The Moor You Know
The Idea
During my MA in Filmmaking, between Spetember 2024 & 25, I made a handful of short films.
The Moor You Know was the first "proper" film I made as part of it!
Truth be told, the making of the short was pretty shocking. It consisted of a one-man crew, me, with help from my
sister to get me to the locations I wanted to film, and my Mum helping to hold a lanter to look "spooky".
I was initially planning to re-make an old film I'd done during my Photography Sixth-form final project, but last-minute
decided against the idea, as I've changed and grown as a person, so it wouldn't make sense to rehash old ground, in that sense.
The idea for The Moor You Know came after watching an analogue horror piece called Brytish Cryptids: Stagmen.
I loved the way it stylised itself as an old, 70's documentary piece with it's use of sound, visuals and aesthetic. This led me to experimenting
with this style myself, as well as trying to create my own piece of folk-lore / cryptidology that I could centre my own short around.
The second major inspiration for The Moor You Know, was the series of public saftey films the British Government produced in the 70's regarding Nuclear war and how to
survive a nuclear attack. This series was called Protect and Survive, and it has such a unique atmosphere that is similar to The Stagmen video, but also completely and utterly different due to being grounded in reality.
Anyways, from there, I began to mull over and brainstorm ideas for my cryptid. Dartmoor was a huge inspiration from the get-go with the film and cryptid creation, as I knew the locations that I wanted to ideally film at.
By having this knowledge from the get-go, it meant that I wasn't trying to think of a cryptid / creature that could be realistically live / exist anywhere, it was able to be tailor made specifically for my location, Cadover Bridge.
To cut a long story short, once I had finalised the idea of the Moorlight Wraith, I went out to the moors and over the course of two - three nights, filmed the video aspects of my project, which happened to be the easiest part!
The Edit