest of the season. It also meant there were more emotionally charged acting moments written in than I’m used to, as the pilot is a re-introduction to Emmy after she becomes a final girl. For this reason, there are real moments of PTSD and flashbacks to the violence she survived, to set the scene and show that despite being a comedy, we are still dealing with the given circumstances. Our team worked on navigating those moments with care, taking the time to clearly set up the emotional core of the show.

It’s funny to think that the scenes we shot on one of our last filming days will be the first thing that the audience watches. Compared to the beginning of our New York shoot, I have developed a clearer understanding of my character, and yet, in a lot of ways, the slate had to be wiped clean. In the context of the plot, none of the events that help Emmy grow over the course of the season have happened yet. While it’s strange to end at the beginning, it also feels fitting in many ways. It’s like waiting to write your thesis statement until the essay is done, so you can read it back over and go, “huh, I guess that’s what it was supposed to be about this whole time.”

We started the weekend with hopes higher than the penthouse, and by the end of it, I can confidently say we accomplished everything we set out to do. There are few better feelings than the wave of good tired that hits as you’re carting gear away from set, knowing you’ve successfully wrapped. I’m still catching up on sleep (and unpacking), but I could not be happier nor more proud. From this point on, we’ve officially graduated to filming half days and pickups, and are so close to wrapping picture. It’s been a wild ride, but, like the elevator, we’re only going up. Note: The elevator was capable of going down, that’s how we did the aforementioned gear carting.

One Singular Big Kiss,

Leorah

Hello again everyone. Somehow I have found myself hijacking the Final Girl Substack for a second week in a row while Leorah is busy doing significantly more important life things (namely moving in with her boyfriend!! everyone cheer for her!!), which means you are unfortunately all once again trapped inside my brain for the duration of this newsletter.

I had originally planned on writing something a little more production-update-oriented, but I’m currently sitting in an airport watching my flight get delayed in increasingly creative ways and ended up finally taking a stab at an idea I’ve been mentally circling for a while now instead. Specifically: the way “female rage” has slowly transformed from an actual emotional experience into a kind of highly consumable internet aesthetic, and how making Final Girl has weirdly complicated the way I think about that as both a viewer and a filmmaker. I mean — how exactly am I supposed to curate a mental breakdown into a cathartic piece of television?

Which sounds extremely serious phrased like that, but I promise this is less of a formal thinkpiece and more of an extended spiral about horror-comedy, stylization, women onscreen, and the strange gap between the movie you imagine in your head and the much messier version you actually end up making in real life.

Anyway. Here’s the essay I apparently decided to write instead of boarding my plane. cracks knuckles

A few years ago, “female rage” stopped feeling like an actual emotional experience and started feeling more like a genre package. Or maybe not even a genre package and instead a visual language that the internet collectively learned how to market back to women in increasingly aesthetic forms. Neon lighting. Smudged eyeliner. A girl staring blankly into a bathroom mirror while a Marina & The Diamonds song swells in the background. Carefully curated emotional breakdowns transformed into something cinematic enough to repost onto a Pinterest board titled “girlhood 🤍”. (can you tell I grew up on tumblr?)

Read: Why the Cathartic Release of Female Rage Dominated 2021’s TV Plotlines

And to be clear, I’m not above any of this. I love stylized filmmaking probably more than anything. I love dramatic lighting and heightened performances and stories where emotion mutates into something grotesque and funny and operatic all at once. A huge reason I wanted to make Final Girl in the first place was because I’m deeply drawn to women in horror who are allowed to become ugly onscreen — emotionally, morally, socially, and at risk of sounding anti-feminist, physically, even! Women who are embarrassing. Women who are reactive. Women who become so consumed by insecurity or humiliation or anger that they stop behaving in ways that are particularly aspirational to watch.

But somewhere along the line, I started realizing how much modern media about women’s anger still feels deeply concerned with maintaining composure, even while pretending not to. There’s almost always this invisible layer of curation sitting on top of the chaos now, especially online, where every emotional experience immediately risks becoming content. The breakdown is still aesthetically coherent. The crying scene is still beautiful to look at. Even characters who are supposedly “messy” often remain messy in ways that are self-aware, attractive, and narratively organized enough to reassure the audience that the character is still fundamentally in control of her own image. I mean, let’s be real— we all know about the unofficial “Good For Her” genre in horror by now.

What interested me while making Final Girl was the exact moment where that composure collapses completely.

When I first started conceptualizing the series, I imagined the visual language being much more uniform across the entire story. Instead, the deeper we got into production, the more the show naturally split itself into two completely different emotional textures and before I knew it it was the only way I could ever imagine the show being.

The present-day timeline became much more stylized than I originally intended. More controlled. More performative. The humor is sharper, the compositions are prettier, the characters are constantly aware of themselves and the way they’re perceived. Even when they’re spiraling emotionally, there’s still this underlying awareness of image sitting beneath everything they do. Which, honestly, feels very true to being a woman online right now. There’s this strange pressure to narrativize yourself constantly, to package your emotions into something digestible and legible and maybe even a little bit witty before anyone else gets the chance to interpret them for you first.

But the past timeline, which contains the actual emotional wound underneath the story, started pulling me in a completely different direction visually. Those scenes became faster and uglier and significantly less restrained. I found myself going back to “old reliable” for slasher inspiration: Sam Raimi, especially The Evil Dead. Aggressive push-ins. Snap zooms. Chaotic camera movement that almost feels you’re panicking alongside the characters. Doing whatever you can so that the emotion stops feeling so curated in those scenes.

And I think that’s because real emotional volatility rarely feels elegant when you’re actually inside of it.

It’s repetitive and humiliating and occasionally even kind of pathetic (a particular feeling I love to explore in my work now that I think about it). It’s replaying an argument in your head twelve different ways while the other person has probably already moved on entirely. It’s wanting to disappear while simultaneously wanting someone to witness how badly you’re hurting. It’s saying something cruel because you feel exposed and then immediately hating yourself for saying it. It’s crying in your car and then suddenly becoming deeply embarrassed that you’re crying in your car in the first place.

One of the things I love about Raimi’s filmmaking is how unashamedly physical it is. His camera doesn’t quietly observe chaos from a tasteful distance; it practically throws itself into it. The emotion isn’t cleaned up before being presented to the audience. It’s frantic and messy and loud and occasionally ridiculous. The filmmaking itself feels infected by whatever emotional state the characters are trapped inside of.

And while making Final Girl, I realized that was probably what I was subconsciously trying to protect: a woman’s ugliness.

Not “hot messy.” Not curated instability designed to still look good clipped into a TikTok edit later. I mean actual emotional grotesqueness. Women behaving irrationally or inconsistently or embarrassingly without the narrative immediately stepping in to transform them back into something aspirational.

Which is maybe why horror-comedy has become such an interesting genre to me lately. Comedy allows women to be embarrassing. Horror allows women to be monstrous. Horror-comedy allows them to be both simultaneously.

The funny thing about filmmaking is that the version of the project that exists in your head before production begins is always impossibly elegant. In your imagination, every scene arrives fully formed. The emotional pacing is perfect. The camera moves exactly the way you envisioned while listening to music dramatically on the subway three months earlier. Everyone says their lines with devastating precision. All your references blend together seamlessly into something that feels entirely original and entirely yours.

Then you actually start making the thing.

Suddenly the emotional climax of a scene is interrupted because someone’s memory card filled up. Somebody spills fake blood on a costume earlier than continuity intended. Your actor accidentally delivers a line much funnier than expected and now the entire tone of the scene changes in real time while you’re standing there holding a coffee that went cold hours ago trying to decide whether the scene is becoming worse or whether you can actually trust your instinct that it’s becoming significantly more truthful.

And I think that’s the thing I’ve slowly started becoming more interested in as a filmmaker.

I’m really trying to lean away from keeping it all so polished.

Not at all a horror movie but recently I rewatched Rachel Getting Married and I rediscovered how much I adore just how simply that movie was shot. It works because has the emotional honesty strong enough to survive stylization. Because the contents of the movie make a bigger impact when it feels as stripped back as possible.

Don’t get me wrong– I still love stylized filmmaking. I probably always will. I love elaborate lighting setups and dramatic needle drops and performances that feel emotionally oversized. But I think what I’m becoming more interested in lately is the exact point where aesthetic control begins breaking apart under the weight of actual feeling. The moment where a character can no longer maintain the version of themselves they were trying to perform for the world.

Especially women.

Especially in comedy.

Especially online.

I still love “female rage” movies. I probably always will. But I think what interests me now isn’t rage itself so much as the performance surrounding it. The gap between what women actually feel and the version of those feelings we’ve learned how to package for public consumption.

Maybe that’s why horror-comedy feels like the right genre for me right now. It allows emotion to become physical and excessive and embarrassing. It allows women to become monstrous and ridiculous simultaneously. It allows characters to stop being aspirational for a moment.

This is one of those essays where I reach the end and go— you know what? I wouldn’t mind continuing to write about this one because I still have more examples to talk about. Maybe I’ll explore this even further one day!

Til next time,

Caroline

A few weeks ago, I wrote about my process in preparing for a shoot day and now I finally get to report back that we very successfully survived said shoot day. Which, in independent filmmaking terms, means nobody died, no locations were lost, no hard drives corrupted, and nobody cried in a way that required production to halt. A massive success, really!

Our latest shoot day for Final Girl took place this past Saturday, May 16th, and honestly? It was one of my favorite days we’ve had on this production so far.

The schedule for the day was honestly pretty relaxed by filmmaking standards. We only had three scenes scheduled as opposed to the seven-ish setups we’ve been attempting this entire process, and because we were filming in my own apartment, I had the rare luxury of actually being able to plan meticulously ahead of time. There’s something very comforting about knowing your location can’t randomly kick you out halfway through the day because I’ve already paid the rent for the month!

Crew call was at 11:00 AM — not particularly bright and early because I wanted everybody to actually get to sleep in and enjoy their morning before immediately coming to work. I know that a minimum of twelve-hour days are incredibly normalized in this industry, but I remain deeply committed to the radical concept of “what if everyone had a nice morning first.”

(Plus it was just a beautiful day outside and knowing that everyone was about to sacrifice it to hang out in my basement made me incentivized to let everyone at least have the time to take a bike ride over)

As soon as the crew arrived, we immediately got to work transforming my basement from “generic Brooklyn living room” into “woman who definitely owns at least seven crystals and knows things about your aura that you do not.”

In my extensive experience of seeing psychics around New York City (what? I’m a confused twenty-something girl living in Brooklyn, of course I’ve seen psychics), I’ve noticed there’s usually a lot of velvet, layered fabrics, tapestries, candles, warm lighting, and various objects that look vaguely cursed in a cool way. About a week before the shoot, our incredible production designer Maggie Sullivan and I spent an afternoon combing through thrift stores collecting witchy décor: candlestick holders, textured fabrics, old tapestries, little trinkets that felt like they had history to them.

One of my favorite parts of filmmaking is honestly this exact process — taking a completely ordinary space and slowly watching it turn into a believable world.

Cast call was at 11:30 AM, though unfortunately New York City itself decided to become our first production obstacle of the day because apparently the Brooklyn Half Marathon was happening at the exact same time. We really do have an incredible talent for accidentally scheduling around city-wide events. But honestly, it worked out completely fine and gave us extra time to continue dressing the set.

I also finally got to meet the actress we cast as the Medium, who was genuinely so delightful and immediately slipped into the role in a way that made the character feel bigger than what was originally on the page. She came up with so many funny little ad-libs throughout the day that suddenly made it feel like this woman had existed long before the audience met her.

Ugh, isn’t she just so cool?!

By 12:30 PM: picture’s up, baby!!!!

We moved pretty quickly into shooting our first setups, and one thing I’ve learned directing on a micro-budget is that you absolutely need to prioritize your coverage strategically. Micro-budget filmmaking is basically just the art of deciding which of your darlings get to live.

Personally, I like to start with what I consider the “essential emotional coverage” first — usually whichever character reaction I think is most important for the audience to emotionally track. Once I know I have the backbone of the scene secured, then I can start having fun with more experimental shots and visual ideas.

Because here’s the thing: if something goes wrong, if time disappears, if a location issue pops up, if the schedule starts collapsing: you will still need a scene that can actually be edited together coherently.

Luckily, because this was my own apartment, the stakes were a little lower in terms of losing the location. But it’s definitely something I’ve been thinking about more and more as we prep for our upcoming office location and was on the forefront of my mind when shooting podcast studio scenes. Every location has its own logistics, costs, timing restrictions, and weird little unpredictable variables attached to it. Part of directing is constantly thinking three steps ahead about what you’ll realistically need later in post-production.

We broke for lunch around 2:30 PM and ordered Dig because one of our cast members is vegan and honestly it just felt like the responsible adult thing to do. (Also: Dig genuinely has some of the best salad bowls in New York and I stand by that publicly.)

Then around 3:00 PM, we jumped back in and started tackling the remainder of the setups for the day.

Since the majority of these scenes took place in the exact same room, we ended up shooting pretty out of order in order to save time. So instead of filming Scene 1 entirely and then resetting for Scene 2, we’d stay on one actor’s setup and shoot all of their coverage for multiple scenes at once before moving on.

For example: we’d get all of the Medium’s close-ups for Scene 1 and Scene 2 while the camera was already positioned there, then move to Emmy’s coverage, and so on.

This saves an enormous amount of time on independent productions, especially when lighting setups are involved, but I can only imagine how mildly disorienting it probably is for the actors sometimes. Which honestly makes me even more impressed by how adaptable and collaborative our cast has been throughout this process — especially because several of them come from theatre backgrounds where scenes are obviously performed much more linearly and continuously.

At one point during the day I genuinely thought, “Leorah is going to write next week’s newsletter entirely about how incomprehensible my directing process is. And honestly, I’d understand wholeheartedly.”

Thankfully, she still seems to trust me.

Around 6:00 PM, we moved upstairs into the hallway of my apartment building to shoot a brief insert scene of the characters approaching the Medium’s office.

Now: was this a groundbreaking cinematic masterpiece of a scene? No.

But transitional moments matter so much more than people realize.

Sometimes when films jump too abruptly from one location to another, it can subconsciously make the world feel smaller or flatter. I always want the audience to feel like they’re physically moving alongside the characters — approaching spaces with them, discovering things with them, stepping into environments at the same pace they are.

Having the characters walk through the hallway before entering the office gave the location this tiny added sense of mystery and anticipation that wouldn’t exist otherwise. Where are we going? Who is this woman? What kind of space are we about to enter?

Even little connective scenes like that help shape tone.

That being said: lighting this hallway nearly destroyed us.

We could not figure out how to properly rig a light stand in the hallway without blocking the actors’ movement, so for several takes our incredible DP Emily literally held one of my tube lights above the actors while doing the splits against the wall so she wouldn’t appear in frame.

This is the kind of thing they don’t tell you when you dream about becoming a filmmaker at age twelve.

By 7:30 PM: WE WRAPPED!!!!!

And honestly? 8.5 hours is kind of a miracle in filmmaking terms. That’s basically a half day. If I didn’t love this so much, I truly do not know what I would do with my life instead.

After we wrapped, we spent another chunk of time resetting my apartment back to normal and backing up footage onto multiple hard drives because if there’s one thing filmmakers fear more than failure, it’s corrupted footage.

I like to play a nice 10 hour long video of a relaxing fireplace while I dump/backup footage. It makes it so my laptop doesn’t turn off mid-transcode but it also serves as a nice ambience

Once everything was packed away, Jake, Emily, Leorah, and I all kind of just lingered for a while talking about edits, upcoming shoot dates, shots we liked, and random life stuff. Nobody was really in a rush to leave.

And I think that’s maybe my favorite part of this whole process so far.

Not even necessarily the filmmaking itself — though obviously I love that too — but the feeling of slowly building something alongside people you genuinely enjoy being around.

Independent filmmaking is exhausting and stressful and occasionally held together by a DP doing the splits while holding a tube light in a Brooklyn hallway.

But then you blink and suddenly it’s 10 PM and you’re sitting around with your friends talking about the thing all of you care about enough to spend your weekends making for almost no money at all.

And somehow, despite how chaotic it all is, that feels incredibly special.

Leorah here, excited to announce that as of Sunday, we have completed another 12 hour day of shooting, wrapping another location! Our filming forecast for the rest of the month includes one (slightly) shorter day next weekend, then we’ll close it out with an action-packed weekend of back to back shoots in our office location on the 30th and 31st!

Now that you’re all caught up, on to the main event…

We spend a lot of time on this blog talking about how to plan for different parts of the filmmaking process, but inevitably, there will be things you can’t plan for. Or maybe, you had a plan that was dashed by any number of variables and moving parts. Or MAYBE, you had a plan, but a team member pitched a better one. In those cases, the name of the game becomes flexibility. It’s improv, it’s jazz. This might feel like a concession, but it actually leads to some of the most magical moments on set.

Our Sunday shoot had many such magical moments. Filming was already especially dreamy considering we were in absolutely gorgeous historic brownstone apartment (built in 1905 babyyyyy). But logistically, this is when some on the fly engineering came into play. After a brief tour last week to ensure that the location would fit our needs, Caroline and our set designer Maggie got to work thrifting knick knacks and home decor to tailor the apartment to the kind of old money villain’s lair we’d imagined. Arriving on set Sunday morning, we had about an hour to get the space ready (on top of loading everything in, and getting film gear set up). With all the puzzle pieces but no picture on the front of the box, we set out to work zip-tying curtains into place and command stripping paintings. Due to a beautiful combination of Maggie’s creative vision and the crew’s hard work, and the way that the set was assembled gave it a human, lived-in quality.

Then consider our script, which had gone through the drafting process and come out the other side this fall. However, reading it with fresh eyes so many months later, I realized it could be cut and streamlined. As I was creating the sides to send to the actors, I was simultaneously asking myself “Why are the characters being so up front with their objectives?” “How is this scene so redundant” and most of all, “Who wrote this!?” (spoiler alert, it was me). So I rewrote the scenes…just a little. The cast graciously rolled with the last minute changes, but even still the text wasn’t set. On Final Girl, no one is expected to be word perfect on their lines, and we look forward to seeing the words develop take by take as the actors make the text their own. In fact, we had intentionally cast folks who were excited to improv and play around with the material. I always look forward to shoot days, when punchlines I couldn’t get to land on paper are riffed upon and elevated into comedy gold. My favorite lines of the day are almost always the ones I didn’t write and couldn’t plan for.

Want to really ramp up on the drama? Our final shot of the series almost didn’t happen, and it came down to the width of the hallway. Ok, I’m overstating the circumstances, but STILL—Shooting in tight quarters, Caroline was worried we wouldn’t be able to get wide coverage in of our high-stakes ending scene. It took a bit of trial and error (but not too much, we didn’t have daylight to burn) and the crew coming together to rig and light the shot, but we figured it out as we went. In a couple months, you’ll be able to tell us if it paid off or not, but as a person with deep bias, I’m certain it was a cinematic masterpiece.

Being on a film set is equal parts method and madness. In creating Final Girl, the wiggle room to play and discover new possibilities in the moment has helped shape the tone and humor so much. Moments caught on camera are truthful because we’re actively surprising each other, and in turn bracing for whatever might make one take different than the last. The choices I made as an actor on Sunday were motivated in by both sleep deprivation and a strong desire to make the crew break. As I’m typing this, I realize I just might be suggesting an editor’s nightmare for continuity, (sorry, Jake and James!) but boy oh boy does this approach provide ✨options.✨

Planning is important, time is expensive in film, and you want to make sure it’s well spent. But if the focus of the medium is capturing life, you have to create spaces for the life to flow in. It’s found in the pictures hung with care on the walls, the alternate line that won’t make the cut but will make the blooper reel, and somewhere between the second and third Red Bull (did you know that that stuff gives you wings???). So yes, this is an ode to the things you can’t plan for, but even more so it’s a celebration of the people willing to figure it out as we go <3

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The past week has been crazy to say the very least, but a huge part of indie filmmaking is finding the ability to jump around (both physically and mentally) from freelance project to passion project and maintain the vision for both somehow. So I figured this week I’d provide you guys with a look into the actual schedule behind this kind of stuff.

I spent the anniversary of my off-Broadway debut flying to the grand old state of Texas to shoot a corporate conference alongside Final Girl alum James Hallock (our editor/moral support extraordinaire) and Conner Wood (our faithful gaffer from the Past Timeline shoot). Luckily Sunday was mostly a travel/check-in day which meant we had time to explore the resort before work began. Since the conference was hosting us, we had access to the absurdly fancy lazy river/waterslide/pool situation on the property which immediately made this feel less like a corporate gig and more like summer camp for exhausted filmmakers (just kidding- that’s actually what Sundance is for!).

Corporate videography jobs are usually the eye-roll-inducing bookings of the freelance world. Great money, usually boring. Luckily, this conference was hosted by people who were genuinely fun to be around, which made the whole thing surprisingly enjoyable. It’s amazing how much a job changes when the people involved actually seem excited to exist.

(Pictures of the resort and my giant Texas milkshake will be included below because journalism matters.)

MONDAY (April 27th)

Monday was the official start of the conference and simultaneously, while running around trying to get the best angles possible, I was also texting Leorah frantic updates about actor availabilities and potential locations back in New York because, surprise surprise, May is officially becoming Final Girl crunch time. We are LOCKED in.

At one point during the conference, employees broke into teams to assemble charity food bags and when I arrived to film the event, one of the volunteers confidently handed me a beard net without hesitation. Humbling.

The rest of the day honestly flew by in a blur of handheld footage, sprinting between conference rooms, and trying not to think about how many unread texts I had waiting for me from production back home. We ended the night at a sports bar inside the resort where I ordered a milkshake roughly the size of my own head while James, being the absolute machine that he is, stayed up late finishing a same-day recap edit that needed to play at the opening conference session the next morning at 8 AM sharp. Meanwhile Conner and I retired to our hotel rooms like elderly Victorian women.

TUESDAY (April 28th)

Tuesday started bright and early with a keynote speech from an Olympic bronze medalist who spoke candidly about overcoming homelessness, alcoholism within her family, and breast cancer. It was one of those moments where you suddenly remember that even corporate gigs can put you in rooms with incredible stories. Plus, she was an amazing public speaker, which always makes my job easier. It’s hard to get bad footage of somebody who knows how to command a stage.

The rest of the day was spent shooting breakout sessions while I simultaneously texted Rachel about possible New York locations for one of our upcoming episodes. One thing I’ve realized recently is how grateful I am for the team surrounding Final Girl. There’s something incredibly reassuring about knowing things are still moving back home even when I’m across the country shooting something entirely different.

Tuesday night ended with a massive Texas hoedown complete with BBQ and live music so good it made me weirdly nostalgic for my childhood in Nashville. It reminded me of all those backyard parties my parents used to drag me to where the adults would hang around talking while all the kids disappeared into the woods trying to catch lightning bugs.

WEDNESDAY (April 29th)

I started Wednesday early. Not because I was worried about making my flight, but because I had a vision for a TikTok involving the resort waterslide and I knew if I didn’t commit to the bit, I would regret it for the rest of my life. So at 9 AM, I dragged James onto a quick 30-minute water adventure before heading to the airport.

After my waterslide side quest, I rushed to the airport and somehow made it to my gate right on time. As somebody who usually arrives at airports approximately seven years early, this felt huge for me personally. I spent most of the flight reviewing drafts, checking sides, and making sure I hadn’t somehow forgotten an important production detail in the year-long process of making this damn show. I got back to Brooklyn late that evening, took a Benadryl, and prayed for a full night of sleep to help my arms recover from multiple consecutive twelve-hour handheld shooting days.

Reader, this did not happen.

THURSDAY (April 30th)

For those who don’t know, over the past month I’ve also been working on a documentary project for a nonprofit following the lives and mental health journeys of four teenage students navigating life in America. Thursday morning, one of my students texted me saying she had suddenly envisioned a shot for her senior class party happening in less than two hours. She wanted footage of her classmates signing directly onto the camera lens the way people sign yearbooks in movies which, as somebody who started making films as a teenager myself, immediately activated every supportive older-sister instinct in my body.

So naturally I launched myself out of bed and spent the morning running around hardware stores trying to find somebody willing to cut a giant sheet of acrylic for us before the party started. We eventually secured the acrylic, grabbed some liquid chalk markers, and met at the school just in time for her to pull the whole thing off.

The whole thing was giving “telling my mom I need a posterboard the night before my science project is due at 8pm".

A few hours later, I picked up the students and brought them to the nonprofit office in Manhattan so we could review footage from the past week together and THEN, because apparently I enjoy exhaustion, I took the train out to Long Island to attend my student’s church service with her family after she’d previously talked about how important faith was in her life. I finally got home around 11:30 PM ready to location scout the next morning.

FRIDAY (May 1st)

Oh God. It’s May. The month of the final stretch of Final Girl production.

I woke up Friday morning feeling optimistic because the landlord for a location we wanted on May 10th had basically implied we were good to go. I happily texted Leorah the green light to tell actors to hold availability and then, almost immediately after everybody confirmed, the location pulled out entirely.

Cool.

Cool cool cool.

Suddenly we were back to square one trying to find a replacement location for a shoot involving three actors who had already blocked off their entire day for us. Luckily Rachel immediately took over and handled everything with a level of composure I deeply envy while I focused on prepping for another shoot happening in approximately forty-eight hours because apparently my life currently operates entirely in overlapping countdown timers.

Thankfully, the location for the May 3rd shoot was somewhere I already knew well, which made shot-listing significantly less stressful. Familiar locations are such a gift on low-budget productions because they allow you to move faster, shoot leaner, and spend less money figuring things out on the day.

SATURDAY (May 2nd)

The final prep day. Location? Check. Actors? Check. Props? Check.

The scene we were shooting involved Emmy and Tom breaking into an abandoned office which, without spoiling too much, eventually escalates into some very Scooby-Doo-esque antics involving a wig. So naturally I spent part of the day purchasing a very silly little bob wig before finalizing shot-lists and charging every battery I own.

As one does.

SUNDAY (May 3rd)

Shoot day!!!

We had to push call slightly because of some scheduling hiccups, but that’s the beauty of skeleton-crew shoots. Small productions can pivot quickly without everything collapsing into chaos. Before the shoot, Rachel made a rough production schedule to keep us on track which mostly existed to stop me from yapping too long between setups. I did, however, request a dedicated 15-minute window for Leorah and I to make stupid videos with the wig. She graciously approved.

The shoot itself ended up being incredibly fun. One thing Leorah and I discussed early on while developing the present-day timeline was how important it was for the characters to occasionally stumble into genuine Scooby-Doo nonsense and this scene absolutely delivered on that front.

I also attempted a new overhead shot idea involving a drone in a tight office space. Unfortunately, the drone motors immediately blasted every loose paper on the desk directly into the air, which did not exactly fit the tone of the scene. But honestly, who am I in this newsletter if I don’t also document the failed ideas alongside the successes?

After wrapping, the four of us grabbed pizza across the street and just sat around talking for a while. One of those small, lovely moments that remind you why making things with your friends is worth all the chaos.

once again, a great dessert to end the day!

MONDAY (May 4th)

Monday began with another location scout. This time for a potential replacement for the location that dropped out on us.

The apartment itself was beautiful. Truly dream-home-level gorgeous. A massive brownstone in Flatbush that immediately made me want to start a Pinterest board titled “houses I will never financially recover from.” Unfortunately, it didn’t quite fit the vision for the character.

For this episode, I’m looking for a very specific kind of New York brownstone. Something old-money. Masculine. Rich woods, deep colors, slightly unsettling energy. A home belonging to somebody highly intelligent, deeply isolated, and just a little bit off.

You know the vibe.

I went directly from the location to a colleague’s house because they had hired me to take new artist photos in their home studio and apparently I just really wanted to make my arms even MORE tired for some reason.

TUESDAY (May 5th)

And now we arrive at the moment you’ve all been anxiously waiting for. Did I find a replacement location for the May 10th shoot?

YES.

This morning I toured a beautiful brownstone apartment incredibly close to my own neighborhood that somehow managed to feel both grand and blank-slate enough for us to completely transform. A large portion of the episode takes place inside the homeowner’s office, and the apartment happened to have a smaller section of the living room partially separated by gorgeous wood molding. I asked the owner if she’d potentially allow us to hang curtains and temporarily transform the space into an office setup and not only did she immediately say yes, but she casually mentioned another indie film had recently done the exact same thing.

SCORE!!!

After confirming the location, I headed to the documentary program where I taught the students a lesson on creative camera movement techniques which honestly felt like the perfect ending to this bizarrely full week.

Thank you all for following along with this increasingly chaotic stage of my life. Somehow, against all odds, Final Girl keeps moving forward.

Until next time,

Caroline :)

Happy Wednesday! Or a Wednesday of your chosen emotion, I (Leorah here!) don’t mean to be prescriptive.

I keep getting social media “on this day” notifications about our Tennessee shoot, and I fondly look back on it now as such an excited frenzy. We had an absolute blast shooting lakeside on location for a week, a time our team now affectionately refers to as “summer camp.” While we’ve dedicated many a post to that shoot and the tone it set for Team Final Girl, we haven’t talked to much about our lead up in preparation for it (mostly because this was a fledgling blog at that time).

Thanks to a very generous financial contribution, we were greenlit a few weeks before our shoot began, so we had a very tight turnaround time. In talking with other indie filmmakers, this is a fairly common occurrence; a project that was on hold suddenly has the funds to move forward, and now needs all hands on deck. For Final Girl, we had already laid a lot of groundwork that allowed us to mobilize when the opportunity presented itself. At the same time, as a first-time producer, I was learning in the moment as we hit (and cleared) hurdles.

So now here I am to pass along some of the steps you can take to stay ready, so that when the time is right, you don’t have to get ready.

Script

• Your script is the blueprint for the project; it dictates the location, props, and cast of characters required, as well as providing a sense of the general production needs. Making sure that your script is polished and ready for shooting is key for setting yourself up for success.

• Once your script is ready, ask yourself, what parts of the script provide flexibility? Can two characters be combined to lighten the talent budget? Can a location be rewritten in favor of another that’s available for the shoot dates? As such a mercurial medium, part of planning for film includes creating a Plan B from jump.

• BONUS: Always have a secondary idea ready in your back pocket. You want to be prepared if your investor asks you “what next?” :)

Location

• Locations are a pain, especially if you need them on short notice. The best place to start is to make a list of locations you know you have access to: personal apartments, family homes, workplaces, etc. If you’re shooting in your own apartment for example (which we’ll be doing at Caroline’s in a few weeks!), you have much more flexibility compared to a location that needs to be rented in advance.

• If you do need to rent out on short notice, check out sites that are not traditionally marketed for film such as Peerspace, Gigster, Airbnb, or VRBO (just make sure you have permission to film there prior to booking!).

Crew

• Assembling a crew last-minute comes down largely to who you know. We’ve lucked out that the majority of our crew is compromised of either friends or recommendations from friends (who have now become friends themselves!). The wider your network is, the easier it is to reach out to a couple different people per position, which helps ensure that someone has the availability you need.

• In that spirit, talk about the projects you have in the pipeline! Sure, it might feel cringe to share your work in progress, but it’s so worth pushing past that feeling. As an actor, I talked about Final Girl when I was on other sets, and it’s all over my social media. If people see your passion for your projects, they are more likely to want to be involved, sometimes reaching out on their own accord!

Cast

• Actors are often the fastest piece of the puzzle to slot in, so a lesson I learned the hard way is casting comes last.

• Similar to crew, casting on a time crunch will also come down to who you know. There’s a reason some director and actors have career-long collaborations; it’s easier to onboard an actor to a project quickly when you already have lines of communication set up, and a clear sense of their creative rhythms.

• Take some time to research the main casting sites in your area. In New York, this is primarily Actors Access, but Backstage and Playbill are options as well.

• If you’re casting regionally, consider sending your breakdowns to local acting representatives, and ask them to put you in touch with clients who might be a good fit for the project.

While we’re on the topic of funding, I can’t help but end with a shameless plug…sorry! We are about to enter our month of back to back shoots, filming nearly every weekend, with the goal of wrapping or getting damn near close by June. If you are able, a way to directly support us is to become a paid subscriber right here on Substack, or share us with a friend! Everything helps as we continue our quest to make high quality art while employing fellow creatives.

And now that that’s out of the way, let me leave you (for real this time) with this. If your project just got funded, CONGRATULATIONS! That is no easy feat, and you did it! While all of the above is important, you also have to remember to trust yourself, and the creative instincts that have brought you thus far. You can’t prepare for everything, but you can hold fast in the belief that you’re making something that matters, and let your care for the project carry you through. You got this <3333

It’s Caroline. And I feel like I should start this week with a bit of self-awareness.

I was originally going to open this by saying something vulnerable about how I’m going to show you my very bad, very messy storyboards. Like, really lower your expectations. Stick figures. Questionable spatial logic. The whole thing. But then I remembered that Rian Johnson’s storyboard for Knives Out looks… like this:

So honestly. Fuck it.

If you’ve been following along, a lot of the brand I’ve built around myself (and Final Girl as an extension of that) is rooted in this idea that I can think on my feet. That I can show up with limited resources, pivot when things inevitably fall apart, and still walk away with something that feels intentional and, hopefully, beautiful. Scrappy has kind of been the name of the game (so much-so that I wouldn’t blame you if you read this, rolled your eyes, and went “okay we GET IT!!”)

All of that is still true. But I’m actually really excited this week to do the opposite.

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Because thanks to our lovely, incredible friend and frequent collaborator Audrey Shapiro, we have the opportunity to shoot in a gorgeous Manhattan skyrise office space that’s been featured in huge mainstream shows like American Horror Story. And beyond that, I was able to go on a proper tech scout ahead of time, which in indie filmmaking terms feels luxurious.

Having access to the space before we shoot has completely shifted how I’m approaching this. Instead of showing up and figuring it out as we go, I get to slow down and come in with a whole level of intention that we don’t always have the time or resources for. I get to think about how the scene actually lives in the space, how the light behaves, where the camera wants to be before we’re under pressure to make a hundred decisions at once.

And to be honest, I’m hungry for that.

So I thought I’d walk you through how I’m approaching one of the first moments we’ll be shooting in this location: the opening scene that establishes Emmy’s world in New York City.

This scene comes directly after our initial flashback sequence of the slashings, which we shot with a lot of warmth. Tungsten lighting, rich tones, a kind of almost suffocating atmosphere, and of course… blood. It feels chaotic and visceral and a little unhinged. So cutting from that into this office, I want the contrast to be immediate, almost jarring. Actually scratch that — I want it to be as jarring as possible. Cold. Clinical. Controlled. A space that feels almost too clean, like the emotional temperature has been completely drained out of the room.

That shift isn’t just something I’m thinking about in theory. It’s something I’m trying to build into the actual shot design from the very beginning.

This first shot I want is going to start out as an extreme close-up on Emmy, asleep with her head down on her desk. We slowly dolly out over the low hum of an office environment, the kind of ambient noise that feels almost too clean to be comforting. Printers, distant chatter, the soft buzz of fluorescent lights. As we pull back, the frame keeps opening until we land in an extreme wide just as she snaps awake. Disoriented. Not entirely sure where she is. And honestly, neither are we. Was that initial flashback something that actually happened, or are we coming out of a dream? At this point, we don’t know yet. We’re still at the very beginning.

I drew this rough storyboard using Procreate on my iPad, which has become my go-to for getting ideas out of my head quickly. When it comes to finding inspiration for shots and angles, I use ShotDeck. I pay for the subscription (it’s about $13 a month) and I genuinely use it enough to justify it. Being able to search for specific moods, lighting styles, or compositions and see how other filmmakers have approached similar moments is incredibly helpful when I’m trying to articulate something that still feels a little abstract in my head.

Shotdeck is a tool I recently got the students at the center of a documentary I’m working on to use as a visual reference because it is simply that good. You can use its database to source so many different types of shots, lens types, number of subjects in frame, and even by color palette - so you can also use color theory to create a jarring juxtaposition between timelines!

just look at how much amazing inspiration popped up by just looking up “office”! I love it!

I’ve written in the past about how one of the best ways to learn how to shot-list is by dissecting scenes you love. Taking a sequence from a film and breaking it down shot-by-shot, figuring out why each cut happens when it does, what information is being revealed, and how the camera is guiding your attention. It’s one thing to watch something and think it feels good. It’s another to actually understand why.

Once I’ve sketched out the initial shots that are floating around in my brain, I’ll upload everything into Canva and drop them into a simple storyboarding template. It doesn’t need to be fancy. It just needs to be clear enough that I can share it with my DP, Emily, and anyone else who needs a visual reference for what I’m thinking. Half the battle is just getting everyone aligned before we even step on set.

(psst: don’t be afraid to take liberties with your storyboards! They’re not supposed to look amazing. All that matters is you have a reference for your vision to show on the fly!)

Admittedly, I haven’t always had the luxury of sitting down and storyboarding something this thoroughly. And as much as I genuinely love the scrappy, figure-it-out-as-you-go energy of indie filmmaking, there is something incredibly exciting about slowing down and actually planning. About knowing that when we walk into this location, I’m not immediately racing against a clock or trying to solve everything in real time.

This time, I get to be methodical. I get to make choices ahead of time and then refine them instead of inventing them on the spot. And there’s a kind of relief in that. A sense that I might actually be able to deliver the cleanest, most intentional version of what I’ve been seeing in my head all along.

We’ll see if I can keep that energy once we’re actually racing the clock next month!

Xoxo,

Caroline :)

Last May, I (this is Leorah by the way, hi!) wrote a somewhat ambitious post for this very blog, sharing thoughts from what I then considered to be the middle point of the filming process of our web series. While we were riding the high of a very successful flashback shoot in Tennessee, reader, we were not yet at the half way point.

I’m writing to you today as someone who is actually, for real this time, very close to the finish line. Since beginning production on our New York unit this fall, we’ve completed around 10 full days of shooting (and a handful of half days, late nights, and guerrilla shoots to boot), and wrapped three major locations. These are statistics I know we keep repeating, but they are no small feat, and one we want to celebrate. I feel that this time, I’ve earned the right to be a little reflective.

How Close Are We To Wrapping?

Very. Well…3/4. It’s a lot and it’s a little. Realistically, we have about 4 days of shooting left. We’re currently preparing for our office location shoot, which will take place in the next month or so. We very luckily have an amazing location, and confirmed cast for these scenes, so there’s only the business of schedule Tetris left. We’re also hoping to pull off a very fun day in our makeshift Medium’s office, which you can read more about in last week’s post!

There are also two locations that, in all honesty, have been harder for us to nail down. We are so motivated to keep this (lovingly) gargantuan undertaking in motion, and it can feel frustrating to have the momentum we’ve built slowed down by outside factors. Or I guess, inside factors? We need to film interiors.

ANYWAY. We’re continuing to do what we’ve always done: get creative. Final Girl is scrappy by nature, and just because we don’t have a solution now doesn’t mean we won’t think outside of the box and find a workaround. Or maybe someone will come out of the woodwork and offer us a brownstone. (Seriously, if you have a lead, let us know!)

What Have We Learned So Far?

Very. …I mean a lot. As a first time producer, I feel like a literal baby in a cool and fun way, because every piece of information I learn about TV production is brand new to me. I’ve learned about how nebulous making a project like this can be; plans change, availability shifts, rewrites beget rewrites beget rewrites. I’ve learned that in indie film, deadlines can shift because you are your own boss. So, if something happens and scheduling recalibrations are needed, why sweat the small stuff? A lesson I relished learning is the importance of celebrating the victories. We are working without big financial backers or studio support, so any work that happens is a direct result of our team’s efforts. Remember when I said we wrapped three major locations!? I’ll say it a third time, because holy shit, we did that.

I think the biggest takeaway is not to fear change, but see it as a chance for further innovation. Scheduling conflicts allowed us to retool our pilot and make it even stronger. Locations falling through led to searches ending with even better alternatives. I don’t know that I’m zen enough to be an “everything happens for a reason person,” but I’m definitely getting there. And I’ll celebrate every step of the way.

What Comes Next?

Very. Very old, this bit is getting very old. Once we wrap filming, we will officially be in post production!!! Our filming schedule has allowed for some editing to take place concurrently with shooting, which expedites the process. This way, when we wrap, we’ll already have portions of the edit completed. See, another thing that happened for a reason!

Alongside editing, another major part of post production will be deciding on our release and promotion strategy. What platform do we want Final Girl to live on, and how do we market it to get as many eyeballs watching all of our giggles and gore as possible? We’re starting to have these conversations now, but there’s still a lot to be done. I have some experience in promotion having run my own social media pages, and marketing my comedy special, but promoting an entire season of TV is going to be new territory. Social media can be a very powerful tool, but there’s a challenge to converting short term viewers who will stay for a 30-second TikTok into longterm viewers, who will navigate to a new platform and watch 8 20-minute episodes. What we can say for sure is we will be editing and releasing our our fan cams. Sorry, you can’t stop us.

I can’t help but think of how excited I was this time last year, when shooting first began in Tennessee. Easter weekend 2025 was filled with long held dreams feeling like they were coming to fruition. That set was also largely my crash course in filmmaking. I pretty quickly picked up the jobs the comprise a film crew, or at least a skeleton crew. I was on the other end of a call sheet for the first time, even if filling it out got rather repetitive; when you only have four crew members, everyone’s doing double duty. I learned the ropes of coordinating a cast, organizing clothing sizes and keeping track of dietary restrictions to the best of my ability. It was wholly electric, everything was so brand new.

The excitement I feel now on the other end of things is different, but certainly just as strong. Dreams are not just beginning, they’re being seen through as a direct result of hard (but very fun) work. I know that as much as I learned in production, I have an equal amount to soak up during post. Part of learning as you go means you can’t always anticipate what it is you’re going to learn, you just approach each task as it comes. And there is a lot of exciting things to come, we’ll keep you posted ;)

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Hello Hello Everyone- Caroline here!

I’m very excited to be getting back into business and entering the final stage of Final Girl pre-production before we can officially call wrap :’) While I break down what we’re going to be filming, I figured it would be fun to share the logistics behind one specific sequence where Emmy and Tom decide to investigate by hiring a medium. It’s a fun little peek into the kinds of shenanigans our plucky protagonists get themselves into, but also a great example of how much planning goes into making something like this actually happen!

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A lot of the work happens before anyone steps on set. By the time we’re rolling, most of the important decisions have already been made. This particular shoot day feels very different from others we’ve had so far, mostly because of where and how we’re shooting it.

^A glimpse into what the actual shooting breakdown for this location looks like currently

Back in December, I wrote about a day where we shot sixteen pages. That required a lot of manpower and a very specific kind of energy. We brought in extra hands and a B camera team just to keep things moving. That day was about covering as much as possible and staying on schedule.

For this one, the priorities have shifted. We’re shooting everything for The Medium in my apartment, using my basement as her workspace. Once that decision was locked, I started thinking less about speed and more about how to transform the space.

This time instead of putting extra money towards more hands-on-deck, I’m allocating more of the budget to set dressing and production design. The environment needs to feel specific and intentional. If the space feels flat or underdeveloped, it will read that way immediately on camera. I want it to feel dense, layered, and slightly removed from reality, something that doesn’t immediately register as someone’s basement.

^Here’s a little moodboard I made to help y’all visualize exactly the vibe I’m going for

There’s something very practical about using your own apartment as a location. It simplifies a lot of logistics. We don’t have to worry about moving between locations or coordinating access with anyone else. At the same time, it puts more responsibility on us to make sure the space feels fully transformed. It can’t look like we just added a few props and called it a day.

One of the biggest advantages is that I can prep the space ahead of time. I’m planning to start set dressing a day or two before the shoot, either on my own or with Maggie, our production designer. That gives us time to build things out slowly, make adjustments, and sit with how everything feels. Plus, it’s a much calmer process than trying to build a world in the middle of a busy shoot morning.

It also means that when we arrive on the actual day, we’re not starting from scratch. The space is already there. We can focus on fine-tuning instead of building. That alone can save hours, and those hours go straight back into shooting. It gives us more room to focus on performance and camera work instead of scrambling to get ready.

The other major benefit is how controlled the environment is. We just came off shooting in a location with floor-to-ceiling windows, where light was constantly shifting throughout the day. It made continuity more difficult and added pressure to move quickly before things changed too much. Audio was also something we had to stay aware of, since we were dealing with outside noise we couldn’t control.

In a basement, those concerns are much more manageable! The lighting stays consistent. We’re not racing the sun. The sound environment is quieter and easier to control. There are fewer external variables pulling focus away from the work.

Even though casting for this role is already done, it still affects how I’m planning the day. This character relies a lot on presence, so I want to make sure the actor has time in the space before we start shooting. Not just for blocking, but to get comfortable and find how they naturally move within it. When the environment feels real to them, it tends to translate on camera.

At this stage, most of my focus is on building a space that can support everything else. If the set feels right, it gives the performances something to sit on. It helps the tone land without forcing it— Which allows the scene to feel complete before we even start rolling in my experience.

What I’m learning through this process is how much directing, especially at this level, comes down to preparation and resource allocation. It’s deciding ahead of time where your energy and budget will have the most impact.

For this shoot, that decision is very clear. I’m putting the work into the space now so that when we get to set, we are less-so building a scene from scratch but more-so stepping into one already established.

Alright that’s all for this week! Take care of yourselves,

Caroline :)