A Ripper Runs Through It footage
Back in 1999, we made our first short film: A Ripper Runs Through It.
As you’d expect, it’s terrible. It’s so bad that only a couple people involved in the making of it have actually seen it. There are actually 2 versions. The original, unedited, unaltered train wreck. And the “remastered” version cut together so that the plot makes “sense”, all the bad edits are fixed, and with an actual score attached. I think that’s the one Steve watched. Almost 2 years ago to the day, I wrote up an article discussing the film and explaining how it all came together (or didn’t, as it were). Other than a few screenshots here and there, I’ve never actually posted footage of the film itself. Odds are you’ll still never see the finished product but I figured showing a bit of it couldn’t hurt.
The footage itself is pretty rough, quality wise. We shot the short on tape and then edited it onto VHS. Years later, I decided to digitize all of it just so the thing wouldn’t disappear forever. As you can imagine, since we don’t have the original master tapes, we stuck everything on a few VHS’s that weren’t treated as kindly as they needed to be by Brady or myself. So for the footage you’ll see above, I actually put an Old Film filter over it. Trust me, it makes the quality “better” and gives it that lost film charm. In the clips above, Jeremy Cech, star of The Grand Horror and Outpost Doom is the guy who gets his head smashed in the bathroom and subsequent body gutted on the kitchen table (that was totally a real skeleton, by the way. Borrowed from the Biology room). The guy being chased is Braden Johnson, better known as David from OD. The killer is our friend Ben Brill, who was a fantastic actor and unfortunately moved away some years back.
So nearly 13 years after we originally shot it (God we’re old), some footage is being seen for the first time. I dunno if we’ve improved that much, but it sure was fun!
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