SECOND EDIT… ‘The Survivalist’ by Oakhaven Films
12 July 2019 · 1 min read
‘The Survivalist’ was a collaboration between The Glitch Collective (‘Mariana 627’, ‘What’s Wrong With Morris?’), Period 8 Pictures (‘A Beautiful Death’, ‘Too Many Cooks’) and the newly-established Oakhaven Films, members of each having worked together on previous projects. Oakhaven was the fictional company for which the main character of our sci-fi short ‘Mariana 627’ worked, and is now the main trading name for our director Matt George Lovett. ‘The Survivalist’ represents the first short film officially shot under the Oakhaven name, but with upcoming period horror ‘Nun’s Cross’ in the works, it certainly will not be the last.
‘The Survivalist’ was filmed in London over two days on a budget of £3000. The script was chosen because it seemed markedly different from other shorts on the Impact website: a light-hearted, quietly comedic approach to the apocalypse, and a man for whom the end of the world is the first time his life has had any sort of meaning. We had previously worked with Doug on ‘Mariana 627’, and so knew he could bring a fabulous beard and commanding screen presence to the mix, as well as a lightly human touch to an eccentric character. The director’s house served as the survivalist’s house, with some minor dressing, while the bunker interior was built from scratch inside a garden shed in Essex.
Behind The Scenes Photos
Photos · 16
Written by
Chris JonesPassionate about all things film, I have spent my life watching movies, making movies and helping others make their movies too. Most recently I have been directing Splinter Unit on 'Mission: Impossible Dead Reckoning', parts 1 and 2 for Paramount. I also executive-produced 'The Enfield Poltergeist' for Apple TV+. Deeper into my past, my early major projects include action thriller 'The Runner', serial killer thriller 'White Angel' and paranormal horror 'Urban Ghost Story'. I co-created and authored The Guerilla Film Makers Handbook series, published by Bloomsbury. There are now eight books in the series. More recently I have run a series of London-based festivals, kicking off with the London Screenwriters Festival which attracts over 1,000 professional screenwriters from around the globe annually. I also set up and run TEDxEaling, an annual TEDx conference on storytelling and human communication. In 2009, I made the multi-award-winning and Oscar-shortlisted 'Gone Fishing', the whole process being heavily documented on my blog. In 2014 I completed my fourth feature film, the crowd-created 50 Kisses which entered the Guinness Book Of Records for most screenwriters on a feature film. Following this success, I founded Create50 to continue the idea of crowd-created projects. Twisted50, our first book, was published on Halloween 2016 and immediately toppled Stephen King from the top spot on Amazon. Five books have followed in the Twisted50 series and we are working on the sixth now. During the summer of 2016 I trained to become a master Firewalk instructor and now regularly take people across the hot coals for charity. Late 2017 I directed the short film 'Seeing Him' which collected a ton of awards too. Over the following years I continued to make award-winning shorts, such as Meet The Nativity and Never Too Late. In the summer of 2022 I premiered Impact 50, the second feature-length movie from Create50. This time I directed the segment at the start of the film, with Olivia Williams as the President, and written by Joe Eszterhas. In the summer of 2022, I also joined the Mission: Impossible 7 and 8 productions as Splinter Unit director. At Halloween 2023, the Apple TV+ show that I co-executive-produced, 'The Enfield Poltergeist', premiered. I run regular filmmaking workshops for filmmakers both online and in person. Some people ask how I began making films? Like most filmmakers of my generation, it was with a Super 8mm camera, summertime and school friends, usually after watching a behind-the-scenes TV programme on a Hollywood movie like Star Wars. My first film was a zombie horror called Necronomicon, heavily influenced by John Carpenter's The Fog. And I was hooked for life. Contact me at Ealing Film Studios, Ealing Green, London, W5 5EP, UK
