On a lonely, fog-drenched hilltop, the night groundskeeper crawls under the house and finds a new, unexpected chore.
DIRTMOUTHS is a short horror comedy directed by Breehn Burns and starring Pendleton Ward in his first live-action role.
A SEVEN MINUTE HORROR MOVIE
Writer-Director Breehn Burns is the artist who designed Sam for the cult classic Trick 'r Treat. He was supervising producer on Netflix's Invader ZIM: Enter The Florpus and showrunner on Bravest Warriors.
Actor Pen Ward created the eight-time Emmy Award winning Cartoon Network series Adventure Time as well as Frederator's Bravest Warriors and Netflix's Midnight Gospel.
Our micro-budget horror short was shot on iPhone with three friends over ten winter nights. Inspired by the handmade horror of Evil Dead II and the realist vibe of The Exorcist, DIRTMOUTHS was an experiment in making the most of whatever we already had. From night shoots under the house to stop-motion scenes animated in the living room, our choices revolved around keeping the action small enough to be achievable.
EMBRACING SERENDIPITY
Dude I just wanted to make a short film so bad that DIRTMOUTHS was written on the fly.
My outline took advantage of our resources; the pugs, the raised deck, the nearby hillside staircase. And then each day, Pen and I would sit on the porch and chit chat over what we wanted to shoot that night. In those talks, as well as a few with the film's talented Assistant Producer Rory Dise, the short's details were ironed out one day at a time.
The same philosophy carried over into editing, where I created new moments from existing material and tried to avoid reshoots. We really didn't want to go back under the house.
Near the end, that fake-out where you only hear the hammer-smashing off screen – then back to Pen for the long beat, before he starts smashing again – was added in the last week of editing, and came partly from playing around with sound design.
In live action, this "protecting your vision" stuff is so discordant with real life that it almost breaks your brain. Supposedly your goal is to bend reality – second by second – into a fragile illusion that's exactly the way you pictured it in your head.
Thinking that way is bad for human beings, but the more you're able to improvise within the spirit of your ideas, the happier the shoot becomes.
"It's a question of preparing the ground in such a way that the lucky accident can happen... so that the piece can take on a life of its own."
– Sidney Lumet
"It's not a matter of how well can you make a movie. It's how well can you make it under the circumstances. Because there's always circumstances."
– George Lucas
AN ANIMATED LOOK
The limited color palette and art-paper texture of DIRTMOUTHS were inspired by RISO prints, a Japanese photocopy technique often used for zines.
My first plan was to print out every frame of the film using a Risograph printer, then photograph them one-by-one like an animated film. But holy shit that was gonna be expensive, and I wanted to make a short without crowdfunding.
So to create a misty, dreamlike place, I --
1. Used heavy fog to add depth and keep the frame alive
2. Scanned art paper and charcoal rubs
3. Animated them to create a textured film grain that would interact with the fog
4. Composited it all together in post
SOUND
For the voices of the Dirtmouths, I sat in a closed car (good acoustics) and pushed my voice as far as I could. I recorded it on the iPhone, then pitched myself up in post.
For the song, Pen's voice was captured in-camera, on set. We did have a little lav mic we tried using – assuming anything would be better than recording straight into the phone – but astoundingly our raw audio was pretty damn alright.
Some of the most powerful scenes in movies have no music. I caved and used a little music in DIRTMOUTHS, but I looked at Friedkin's The Exorcist to understand intentional sound design that doesn't rely so much on score.
I also studied the sound of an animated creature feature -- the quiet, 8 minute pilot for Scavengers by Joseph Bennett and Charles Huettner, with sound design by Mike Jannson.
I remember hearing that M. Night Shyamalan edits his movies without any temp score and tries to get every scene working on its own, and at the time I almost didn't believe it.
The insecurity around using music in film fascinates me. An audience will watch a good movie with no score and never even notice, but they rarely get that chance. I can only think of a handful of movies with (mostly) no music, like Rope, Network, Dog Day Afternoon and No Country For Old Men.
