The news just keeps on rolling on for our Psychological Horror Feature Machination. Last week the latest platform was Tubi TV and this week the film has landed on AppleTV. You can watch in most English speaking counties, such as Australia, /nZ, Malta the US and Canada.
Pandemic Film Machination Film Poster Process Revealed
It was a welcomed surprise to receive an email from our Machination poster photographer Fran Stivala last week. Fran was writing an article for WHAM Malta detailing how she photographed and created our attention-grabbing poster, and it’s now live. The poster image, starring Maltese talent Steffi Thake is perfect, it oozes the tension we needed and pops with the coloured lights. You can read the article here and look at the poster.
The link to the article can also be found in our PRESS section.
Machination Week 1 Done
Our latest feature Machination has just wrapped Week one of production. It’s a two week shoot, but we now have a week off to recover and rest for a moment before planning and prep begins for Production Week two. Machination is about a woman battling the monsters in her head during a global pandemic and stars Steffi Thake as Maria. If the first weeks rushes are anything to go by, it will be a very powerful performance.
We are thrilled with the results so far and grateful to the small but dedicated team helping us to make this film happen during a real pandemic here in Malta, part of the worldly global pandemic which inspired the writing of the Machination story. It may seem like a timely film, but it’s story more than what you see on the surface - it’s story about a woman battling mental illness, facing here past demons and how the two meet to break the human spirit.
Mental illness is a topic we need to talk more openly about as the monsters in people’s minds can be life threatening, and any event that is large and out of our control, spurred on by heightened media can feed anxiety and trigger symptoms for a sufferer. Sometimes with devastating results.
The beautiful thing about working so closely with Steffi in the improvised process from conception stage, from the very first story outline (that was more focused on the absurdity of conspiracy theories and the media hype surrounding such theorists views which emerged through the pandemic here in Malta), is that together, through research and advice from psychological professionals, the story of Maria and the monsters she is battling became more of the character piece we are interested in and can relate to. A big step away from the genre horror film we had originally envisioned, which we honestly were not sure we wanted to make.
The Machination we are filming now is relatable, it could happen to you or me and it’s a character study of a woman who, throughout a pandemic outbreak is being pushed to her mental limit due to the reality she has created in her mind.
Life Improvised: Hoping
Last month we finished Life Improvised: Hiding, a bleak look at the fear and anxiety caused by the COVID-19 pandemic, filmed during lockdown. But now we are proud to share a more optimistic reflection on the pandemic in Life Improvised: Hoping. Again, it stars Sarah Jayne with Ivan Malekin the only crew, but this time though we tackle fear and uncertainty we also want to present a message of hope and resilience. Life goes on and we can make the best of a bad situation if we embrace the lessons that can be learnt.
Lockdown Inspires Filmmaking
It’s a crazy time, I don’t have to tell you that, we are all living through this COVID-19 pandemic hell and some of us are having a hard time more than others due to factors in our lives which existed before this hit. Some of us now are feeling the hardship suddenly wash over us as we loose our jobs, our income, our physical connection to others and our sanity.
To keep us going in lockdown and self quarantine we have been writing screenplays, developing ideas and shooting films. These films are short films which fit under our Life Improvised micro film banner and shot mostly in one location, with Sarah Jayne as the lead and Ivan Malekin as DOP.
The first one is called Hiding and is about a woman becoming more and more paranoid about the rise of COVID-19. She puts herself in self-quarantine as she battles her fear.
The second micro-short is called Hoping, and is a reflective look at our ‘new normal’ with hope for the days ahead.
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