Endings Are Hard... Why I Hate the Ending of My Short Film

Happy Halloween, if you are watching this on Halloween, which most of you probably aren't, so hope you had a good Halloween. But with Halloween right around the corner, at least for us when we're shooting this, my last horror short has been rattling around in my head. Specifically, one thing about it that I now kinda hate and wish I had done completely differently. So we're gonna talk about that, what I learned from it, and if Film Riot is dying or not. Dying? Who? Well. The short film I'm talking about is There Comes a Knocking. It's sort of a tone piece short film that I made to accompany a feature script I was taking out at the time. It was a tricky one because I couldn't give away what the feature would be, but I still had to give a sense of what it would be. And before we get into it, I'm obviously about to spoil the short film, which is only nine minutes, so go give that a watch at the link below if you have not seen it before, then come back here. To start off, I think it's worth watching the ending moments of the short. So if you've seen it, here's a quick recap to get us up to that ending point. We open on decaying roses, then see a bed that's half slept in, half untouched, inside of a bedroom that's a bit of a mess. Then ultimately, we find our lead, Emma, installing some ornate door, which she accidentally locks shut, tries to pick the lock, then loses the tool that she tried to pick the lock with under the door. It's all a bit cryptic until we find her doing what it seems like she might do every night, sitting alone, listening to the last message her husband left her before dying. We also find out that her husband is the one that purchased the door, setting us up for this cut that shifts what the door means to us. Then, as Emma's clock shifts to 3 a.m., she's woken by the sound of knocking. Turns out that it's coming from that door, which is just a closet. She peeks under, the knocks get more aggressive, and the tool she lost under the door comes rolling out, telling us it's not all in our head. So with that recap out of the way, let's watch it from there. Leave me alone! John, John, is that you? Is that really you? Yes, Emma, it's me. Can you stay? Yes, Emma. I can stay. Now, I will say, I have talked about this in the past, and there are a few people that have told me they disagree and they like the ending, and I think that's great. If the ending worked for you, you're not wrong. It worked for you. And while I'm very proud of this film overall, the last shot is what I wish I would have done differently. For one, I realized far too late that the creature was over the wrong shoulder on this shot. I should have had him over her other shoulder. And it's the positioning of the viewer's eye on the screen that dictates that decision. Here's what I mean. This is the shot directly before the final jump scare moment. So our eyes are right here on the screen, but when we cut to our final shot, our eyes are still right here where there is nothing, so we get this big music cue for nothing until our eyes have to shift, making the journey to the other side of the screen to find the creature here. Again, some have said that searching it out is what made it creepier to them, but for me, it dilutes the shock, and so the moment as a whole as well. It still works, but with less impact. Since if he was right over the shoulder, your eyes would have been right exactly where I wanted you to look, so that shock would have hit immediately. But even if I would have had the creature over the correct shoulder, this final sort of it's right behind you jump scare has been done so many times that I feel it diminishes the whole. And to prove my point, just watch almost any horror short film on YouTube. It's not gonna take a lot of clicks to find that ending elsewhere and multiple times. So instead of doing that contrived ending, I wish I would have drawn out the ending just a touch longer. And as I've done with my other short films like Tell, I should have played with the audience's expectation of knowing that something would show up behind her. Then just don't do that, and use that unfulfilled expectation to increase the unease and let her step into the room, interact with her ghost husband, and have a shift, which I have an idea for what I'm going to do, and I don't wanna detail it here because I think I might actually do it for the feature, but something that would have been more gradual, that would have leaned into the dread and creepiness instead of just a loud music jump scare. I would have used the same creature still in the end, but revealed him more unexpectedly, and use that to stay more thematically true than I ended up doing. And again, don't get me wrong, I am very proud of this short film. I love the work we did here. Stephanie is absolutely incredible. The cinematography from Chase is phenomenal. The score from Daniel James is amazing. Lucas Harger's editing crushes as usual. The whole crew really helped me create something that I'm still very, very proud of, and everything leading up to that last shot, I wouldn't change. But I think it's incredibly important to go back and dissect your own work and see where it failed and why it failed that way so you can take those lessons to the next thing. Because that failure at the end of There Comes a Knocking is something that I learned more from and have taken more from to the work that came after it than the rest of the things that I did learn that succeeded in that short film, and all of Ballistic that came before it. Ballistic is a short film that I'm very, very proud of, and it's a much longer short film, and something I learned a lot from as well. And there's a lot of small mistakes, but there wasn't anything in Ballistic that was as glaring and massive of a mistake, in my opinion, as the ending shot of There Comes a Knocking. So that failure was one that was a strong reminder of something I already knew, and really taught me something about how I end any story that I'm conveying to an audience. So I guess the point here is, don't ignore your failures. Open your arms wide to them and let them make you a better filmmaker. Every big mistake you make is one that you now fully understand and have the intellectual tools to not fall into the same trap again. And I guess the main thing, the main takeaway here for me is audience expectation, which is something that I preached on the show a ton, and why earlier I said reinforcing something I already knew. It's about understanding what your audience's expectation is at any given moment in your film, their expectation of the next line of dialogue, the next shot, and so on. People are so versed in cinematic language now that while it makes some things difficult, it also gives you so many more creative tools. You can use their assumptions about the ending, where the scare might come from, or even how a character relationship might evolve. If you understand those expectations and understand them from a place of experience, from mistakes, whether those are your own or even other people's mistakes. Although when it is your mistake, it's a lot stronger, I think, a lot louder, and has more experience wrapped up in it. But looking at it and dissecting those mistakes will help you further refine and understand what an audience expectation might be at any given moment. That way you can conduct the symphony of your story in such an intentional way that you'll hopefully land the story exactly as intended. At least that's what I'm always chasing. But I do want to talk a little bit about Film Riot as well, but before we do, let's thank today's sponsor, which is Musicbed. And speaking of expectations, my expectation when it comes to finding music for any project is that eventually I'm gonna be pulling my hair out, but Musicbed has genuinely made it infinitely better. Of course, they are very curated for filmmakers. They have high standards for everything that's on their platform. They've even said they accept less than 1% of music submissions, which is why every song that you click on is gonna hit the quality and emotional levels you need. But what's made it better for me at least is the AI-powered search by song feature. Whenever I'm making something, I usually do have a piece of music in mind. But of course, that's some kind of popular copyrighted music that I can't use. So if I have a joke, say, that would work amazingly well with this Eminem track, I can type the name of that song in here or even copy paste the link over there, and Musicbed is gonna automatically deliver me up a bunch of tracks that fit the same vibe. I can also turn on quick preview here, which will take me right to the heart of each song, giving a sense of it very quickly. And to make it even faster, I can use shortcuts like up and down arrow to shift songs. And again, with quick preview on, I'm getting to that core immediately. Then I can use forward arrow to jump ahead 10 seconds, back arrow to jump back 10 seconds. So again, it's not just that you're getting really high quality music, it's the methods they put in place to help you find what you actually need. So if you are a creator of any kind that wants better music that's a whole lot easier to find, make the switch to Musicbed and start your 14-day free trial today. Link for that in the notes below. You may have noticed that we've been doing less episodes this year, like a lot less. And we've seen a lot of comments asking if FilmRite is going away, which is a totally understandable assumption, but no, not at all. There's been a few factors of why we have pulled back. One has been a bit of burnout. We needed a little bit of a breather, but the main reasons have been projects. We started working more closely with Adobe, making some videos for their channel, which you can find a link to that in the notes below if you're interested. But I've also been focusing a lot of my attention on larger projects this year. A lot of writing, pitching, and a lot of planning. And I can't really give a lot of details on that yet. One, because it might hurt the potential of some of those projects. But for a lot of the others, it's because we're still figuring that out and I don't wanna announce something that may change because that's the nature of indie filmmaking. But I will say that we should have been communicating with all of you a lot more. We have the most amazing community of filmmakers and I want to get back to engaging with that community a lot more. So we plan to do a full episode probably early next year. That will be more of a career update for me and a show update as well. Until then, I can safely say that I am pitching several features right now, working with multiple writers on some scripts, some that I'm writing alone, but there's also three comics in the works at various stages and I'm hopeful that we'll be able to launch two of those next year. Then we have a bit of a shift here at Film Riot as I'm focusing more on these larger projects. Josh is gonna be taking over more and more as we go on. I'm not going anywhere, but soon we'll hopefully be following me on one of those larger projects that I'm talking about. And there are other new things that we have in the works as well. I'm sitting on the set of one of those right now. Go on, watch the beef. This is the set for our coming podcast called All of the Above Podcast, which will be Josh, Justin, and myself sitting around talking about film, goofy nonsense, and anything else we feel like. It's one of the ways that we're hoping to reconnect with all of you and bring you more deeply into our day-to-day. So for all of our longtime supporters, thank you, know we are not going away and there is a lot of cool things on the horizon. And once we kick off the All of the Above Podcast, which will probably be early next year as well, we'll be keeping you up to date with all that we have going on on a much more normal basis. In a format like that, we're gonna be able to dive a lot deeper too. So it's something that I'm very, very excited about. That's it from me today. And again, I'm excited about what the next few years are gonna bring for us. And I'm even more excited to bring you all along for whatever that ends up being, the good and the bad, as we always have. So until next time, don't forget to write, shoot, edit, repeat. See you later. Talk, talk.