Door 66 - Horror Short Film

Early in 2025 I was approached by a close actor friend and an acquaintance of his to try and compete on that year's MotelX Horror Film Festival. This friend of mine and I had directed and produced Habitat in just two weeks back in 2023 and achieved the Top 10 in that year's edition of MotelX, so we wanted to try and beat that.

Working with Bárbara (writer, director), we started drafting different ideas, from a gory horror flick, to a deep, artistic psychological horror. Many things came about in the writing room, but we ended up with an idea that we thought would ressonate more with the younger audiences.

Taking it's name from the portuguese Porta 65 initiative of affordable housing, Porta 66 tells the story of a young man and his girlfriend that suddenly have to deal with unruly landlords and the rising housing prices, all whilst trying to manage their relationship and he deals with trauma and anxiety.

I wanted to focus on directing the photography of this short rather than directing, so I took a stab at it and applied the knowledge both from my studio and portrait photography experience, as well as my art direction and 3D background, to try and achieve more unique shots and compositions.

The location was tight. It was a packed house with a crew of around 11 people, and it was a rush. We had only 1 day in the house and half a day in the garage location, so time was of the essence. Working with the gaffer team, we setup as many reusable lighting setups as we could, and had to be creative with the amount of lights and hardware we had.

The Sony A7S III and it's 12bit raw recording capabilities paired with the Atomos Ninja V were amazing in post production, both for color grading, but also for VFX, helping to get tricky mattes and rotoscoping with less image compression.

It was my first time on-set with such a big crew, and it was a great opportunity to meet new people and explore other people's ideas of what a movie should be and look like.

In the end, the goal of achieving a better qualification wasn't met, but we're still happy that we did it. The experience and knowledge gained are always a plus, and will definitely come in handy in whatever next projects come about.

Enjoy some of my favourite shots from this short!