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Saint Vincent College filmmakers have scary good time in Pittsburgh 48-Hour Film Project competition

Saint Vincent College filmmakers have scary good time in Pittsburgh 48-Hour Film Project competition

by Public Relations | October 10, 2024

LATROBE, PA – Two teams made up of current students and recent graduates of Saint Vincent College worked past the witching hour to conjure creepy tales for the 48-Hour Film Double Retro Horror Project–Pittsburgh competition.

The four filmmakers—Saint Vincent senior Reilly McKay and alumni Will Radan, C’23, Kieran Rapp, C’24, and Brennan Valladares, C’23—say they were not spooked by the task of writing, shooting and editing a short horror film entirely in a 48-hour span.

“The process was super fun,” Rapp said. “The adrenaline rush was real. There’s nothing like coming up with a story that makes sense, producing it and watching it in real time 48 hours later.”

All 60 films in the competition will be screened next week at the Rangos Giant Cinema at the Carnegie Science Center in Pittsburgh. “Black Tuesday” by Radan and McKay will be shown at 8:30 p.m. Oct. 14. “I’m Watching You” by Rapp and Valladares will be shown at 8:30 p.m. Oct. 15. The awards show, which will include an encore screening of the winning entry, is set for 6:30 p.m. Oct. 27.

On Sept. 27, each team was randomly assigned a different genre and historical event as its topic. All the films had to include the same character (Casey Connor, a history teacher), specific line of dialogue (“I’m watching you”) and prop (a balloon). Each film lasts four to seven minutes.

Radan and McKay’s film is in the “dark fantasy” genre and is set at the time of the 1929 stock market crash. They hammered out their storyline and script into the wee hours of Saturday morning, got a couple hours of sleep, then shot the film Saturday at Radan’s grandmother’s Depression-era house, using her Ford Model A car from the 1930s as a prop.

“It was pretty crazy,” said McKay, a communication and digital art and media double major from Ligonier. “We spent all day Saturday shooting until about 11:30 p.m., then edited through the night. I think we turned in [the finished product] Sunday night with a couple minutes to spare. We put in a lot of effort, and it’s really cool just to be able to say we got it done.”

Their cast and crew consisted of Saint Vincent students Brayden Gibson, a senior engineering major from Youngstown, Ohio, and Jack Adair, a junior communication and media studies major from DuBois; Parker Sphon, a senior at Greensburg Salem High School; and Brad Skero, a freshman at the University of Pittsburgh-Greensburg.

“It was a lot of firsts for me,” McKay said. “My first experience doing a 48-hour film competition and my first experience with the horror genre—or at least the first time I was intentionally trying to be unsettling and weird and stuff like that. It was a lot of fun.”

Rapp and Valladares’ film is a two-man production—there was no additional cast or crew—made in the style of “found footage” and based on the creepy clown stalker craze of 2016. Valladares said the genre and topic were a great match, which made it easier to create a storyline, but the compressed turnaround time was challenging.

“I’m someone who really gets hung up on trying to make everything perfect, which can drag out the process,” Valladares said. “In this competition, you can't do that. … It all worked out because I trust Kieran a lot. This is the second time we've worked [on a film] together, and we’ve known each other since high school. So, when we were filming this one, we just let it happen. I think it worked out really well.”

Earlier this year, Rapp and Valladares won a Gold Viddy Award for their documentary, “Don’t Count Us Out.” The film, a behind-the-scenes look at the Saint Vincent College women’s basketball team’s 2022-23 season, was selected for inclusion in the College Filmmakers Festival.

Movie poster for black tuesday featurig a bearded man in overalls in the shadows holding a lit match

Film poster for “Black Tuesday”.

Movie poster for I'm watching you featuring a close up of a person wearing a clown mask with blood splatter

Film poster for “I’m Watching You”.

 

 

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