A terrified young woman wakes up in the dark woods. Crows caw, bamboo wind chimes eerily rattle, creepy choral voices chant and whisper.
So begins Gorshire, a film by Grade 12 students Ylva Grundvig and Lucia Schevers.
Appropriately filmed on Quadra, where scarily beautiful woods abound, the 10-minute movie is about a woman who is cursed by a haunted forest, and then saved by a coven of witches.
Period costumes are wonderful, the lighting and colouring are impressively done, and the sound effects are equally apt.
Grundvig, who helmed the camera said she has been interested in movie making since she was a child.
“I’ve always been making little short films,” she said. “I had a little GoPro camera when I was younger.”
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She is in her last year of high school, and taking a video productions class. Her teacher challenged her to make something a little more advanced, and she took up the gauntlet.
Grundvig and Schevers started brainstorming for ideas.
“We’ve been interested in witchy things in general,” she said. “And we thought it would be a cool concept that nobody who’d taken the class had done before.”
Their stomping grounds on Quadra Island were the obvious choices for locations.
The forest scenes were filmed at the Community Centre woods, because they go there so often, Grundvig said. Other scenes were filmed on her parent’s property, and the final one – which has a marvelous drone shot of the witches atop a hill – was shot at a neighbour’s place.
During filming, a curious bear stumbled upon the shoot.
“It was a little scary, but we saw it in the distance and we backed away,” Grundvig said.
The response to the film has been great, which has encouraged the girls to collaborate on more movies in the future.
Like the drone shot to end Gorshire, the sky’s the limit for these talented young film makers.
ronan.odoherty@campbellrivermirror.com
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