In 2006, I served as the cinematographer for a feature-length horror film about a group of teenagers conducting a seance at an abandoned slaughterhouse in the woods near Mount Diablo—a place thick with local folklore and ghost stories. We completed principal photography and wrapped on the shoot. But before post-production could even begin, every last frame of the feature footage was lost in a devastating accident; all of our physical production tapes completely disappeared. The feature project was consequently abandoned.

 

Location Scout was born before that tragedy occurred, emerging from a completely practical trip. Armed with an old, single-chip MiniDV camera, I had originally gone to the slaughterhouse purely to conduct a location scout and document the physical space. The raw footage itself was entirely ordinary.

 

The resulting short film emerged in the edit. By manipulating the image into a gritty, high-contrast aesthetic and incorporating an eerie, unsettling sound design, the footage ceased to be a simple recording of a physical space. It became a proof of concept for the feature.

 

For me, cinema has always been about this exact transformation—using a raw recording as a starting point to construct a world where feeling matters far more than explanation, and where sound and image become a doorway to dreaming.