Filmmaking Club's Cut/Splice

For this issue, Matthew James Borrill (5C) walks us through the filmmaking process of his award-winning film "Nihilium".

Making Nothing

Nihilum premiered at the After Dark Horror Short Film Competition and won Best Film, Best Director, Best Editor, and Best Supporting Actor. Stream it at YPICA Film Club's Facebook page.

Nihilium started out when the After Dark Horror Short Film Competition was happening. My friends and I were brainstorming ideas for our own horror movie. We settled on a story about a curious student lingering on the Dark Web. During scriptwriting, we changed the story, from the Dark Web to a fictional website called Nihilium, which is the Latin word for "Nothing". We stuck with a story that was simple and easy to execute while allowing us to take advantage of multiple locations.

The Hacker was a character we created as a sort of antagonist in the story. We didn't really have an idea or concept on what he would look like. We needed a character that was intimidating and dangerous so, we simply grabbed whatever we had and used it.

Milan, Jonald, and Kishan in a scene from "Nihilium".

The original idea was that, after the main character checked out the website, the dark figure or "The Hacker” would appear at the main character’s place and terrorize him. The main character would then sleep over at a friend’s place for a while before returning to his own flat only to find out that the dreaded Hacker would still be there. Then, there would have been a news coverage about the main character going missing, but we thought that it was all too ambitious for the budget and schedule that were available to us.

Eric (5B) and I worked on the screenplay. We wrote a loose script so that our actors could improvise. Most, if not all, of the jokes in the movie were done on-the-spot or came about during the postproduction stage. We didn't really have a full script when filming began. New pages and scenes were written the day before the shooting of the scene. Shots and camera angles were staged on the fly.

Shooting took about two weeks in total. We decided we were going to go to shoot on-location only once so, we made sure to cover whatever we can at that location. For example, since there were two scenes set in Ginza, instead of going there a second time we filmed both scenes on the same day but shot them at different areas to make it look a bit different.

The house was filmed at a friend's flat and the scenes there were shot in two days. The ending was a day-for-night-shot which is a scene filmed during the day but edited and manipulated to look like night. The school scenes, and everything else all the way to the ending scenes, were all shot after school in the same afternoon.

Jonald discovers the dark secrets of "Nihilium".

We initially decided to have the film lean more toward horror but when editing came around, our editor, Eric, edited the film to be more horrorcomedy. We were originally going to edit the film together, but my computer was unavailable at the time so, we had to use his computer and editing software to complete the film.

During shooting, we wanted to have a post-credit sequence. After the credits, "The Hacker” was supposed to kidnap the main character and there would've been a news report about the main character going missing. We cut it due to the time length exceeding five minutes. It would've been both difficult and time-consuming.

Fun fact: Eric submitted the final cut with the filename “Do_Not_Delete”. Thinking that this was the title, Filmmaking Club announced it on stage during the awarding of the trophies instead of the real title “Nihilium”.

Nihilium's award winning cast and crew (L-R) Mahmod, Jonald, Eric, Milan, Matthew, and Kishan celebrating their win by watching a horror film.