Abandoned and exposed to a deadly disease, a young woman wakes up to discover she must survive the night alone.

Joe Penna and his team return with another exciting short sci-fi short that takes us to a possible post-apocalyptic near future, where a life-threatening airborne disease can turn you into some kind of zombie. It might sound a little typical, but the film portrays an interesting angle on the genre, and builds on the character confinement elements.

YouTube Space LA and SkyBound built a really really cool set and we had the opportunity to apply to a writer’s program at the space. It was awesome, it was about six classes… of us going in and talking to wonderful people like David Albert and [Academy Award winner] Geena Davis. So we wrote the script [and] got great notes from the program and had to figure out how to actually pull this off.

Written by Joe Penna and Ryan Morrison, they had the unusual but pleasurable task of writing a scene for a specific set. Ryan tells how it advantaged his preparations in pre-production:

One of the advantage of having the set already built is that I was able to create an identical set on the computer, I used a program called FrameForge to create a storyboard and we basically knew exactly what every single shot was going to look like even before we got to shooting

With is confined location, they were able to get creative with some extensive equipment which in turn allowed them to film the shots in sequence, a real rarity in productions. Despite the expensive looking production, the team kept everything at a minimum, including cast and crew – where even the director himself was turning on smoke effects from the floor during the scenes.

This is kind of a dream job for a director, we’re shooting everything in sequence so you get to see how things are turning out and I got to work mainly with just one actress on the set so it really gave me a chance to own my skills as a director.

Watch the excellent behind the scene doc which shows how the guys brought everything together, as well as all the unexpected difficulties that come through on set – just like the lead actress Jade being a bad car accident on her way to the shoot.

Read Jade’s in-depth interview with our own collaborator Taylor Holmes.