Demons: Director's Comments

Demons marks the first time I ever adapted something for the screen because the original story was actually written by a good friend of mine, Siddhant Singh, back in October and originally released on Instagram (which has since been taken down). Funnily enough, we weren't even friends at the time but I just approached him after reading it saying that I thought it could make a good film. He said he was down and 5 months later we now have this film to show for it.

Demons (2019) is available to watch on YouTube

The story itself follows a demotivated and lost man in the name of Oliver, who is suffering from severe anxiety attacks and what he calls 'demons', and he has not known a life outside of that. He thinks everyone has them so will he be able to overcome his very own 'demons'?

Spoiler warning for Demons from this point onwards

The story is one of the best we've produced so far in my opinion, as it really showed good character development in Oliver as he battles to fight these 'demons'. The story was also unique in the way it was told, allowing the possibility of an expansion into how these demons came to be or what happens afterwards with that on-set decision to have a cliffhanger, more on that later. The story was also held quite close to our hearts as we produced it in the effort to help people who actually undergoes the same issues, people who do have these voices in their head and suffer these serious anxiety attacks. It is unfortunate that it isn't talked about a lot so it can be hard for these people to find help. This is why we found this film to be especially meaningful to release.

The Demons teaser poster

The story itself started out life as a written piece for Instagram, as noted above. So adapting the story to a screenplay was definitely part of the challenges in the developmental stage of the production. It was important to both Siddhant and I that the story wouldn't change too much, whilst at the same time, worked for an on-screen performance. This led to the decision to have the story be narrated by Oliver himself, as the story was originally written from Oliver's perspective. This allowed for most of the lines to remain unchanged in the adaptation, with the most significant change to be the addition of Dave, as he simply did not exist in the original piece. However, his addition allowed for the progression of the story at a much smoother pace for a viewing audience.

As mentioned earlier, yes the ending was entirely improvised. It was a last-minute on-set decision. So last-minute in fact we were in the middle of packing up after having shot the original ending. At the time the film was written as a one-off, just like most of the short films we've made so far and is also the usual way independent filmmakers work. But during production, we suddenly had a thought of a possible expansion to the story. We realised that the story itself had potential and we only did so little on it, so we thought "why not? Let's shoot an alternative ending and see if it works." When it came to editing the project, we couldn't believe that we were about to stick to the original ending, because this new one was just that much better and hence why it is the one you see now at the end of the film. Of course, being a suddenly improvised idea, we didn't really know how exactly we were going to work with it. You can read more about how this was done here.

Being a youth crew, a lot of the equipment was being used for the first time on set, meaning we were learning on the fly.

Of course, as with all productions, this one had no lack of difficulties, in fact we ran into so many problems during the production I made a whole separate blog post on it which you can read here. But to cut the long story short, we were in a massive rush to complete the film so we had to give up a lot of artistic choices in the name of speed, as well as having glossed over the pre-production stage leading to a poorly planned rushed film.

Due to the shortcomings during production and post-production, the film release was rather disappointing. It did not live up to the expectations of the crew, nor did it appeal to the audience who had read the original first. The film was simply a pain to watch and this is, unfortunately, something I have to agree with. If the audience had read the screenplay instead of watching the film, they would have almost certainly enjoyed the experience more. Needless to say, cinematically and audio-wise, the film was simply unbearable.

But the storytelling and the story itself still holds its merits, which meant the project was not a lost cause, because our original purpose was of course to help those who needed it. And as Bill Collinsworth commented on the original YouTube release, "Thanks; we all need that hope. We can overcome our demons, if we get the help and support of our loved ones, and are willing to put the effort forward." This proved to the team and I that the production was well worth the struggle.

Reviewing footage without a monitor in scorching sunlight proved to be one of the many challenges on shoot days.