Book Of The Dead - Evil Dead Fanfilm Trailer (Final Third Version - 2018)

[EvilDeadChainsaws]

This is the third and (probably) final edit of my 'Book Of The Dead' Evil Dead fanfilm trailer. As this final trailer is edited, you have the discovery of the Book Of The Dead, Professor Knowby's translation and the possession of his wife, being tormented in the cellar & killing his wife, the arrival of a new group at the cabin and their investigating the cellar, snippets of what befalls them, and finally the burning of the Book.



The original project was conceived as an Evil Dead inspired fanmade short film in February 2016. It was to be a re-writing/re-telling of the 'The Evil Dead', recycling some of the back-story & myth, plot points, and featured props. It was to be more of a scary ghost story like the first film, as opposed to the action/adventure of the second & third films, and wouldn't feature any of the existing main characters from the trilogy in the body of my short film.

As a short filmmaker myself, it was to be made simply for the love of film-making. Over three months, the opening credit sequence to lead into the short was paid-for & shot out of my own pocket, to use as a 'trailer' to raise the £2000/$2700 funding to make the full short film via the crowdfunding platform Indiegogo. The Indiegogo campaign ran from April to June 2016, but less than a quarter of that financial goal was raised. By September, and after much thought, I came to the conclusion that the best avenue was to refund the money to the backers, and the project was put on hold.

In January 2017 I decided to take the project partially forward out of my own pocket. I created a new second trailer by filming specially selected shots from the full fanfilm's storyboards. That allowed the project to move forward, and give some purpose to the number of props & set-pieces which had already been created solely for this fanfilm. That trailer was released online and the project was put to rest once again.

From January to May 2018 I created a scale model of The Evil Dead's cabin & workshed, unrelated to this film project. A few people suggested I could film it as a miniature and edit that into my previous fanfilm footage to add exterior shots of the cabin, which would increase the scope & production-values. I tried a number of shoots over a few weeks; daylight, night, indoors, outdoors, lighting colour combinations, smoke/mist, wind, and eventually I got a few brief shots I felt looked convincing enough to roughly pass as the full size cabin. I edited a third final trailer recycling the editing structure & musical progression of the original credits sequence, cherry-picking the best footage from both the first and second trailers with the new miniature shots, to create one (probably) final trailer.

Throughout this two-year project, all the props & sets were bought/made myself (with the exception of the Books & loose pages, made by Danish fan Jesper Mørch), and the lighting/sound/filming/editing done with my own equipment myself, with help from friend John Mitchison, along with a few unwilling 'actors' roped in for certain shots. See this page for more info, and various behind the scenes shots below;

http://www.bookofthedead.ws/website/features_book_of_the_dead_an_evil_dead_fanfilm.html