PipemanRadio Interviews Jeff Burton Director of Horror Short Ophelia

0:04 Hi, you have done too this censure? Wow crazy you? Why up America, It's time for the Adventures. So pipe Man on W four C. Why I'm com wiz pon Beach is number one Internet radio station. Here's your host, the vipe Man. This is the pipe Man here on the Adventures pipe Man W four C Y Radio. And I'm very excited about our next guest. I know there's a bunch of people in our network that would be excited because we love, love, love horror flicks and this one is really really cool. You're going to want to check it out. So let's welcome to a show. Jeff Burton, how are you hey, I'm doing good. Thanks for having me. Oh my pleasure. And uh so tell us a little bit about ophelia. Where where did the brainchild come to?

1:07 You know in your head for this? Yeah, so interesting story. When I was younger, I'm from Michigan and grew up just outside of Detroit, and in my city there's a psychiatric hospital called Eloise. It closed down in the eighties, but at one point it was the biggest in the country, had its own zip code, its own fire department, all of that. It was massive. I remember when it closed down in high school a couple of times, sneaking in and scaring myself, you know, walking around the halls and you know, pitch dark and just it was scary, and that that feeling never left me. And then a couple of years ago I got a call from a high school friend who said, Hey, guess where I'm at. I'm in Eloise, and somebody bought it and they're turning it into a haunted attraction. So the guy turned to the first floor, in the second floor, or excuse me, the basement in the first floor into a really high level haunted attraction. Two, three, four and five is still paranormal investigators all that kind of stuff. So I asked him, I said, if I come up with these ideas I want to do like a horror universe like Conjuring and Annabelle and you know, throwing an offshoot like paranormal activity, could I shoot some of it here? And he's like, yeah, one hundred percent. So I spent the next year, some with a writing

2:42 partner and some on my own, coming up with three completed scripts for full length movies. And then we decided instead of look books and you know, business plan and all that stuff, let's just do a proof of concept short. What do we want that short to be? You know, it's got to stand on its own, it's got to get there. It's gotta you know. And the idea for taking the character out of one of the movies and giving her her own short film in a sense, and kind of introducing people to what this could be. And you know what, right off the bat, like even from the trailer, it catches my attention right off the bat, which is the key to what you want, because listen, you don't catch somebody's attention there, where are you going to catch it? But it interested me totally because of the fact that I've had my own experience with a paranormal but be psychiatric hospitals. You know. I used to live in a house in Marlborough, New Jersey, directly across from the Marlborough State Hospital, which also no longer there, and me and my bro used to sit outside on the front porch and there was some weird stuff that would go on

4:14 at night outside that hospital, and like we weren't sure whether it was real paranormal or what was going on, but it was like, I think we're gonna go back inside. I'm with you there, you know. And then I had another scenario. You're gonna laugh at this one because this one I've never told on the radio ever. But my father was you know, he was kind of a party animal, and he ended up like going nuts from that and he my my family locked him up in a mental hospital in California, and he I went that he wanted me to break him out of the place. He called me, and so I was like, I don't know, sixteen years old. I went down there, and when I walked in the place, it gave me the creeps the minute I walked in. So like something like, this is not just a horror flick. It's like it's real life, this stuff that happens. And so tell us a little bit without ruining the movie, a little bit about the story behind the short and the full length movie as well. So what I did was, you know, I tried to create this backstory of in the late eighteen hundreds, they

5:49 were putting people in asylums for anything like tuberculosis, you know, gonorrhea, menstruation, like not to mention just normal things, you know, but even Parkinson's and like anything that they didn't know you had to be crazy and they put you in an asylum. Well, what if in a remote area the government actually authorized the build of a massive asylum for the worst of the worst, like people who were criminally insane and all that stuff. And what if there was a doctor that headed this whole thing and he did his own types of experiments, like really throwing the rule books away and anything goes And what if this doctor had a little girl. That's where Ophelia came from. She saw all this wow, and you know, and that's not even so far fetched because I lived in Agura in high school and ninety percent of my friends were locked up in Woodview, Calabasas, which is also no longer there for the same type of reasons, like parents can control their kids, so they didn't know what to do, so they got pitched to put them into these mental hospitals. And there is some weird stuff that goes on mental hospitals.

7:15 That again, that's what makes what you're doing so great, because it's not far fetched. You know, there's a lot of weird stuff that goes on. Well, I have this paranorm uh paranoia of what what if you get wrongfully put in an asylum and they start giving you medications that completely put you in the mindset like you should be there and not from the outside. They're looking at you like, see, he is crazy, but it's really just a medicine. And what if that gets worse and worse? So that, to me is maybe the foundation and for all of this. And one of the movies I wrote with one of my writing partners, which is right here, seven Cells. That's what that's about, which is what if you woke up in a concrete room, total darkness, you didn't know where you were, why you were there, and worse, who you are, and then you find out there's seven others. You know, that's like the first five minutes of that movie, and then it gets worse. So that's my paranoia.

8:35 And then I you know, and that all happens to take place in this asylum one hundred and eighty years later. Wow, But there's all this Ophelia stuff, and I have like an eighteen ninety two backstory film that kind of you see it unfolding in real time. Then movies like the short film you saw take place present day and is Ophelia a ghost? Is she you know? Who was there with her? You know? Because you saw the ending without giving anything away. So I think a lot of people have paranoia of even if it's as basic as what if your fate was out of your hands? That she usually is in nose plays, right, Yeah, you know, And I started, you know, with a super low budget movies, you know, back when I was younger, and you know that starts with just the simple, you know, crazy person running around hacking people up, and you know that's kind of what you cut your teeth on if you're a horror movie fan. And you know, I grew up on John Carpenter and you know Friday the Thirteenth as well, and you know that kind of stuff, Freddy Krueger. So that's all in me. But then all of a sudden, Scream came along and it was different. Then you know,

10:11 the Blumhouse stuff with you know, their their take on their early films, which you know, you get Annabelle and Conjuring and you know, different things from that time period, including paranormal activity. And so, you know, being haven't been around for a little while, I've experienced quite a few takes on the horror world. And I was also lucky enough again being from Michigan, when I made my first movie. I was introduced to a gentleman named Bill Vincent, who is the ms the Michigan State University screenwriting professor. He was Sam Raimi's professor, and Sam Raimi did The Evil Dead and Army of Darkness and a bunch of great movies including you know, Oz, the Great and Powerful, plus the latest Doctor Strange multiverse movie. So he's a big time director, but he started with a couple hundred thousand dollars, you know, coming up with this idea in Michigan with his MSU professor. And I was lucky enough to that professor introduced me to his brother Ivan, who wrote Army of Darkness, Spider Man three Dragged Me to Hell. We became friends and we did some writing together. I did some writing with Bill Vincent, the professor. I also did some writing with a gentleman named Chuck Farr p

11:43 F A R. R. E. R. And he's a former Navy seal who actually wrote the movie Navy Seals back in the day with Charlie Sheen and then went on to do quite a few big movies like Hard Target and The Jackal and Red Planet and you know, a whole host of movies and working with these people. It really brought out I was more visual. I cared about the shot, and I cared about the audio and the sound design because I'm a former musician who you know, recorded hundreds of songs and scored my first eight movies. But once I met these people and they taught me how to put a basic plot line together. You know, movies have to have beats, you have to scare people at certain points. You've got to do this stuff, and there's a process that people are used to receiving.

12:39 Now, you can always vary eight, you can always take risks, and you know, change things up, but generally speaking, there's there's a formula that if you can you can get a story to weave into those plot points and those expected things and then some unexpected things and then your own twist on things. That's when you start separating yourself from your early works. Yeah. And you know what, though, I have to say, I personally sometimes like a low budget because I think some like you take some of the movies now that are remakes of movies from back when I was a kid, like seventies and eighties. I don't like the newer versions like I like the older versions, even though it didn't have the special effect. It's just more real.

13:35 And one thing I can say is while I was watching Ophelia, I mean I didn't get to feel it was low budget at all. I felt like it was like a full motion picture. And you know, credit to you. And because also how many things scare me too much and that, you know, like we got Halloween, I go to haunted houses and I scared of people trying to scare me. I never really get scared in a haunted house, but in real stuff, I've been, you know, scared. And that's the feeling I got from Ophelia, like like it was real. It wasn't a movie. It wasn't something where, oh, I know what's going to happen next. It was like, get me out of here.

14:20 I appreciate that. And a little side note. I did a screening at a theater and invited about fifty people. You know, some people who worked on it. In their family is a little girl and her mom and dad and grandma and grandpa and on unts and uncles and stuff. And then other people that I've worked with through the years, you know, because I took seven years off just to write screenplays, like I took some time off of filmmaking because I wanted to get better as a storyteller, because I knew I was always going to care about the picture and the audio. So I did a surround sound mix of Ophelia, which I'm proud of myself for learning how to do that. But as the person who did the sound design for it, I was able to you sit in complete circumference of what that house sounds like, all that atmospherical you know, rumbling and those sounds and what have you are going on all around you and giggles over here and creaking floorboards over here, and then somebody says avery off to the front right, and you know, everybody when it got done, that was the first time I ever felt really fulfilled because everybody sat there in silence until the end of the credits, because you know, a little girl singing creepily with reverb is always

15:52 good to sit around. And then they stood up and applauded, and that's I thought, like they got it. Because it was so important to me to have the audio really take and immerse people in it, because if the audio's bad as a viewer, it takes you out of the enjoyment. You can still follow the plot and this and that, but I just I felt like Ophelia deserved that house, deserved to be a character. And then the audio. I agree with you, because the audio is what makes it more real. It makes you kind of engaged with it, you know. And it's just like doing radio or a podcast, Like there's people out there that have great content. If their audio is terrible, I don't want to hear it, you know, It's like it just it would not do it for me. And in the same way movie, like, I'm one of those type of people that you know, and people will say, how do you do that? Like I'll watch a movie while I'm working, you know, at night, you know, and or I'll watch a movie doing other things.

17:04 It's the movie that gets me to stop doing those other things and sit and literally get consumed by the movie. That's a good movie, and to me, that's what a feeling is. Well. I appreciate that. I think one of the one of the one of the first thoughts after deciding to make a short version of one of the features, was I don't want to start at the beginning, have a little bit of the middle, have a little bit of this, have a little bit of that. I want to take these characters and and let's let's assume that this was the second to last group of paranormal investigators that went into this house before the feature film. And I wanted to start at like the eleventh hour, like I didn't want to.

17:56 I didn't want to a slow burn. I didn't want to take eighteen minutes to finally get to one cool thing at the end. I wanted to make it seem like everything's already gone wrong, everything's already in a bad way, and this girl is about to, you know, have a pretty bad eighteen minutes. Yeah. And you know, it's funny because when I first looked at it, you know, I didn't see the writing part about headphones, and I was just looking at it, and then I noticed where it said, you know, put headphones on, And man, that was good instructions. People need to fall instructions because that made all the difference in the world too, because the sound that you're talking about and what you created, like it totally when you're putting the headphones on, totally engulfs you and it's almost like you're there. That's how I like to feel in all the movies that I've done. Is like you are the extra character. Like I do a lot of handheld stuff. I'm in with the people, and I wanted people to feel like they were in the house too. Yeah, and that's the way it should be. Now, speaking of which, tell everybody how they can go to the website, how they can check out Ophelia, how they can see not only the trailer, but the full you know, movie and anything you want that they would connect to you, socials, all that

19:27 good stuff. Yeah, So go to opheliamovie dot com. You can watch the trailer and you can watch the short film there. It's also shows, you know, some movie posters. And we've entered a bunch of festivals, film festivals, and we're winning a lot of them. We're honorable mentioned. We've got best special Effects, Makeup, Best Film, Best little Girl Actor, you know, different things like that. As you said, I recommend the best audio situation that you can possibly do. Whether it's headphones, some people have their computers set up with really nice speakers. If you've got a smart TV, you can just go to YouTube. You can put in Ophelia short movie. It pops up, Turn on your soundbar, turn on your sub wolfer. Because you're gonna feel it and just enjoy it. I mean, you can go to Shadow Lake Films on Instagram, you know, reach out to us there. We just we just got that going. But the big thing here is just to share this short with people, get some buzz, and we want to turn this into finding the right people to make the films with. Well, I think it is definitely the next best thing in horror because also too, like you said, you know, you've gotten awards and people really love it at the film festivals, and that says a lot because of any genre of moviesror horror movies in those scenarios at those film festivals,

21:03 there's a lot of competition, a lot a lot of competition, So it says huge things that you or even noticed, much less get awards in there. So that's a big reason in and of itself for people to check out the movie for sure. Yeah, I appreciate that. Is there anything else you want to let the listeners and the viewers know that we haven't covered already that they need to know about Ophelia? No? I mean, I I like keeping a certain level of horror movies alive. You know, it's not even just Halloween it's people like to be scared, whether it's roller coasters.

21:49 I like to do stuff that is a little fantastic in the sense that you know, you can get lost in it, not with not like mafia movies scare me, war movies scare me. This is good fun to me. And I think all the independent filmmakers out there, you know that are wondering if they should make a movie, just do it. I did it for no money, no idea what I was doing, and eventually got a little bit better and a little bit better, and it takes time, but just start, just do it nice. Well. I think that's great advice.

22:34 I also think, you know, since I do all like music festivals, especially like the Danny Wimmer festivals, and just playing it out there, this would be a great idea. Like they have comedy things sometimes it would be a great idea to have Ophelia or any of your other works in a music festival environment like that too, because it just goes hand in hand. So I'm just putting that out there in the world. I completely my first movie. I recorded sixteen bands for the soundtrack. A lot of the music made it into the movie. I had a scene in the movie where there was a battle of the bands happening in the movie, so you know, people could get exposure that way. I sold copies of the CD. I'm a firm believer that music and sound in movies matters. In horror movies, It's key there, you go, absolutely one hundred percent. Well, I thank you for giving us this because it is it's great creativity. I love it. I know all the listeners will love it. And thanks for being on the Adventures of Pipmin. Yeah, I really appreciate. It's good to meet you. Thank you for listening to the Adventures of Pipemin. I'm w for CUI Radio.