Tell Us Your Secrets (2016)

An American gets kidnapped and asked to reveal government secrets. But his kidnappers are in for a real surprise!  

Produced by Smadam Productions and The Mailroom

Starring

Ryan Sitzberger

Jacob Barbot

Julia Mercer

Lucia Rieur

Steph Callaghan

Boom operator was Michael Bermuda

Written and directed by Alec Valadez

Music

Hitman by Kevin MacLeod

Corruption by Kevin MacLeod

Chipper Dan by Podington Bear

Note Drop by Broke for Free

At this point in our careers, this was probably the most ambitious short we had attempted. We had a fairly large cast, we needed a dark and dingy location, we needed make-up, we needed costumes - and that wasn't even accounting for the sound mixing and special effects that would be required in post-production!

Make no mistake about it, we have so much love for this project. We still think it's funny and honestly, what a great story. But it also taught us so many lessons. It can always be shorter. Maybe a basement is a bad place for good audio. Too much color correcting can create artifacts in your footage. Bumping the ISO up might get you more light, but also more noise. Maybe fix it before you get to post. It's not a bad idea to do test footage before you say you can pull off a special effect. This makes us love this short even more as it taught us so many important things about filmmaking.