Farmhouse Horror Short Pre-production Board

Pre-production board for a 12-minute farmhouse horror short: location, creature build, practical effects, lighting, sound and a four-day shoot plan.

Updated

This board was put together for a twelve-minute horror short set on a working farm in late November, and it is laid out the way the team used it in the weeks before the shoot. It opens with the treatment, a one-page brief and a single still of the farmhouse at dusk. Those three cards do the pitching: anyone joining the project can read the story, the team, the dates and the budget before looking at anything else, and the still sets the tone the whole film is lit to. A saved film reference sits beside them with an arrow saying exactly what to borrow from it, which is the lamp-lit interiors and nothing else. The farmhouse section is a photo grid of the real rooms the film uses, from the front elevation to the loft, with a recce note beside it that records what matters on the day: which way the kitchen faces, how wide the stairs are, where the power comes from and what the farmer has asked for. The palette sits here too, taken from umber walls, straw, wet sacking and the blue of the field at dusk, because the location decides the colours. A smaller set of alternates from the second-choice farm is kept out of the way in its own group. The creature section keeps the practical build in one place: texture references for the skin, hands and head, a build note, the three blood gags in scene order and the workshop checklist. Keeping the gags next to the references makes it easy to see what each one needs and how long it takes to reset. Light and sound share a section because in this film they do the same job. The lighting rules are short and fixed, the reference pictures show the only sources allowed in the house, and the sound note and field recording set out what the audience hears instead of a score. The shoot plan closes the board with a four-day schedule, the top budget lines, a checklist of what is still open and a note on night work and weather. If you are building your own horror short film pre-production board, start from the location and the light, settle the rules early, and let the schedule follow the gags and the dusk. Photos by Zach Ward, Wendelin Jacober, Rüveyda, Alfo Medeiros, Laura C, Boti Von, Emmet, Ann H, Jakub Sambor, Nagy Richard, Tóth Viktor, James Frid and Natural Light Visuals on Pexels. Sound: "Perseverance rover's SuperCam records wind on Mars" by NASA/JPL-Caltech/LANL/CNES/CNRS/ISAE-Supaero (Public domain) on Wikimedia Commons.
A derelict house with broken door and overgrown foliage creates a moody rustic scene.

Treatment

Logline

After the last of the harvest is in, a widow farming alone finds that something has moved into her hay loft, and that it keeps rules she half remembers.

The story

Ruth Garrow is 64 and has worked Hollow Acre alone since Tom died in the spring. The bales are in. The hens go quiet. There is a trail of wet straw from the barn to the back door.

Her mother left a saucer of milk on the loft step every winter and never said why. Ruth does the same, and it works for four nights. On the fifth the

A close-up of an old, weathered wooden door showcasing rustic textures and natural wear.

A × visual grid — The farmhouse (3 images) — view it on the board above.

Detailed close-up of a weathered and rusty corrugated metal wall showing texture.

The Tenant — build

Ollie Brandt in the suit, 6ft 4 plus 8cm lifts. Never whole and lit in the same shot.
- Skin: hessian sacking over foam, soaked in glycerine and cold tea, straw packed at the seams
- Hands: two pairs; the long pair has 30cm root-wood fingers on aluminium rods
- Head: latex over Mei's sculpt, rotten-timber grain, cable jaw, no eyes, a wet slit
- Ruth smells it before she sees it: damp hay, every time
Mei builds at the Horncastle unit from 26 Oct.

▶ Fog off the top field (plays on the board above)

One bulb — Sc. 6
One bulb — Sc. 6

Schedule — 4 days

  • Day
  • Scenes
  • Call
  • Wrap
  • Fri 20 Nov
  • Sc. 1, 2, 4 — yard, lane, field
  • 07:00
  • 17:00
  • Sat 21 Nov
  • Sc. 3, 5, 6 — kitchen, back hall
  • 11:00
  • 23:00
  • Sun 22 Nov
  • Sc. 7, 8, 9 — stairs, loft, creature
  • 13:00
  • 01:00
  • Mon 23 Nov
  • Fog plates, wild tracks, inserts
  • 06:30
  • 12:00

Budget — top lines

  • Line
  • £
  • Note
  • Location, Pell Farm, 4 days
  • 1,600
  • Incl. house power
  • Creature build + suit
  • 2,400
  • Mei, 3 weeks
  • Blood + gags
  • 350
  • Pump rig hire, 2 gal syrup
  • Lighting + 20kVA genny
  • 1,900
  • Ada's kit
  • Fog + haze
  • 280
  • Fluid, 2 days hire
  • Catering, 14 crew
  • 1,100
  • Two hot meals on nights
  • Contingency 10%
  • 763
  • —
  • Total
  • 8,393
  • Screen fund + deferrals
Foggy countryside scene with metal gate and dense foliage.

Second choice if Pell falls through. Bigger barn and a better loft, but the kitchen was refitted in the 90s and the A16 is audible from the yard. Jonah's photos from 14 Oct.

Lighting rules

Agreed with Lena, 28 Oct.
- Interiors lit only by what's in the room: the bulb, the oil lamp, the range door
- Bulbs swapped to 2400K, lamp at 1800K. No daylight balance indoors after Sc. 4
- Exteriors overcast only. If the sun comes out, we move inside to the stairs
- Blue hour on the top field is 16:05 to 16:30: one take a night, Fri and Sat
- The creature is lit from below or behind, never from the front

Kitchen lamp
Kitchen lamp
Hands — root ref
Hands — root ref

Before the shoot

[x] Pell Farm contract and insurance signed
[x] Genny position agreed with Mr Pell
[x] Hen wrangler booked for Sat
[ ] Night calls cleared with every department
[ ] Met Office checks daily from Mon 16 Nov
[ ] Diesel heaters and hot food for the loft nights

Blue hour, top field
Blue hour, top field

Pell Farm, late November

  • Umber wall — #3b2a1e
  • Lamp amber — #c8893a
  • Straw — #c9b27a
  • Wet sacking — #6b5a44
  • Top field dusk — #4a5560
  • Bone — #e6dcc6

Sound — ideas

From Tomás.
- Two minutes of room tone in every room at Pell Farm, with the range ticking
- Loft creaks are real: record the joists with Ollie walking in the suit on Day 3
- No score until the last minute. Before that: wind, hens, the fridge, the bulb's hum
- Ruth's radio plays an old organ hymn, public domain, thin through a 3-inch speaker
- The creature has no voice. It sounds like wet straw being pulled apart

The Witch (2015 film)

Location — Pell Farm

Pell Farm, Haugham, near Louth. Recce'd 12 Oct with Jonah and Priya.
- 1890s brick, kitchen faces west: last light through the sink window until about 15:50
- Back stairs are 68cm wide: no Steadicam, handheld or a slider on the landing
- Loft floor is sound but unlit; power from the house, 2 x 16A
- Lane is 400m of mud, 4x4 only after rain
- Mr Pell wants the hens in by dusk and no haze near the grain store

♪ Barn at night — wind in the boards — 0:40 · 0 BPM · M4A (plays on the board above)

Nights + weather

- Sat and Sun are late calls running into the night. Hot food at 18:00 and 23:00
- Loft is unheated: two diesel heaters, off for takes
- Fog: Kofi checks the Met Office from Mon 16 Nov. No natural fog by Day 4, we run the fogger off the trailer
- Unit base in the cart shed, not the house
- Day 4 is a skeleton crew of five: Priya, Ada, Tomás, Kofi, Lena

Head — rotten timber
Head — rotten timber

Blood + gags

Three gags, all in camera.
- Sc. 5, the hen: feathers and a rubber hen dropped from the loft hatch. No blood on screen, just the sound
- Sc. 8, the nail: prosthetic palm piece, two takes max. Mei's syrup blood, darker than shop blood under tungsten
- Sc. 9, the loft: pump rig through the floorboards, 1 litre, dripping onto the lamp glass
Reset on Sc. 9 is 40 min, so it goes last.

Includes a nested board (open it from the canvas above)

FX workshop — to do

[x] Sacking skin dyed and aged
[x] Head sculpt signed off by Lena
[ ] Cable jaw test on the finished head
[ ] Suit fitting with Ollie, lifts on
[ ] Second pair of root-wood hands for the stairs
[ ] Pump rig test through spare floorboards