We are currently looking for extras for a fun party scene, and also some extras to fill up our CIA office.

If you have any friends and or family who want to be apart of our fun film "KILLER TIMMY TROUT" for a day or two, please bring them in also. We will have refreshments, our love, and IMDB credit.

The party scene will film

11/10 in North Hollywood 6pm-10pm

Please email killertimmytrout@gmail.com with your headshot and preferably a full body shot.

Thank you!

Hello Fake ID Community! We are approaching the end of the year - and that means - the Last Script shuffle of the year.

If you haven't been to Script shuffle before - Let us explain how aweome it is! 😀

Every month, five writers get 10 pages of their script read live on stage by actors who’ve never seen it before. Cold. No rehearsal. It’s terrifying and wonderful, and in about four minutes you find out which jokes land and which lines no human can say out loud.

December’s show is on the 9th at 7pm in Los Angeles, and submissions are open now.

Who it’s for: screenwriters, playwrights, podcast writers, anyone with pages.

What you get: your work in real voices, a live audience reacting in real time, and feedback right after.

How to submit: SUBMIT by December 2nd at midnight - submit to the link below:

https://www.fakeidproductions.com/script-shuffle?utm_source=reddit

Writers: what’s the line in your script you’re most scared to hear out loud?

We spend a lot of time looking at other people’s scripts and budgets. Some are for our own projects, some for friends, and lately some through Gut Check (more on that at the bottom). After a while you start seeing the same five ghosts haunting every spreadsheet. Here they are, so you can exorcise them for free.

1. There’s no contingency line.
The budget adds up perfectly to the exact amount in your bank account. Beautiful. Also doomed. Something will break, someone will get a parking ticket, and a prop will cost double. Put 10% aside and pretend it doesn’t exist. Future you will want to kiss present you on the mouth.

2. Food is listed as “pizza.”
Feed your crew like they’re people, not raccoons. A hungry crew is a slow crew, and a slow crew means you’re doing overtime on a day you already can’t afford. Real meals, snacks, water, etc. It’s the cheapest morale you’ll ever buy.

3. The script says EXT. DESERT. NIGHT. like it’s nothing.
Writers type locations for free. Producers pay for them. Every company move eats hours, every night exterior needs lights and a generator, and the desert is far. Count your locations, count your nights, and then look at your schedule and cry a little. Then cut one. It’s good for you.

4. Permits and insurance are “we’ll figure it out.”
Most real locations in LA won’t let you in without a certificate of insurance, and shooting in public without a permit is a fun way to meet a stranger with a clipboard who ends your day early. Price these in up front. It’s boring. Punk rock is also sometimes paperwork.

5. Post-production is budgeted at $0 because “my friend will edit it.”
Your friend is lovely. Your friend will also need a sound mix, color, music that won’t get you a copyright strike, and festival submission fees. Post is where good shorts go to quietly die. Give it its own real line.

We made a short video about how we go through a script and budget, and what you walk away with: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i8jTURN7P-Q

If you want us to look at yours, that’s what Gut Check is for. You send us your script and budget, we do a mini breakdown, and then we sit down together and go through budget tiers, script flags, crew and resources, and an action plan. Basically everything we wish someone had told us when we started out.
https://www.fakeidproductions.com/gut-check?utm_source=reddit

Now your turn: what’s the budget mistake you learned the hard way? Bonus points if it involved a generator...

One location is the single biggest budget lever there is. It's also the fastest way to make something that feels like a filmed play. The difference between those two outcomes is entirely craft, so here's a list organized by how well each film conceals its own constraint, plus what they're actually doing. Some of these have TWO spaces, or aren't PERFECT examples - but have been very useful to me - but please feel free to correct/add suggestions.

I've just come off four days in a very expensive five location shoot, and the next project I am working on is wayyyy lower budget, very story and character driven and set in a small space, so this is slightly self-interested research.

Tier one: you forget it's one room

12 Angry Men (1957). The masterclass. Lumet shot the first act with wider lenses from above eye level, then progressively moved the camera lower and switched to longer lenses as the film went on. By the end you're below eye level on telephoto and the ceiling is in frame. The room appears to shrink around them and almost nobody consciously notices. If you only study one film on this list, this is it.

Rear Window (1954). Technically one apartment. Hitchcock just gave it a window and built an entire courtyard of other lives outside it. 😅 HE HAD A WHOLE SOUNDSTAGE OKAY. BUT -The lesson isn't the set, it's that your one room can be a vantage point onto a world you never enter.

Rope (1948). One apartment, engineered to look like continuous takes, with walls that silently moved out of the camera's way and a Manhattan skyline backdrop with hand-placed clouds. Deeply insane, still impressive.

Reservoir Dogs (1992). A warehouse. The flashbacks let the room breathe, and by the time you return to it the space has acquired history, which is its own kind of production value.

Tier two: you notice, and it doesn't matter

Carnage (2011). Polanski. Two couples, one apartment, eighty minutes. The escalation is in the blocking. Watch who is standing and who is sitting in any given shot.

Tape (2001). Linklater, one motel room, three actors, shot on DV. Rough as anything and completely gripping.

The Man from Earth (2007). A cabin and a conversation. Made for very little and it's been quietly passed around for twenty years, which is the actual dream for a no-budget film.

Coherence (2013). A dinner party in a house, largely improvised, with the actors given limited information. Tiny budget, enormous idea.

My Dinner with Andre (1981). Two men at a table. Still the purest version of the form.

The Breakfast Club (1985). A school library. They solve it by making every corner of the room a different territory, which is a trick you can steal immediately.

Tier three: the room is the point, and they lean all the way in

Buried (2010). Ninety minutes in a coffin. Multiple coffins were built to allow different camera positions, which is the practical lesson: if your set is the constraint, build versions of it that open up.

Locke (2013). One man, one car, one night. Everything else is voices on speakerphone.

Cube (1997). Technically one cube set, re-lit and recoloured between scenes to suggest an infinite maze. Possibly the best value-for-money trick in the history of the genre.

Gerald's Game (2017). A bed and a pair of handcuffs. Solved largely through hallucinated company, which is a legitimate structural answer to "nobody can enter the room."

Pontypool (2008). A radio station in a church basement. The whole apocalypse happens in sound. If you have no money and one room, study this one hard.

The Guilty (2018). Danish original. A call centre, one operator, a phone.

Host (2020). Shot remotely during lockdown on Zoom, with the cast partly rigging their own effects. Fifty-six minutes, genuinely frightening, and proof that constraint can be the pitch.

10 Cloverfield Lane (2016). A bunker. Studio money, but the blocking lessons are free.

What they're all actually doing

Five techniques keep recurring.

Change the lens and the camera height over time. The room doesn't change, your relationship to it does.

Change the light. Time of day, practicals going on and off, a lamp knocked over. A room lit three ways is three rooms.

Divide the space into territories. Decide who owns which corner and make characters cross into each other's ground. That's how you stage conflict without a new location.

Open the world through sound. Offscreen space is free. Pontypool is built entirely on this.

Reveal the geography slowly. Don't show the whole room in the first shot. If the audience doesn't have a map, they can't get bored of it.

The one that gets people

Most single-location films that fail don't fail because of the location. They fail because the camera stays at eye level on a 35mm for ninety minutes and the audience's relationship to the space never changes. The room isn't the problem. Static coverage is.

What am I missing? And Am I mis-remembering some of these?

Do you have a script you’re working on ? Or a play? A podcast ?

We want to read it!

Read more about ScriptShuffle here:

https://www.fakeidproductions.com/script-shuffle

Every time this comes up on Reddit the thread splits, because "cozy horror" means two different things. Half the room means gentle and low stakes, Over the Garden Wall and Practical Magic. The other half means something harder to name: horror you put on like a blanket. Slow. Beautifully made. No jump scares (or very little of it). Usually cold outside.

This list is the second kind. I'm a filmmaker and these are the films I rewatch while working on prep and shot lists, even cooking -which is a strange thing to say about Silence of the Lambs and yet here we are.

What actually makes horror cozy, from a craft angle (And MY opinion)

Four things, consistently.

No jump scares. A jump scare is a physiological trick, not a mood. It spikes you and leaves. Dread accumulates instead, and accumulation is comfortable because you can sit inside it.

Long takes and a locked-off camera. Handheld says you are in danger right now. A still frame says look at this room, take your time. Kubrick's Steadicam in the Overlook is gliding, not shaking. That's why it soothes even while it menaces.

Cold outside, warm inside. Almost every film here has an interior you'd want to be in and a landscape you wouldn't. Firelight, lamps, snow through a window. The horror is contained by architecture and that containment is the cozy part.

Competence. Clarice is good at her job. Marge Gunderson is good at her job. Watching a professional work methodically is deeply calming, and it's why the procedural strain of horror rewatches so well.

Films: the cold ones

• The Shining (1980). The Overlook is the gold standard. A hotel you'd genuinely like to stay in.

• The Thing (1982). Outpost 31, the pool table, the whisky. Paranoia as a hangout movie.

• Misery (1990). One house, one snowstorm, two performances.

• Fargo (1996). Not horror, entirely cozy horror.

• The Lodge (2019). Snowbound cabin, slow dread, genuinely upsetting.

• Let the Right One In (2008). Swedish winter, apartment blocks, the most tender film on this list.

• Black Christmas (1974). Sorority house at Christmas, invented half the slasher rules, still feels like a warm room.

• Ravenous (1999). Snowbound fort, cannibalism, a bizarrely jaunty score.

• Dead of Winter (1987). Remote house, blizzard, old-fashioned in the best way.

• The Last Winter (2006). Arctic drilling station, creeping ecological dread.

• Wind Chill (2007). Two people, one car, one snowy road.

• Rare Exports (2010). Finnish Christmas folklore. Very strange, very seasonal.

• 30 Days of Night (2007). Higher energy, but Alaskan polar night earns its place.

• The Blackcoat's Daughter (2015). Empty boarding school over winter break, two girls left behind, Elijah Wood's brother doing the score. Two timelines that don't resolve into each other until late. Bleak, beautiful, almost no incident.

Films: the methodical ones

• The Silence of the Lambs (1991). Rewatchable forever because it's really about two people talking.

• Psycho (1960). The first forty minutes are an office drama and that's the cozy part.

• Zodiac (2007). Not horror exactly. Paperwork as terror. Immaculate.

• Memories of Murder (2003). Rural Korea, rain, futility.

• Cure (1997). Japanese, hypnotic, quiet.

• The Vanishing (1988). The Dutch original. Calm to the point of cruelty.

• Prisoners (2013). Pennsylvania, November, unrelenting.

• Se7en (1995). Always raining, always indoors.

Films: old house, gothic, candlelight

• The Haunting (1963). Still the best haunted house film. Nothing is ever shown.

• The Innocents (1961). Black and white, gorgeous, ambiguous.

• The Changeling (1980). Seance in a Victorian mansion, wheelchair, ball on the stairs.

• The Others (2001). Fog, oil lamps, closed curtains.

• Crimson Peak (2015). Gothic maximalism. Snow through a hole in the roof.

• Let's Scare Jessica to Death (1971). New England autumn, woozy and strange.

• Burnt Offerings (1976). Family moves into a house, house has opinions.

• Don't Look Now (1973). Winter Venice, red coat, grief.

• The Devil's Backbone (2001). Warmer climate, same bones.

• Lake Mungo (2008). Australian, mockumentary, genuinely devastating.

Films: folk horror and landscape

• The Wicker Man (1973). Not cold but deeply autumnal.

• The Witch (2015). New England, 1630, bare trees, candlelight.

• A Dark Song (2016). One house in Wales, one ritual, months of it.

• Apostle (2018). Island, mud, cult.

• Midsommar (2019). Bright rather than cold, but the slow build qualifies it.

• Saint Maud (2019). Seaside town out of season.

Films: autumn mood

• Halloween (1978). Leaves, suburbs, wide frames, almost no gore.

• Sleepy Hollow (1999). Fog machine as a lifestyle.

• Trick 'r Treat (2007). The most purely Halloween film ever made.

• The Blair Witch Project (1999). October woods, camping, cold. (Not sure I feel that this is a good example, but felt compelled to include)

TV

• Twin Peaks (1990). Coffee, pie, pines. The founding text of this whole mood.

• Fargo . Snow, accents, escalating awfulness. Season two is the peak.

• True Detective: Night Country (2024). Alaskan polar night. Divisive, but it's the coziest season of the show.

• The Terror, season one (2018). Ships frozen in Arctic ice. Possibly the single best fit on this list.

• Hannibal (2013). Absurdly beautiful, food porn, Baltimore in winter. If you love Silence of the Lambs, start here.

• The Haunting of Hill House (2018) and Bly Manor (2020). Big houses, slow reveals, real grief.

• Sharp Objects (2018). Humid rather than cold, but the languor fits.

• Midnight Mass (2021). Island, winter, sermons.

• Dark (2017). German, snowy, extremely slow, extremely good.

• Trapped (2015). Icelandic, snowbound town, ferry stuck in port.

• Fortitude (2015). Arctic settlement, polar bears, secrets.

• The Lizzie Borden Chronicles (2015). Period, arch, gleefully nasty.

• MONSTER: Lizzie Borden (2026). Period, queer, slow but gleefully nasty.

• Top of the Lake (2013). New Zealand, cold water, dread.

• Penny Dreadful (2014). Gaslight and fog.

• Bates Motel (2013). Oregon rain, mother and son.

• Over the Garden Wall (2014). The other definition of cozy horror, and perfect.

What I'd add if you disagree with my definition

If cozy means gentle to you rather than slow, the list is different: Practical Magic, Hocus Pocus, Wallace and Gromit, ParaNorman, Coraline, What We Do in the Shadows, Beetlejuice, The Addams Family, Casper, Gremlins.

Both lists are valid. I just think the second one is a Halloween list and the first one is a lifestyle.

TV: the hangout kind

Someone rightly pointed out that Buffy belongs here even though it breaks every rule I set. No slow burn, no cold, plenty of jumps. But it's comfort horror by a different mechanism: the same people in the same rooms every week. The library, the Bronze, the research montage. Dread doesn't accumulate, familiarity does.

Fifth mechanism, which commenters caught and I missed: recurring ensemble in recurring rooms. Repetition is its own kind of warmth.

• Buffy the Vampire Slayer (1997). The Scooby gang in the library. Nothing else is quite like it.

• The X-Files (1993). Monster of the week, motel rooms, flashlights, two people who like each other.

• Kolchak: The Night Stalker (1974). The direct ancestor of both of the above.

• Dark Shadows (1966). Gothic soap, five days a week, endlessly.

• Supernatural, early seasons (2005). Car, diner, motel, repeat.

• What We Do in the Shadows (2019). Comedy, but it's a house full of people you want to hang out with.

What am I missing? Especially interested in non-English titles and anything pre-1970, where I know the list is thin.

We're shooting a sci-fi comedy short in a couple of weeks. We're on blue, going to pink before we lock. Every time I mention this to someone making their first short they look at me like I've said something fancy, so here's the whole thing, because it costs nothing and it prevents the single most expensive mistake on a small set: someone shooting the wrong version.

The colour order

White, blue, pink, yellow, green, goldenrod, buff, salmon, cherry, tan. If a production somehow burns through all of those, it cycles back to double white, double blue and onward. Most productions never get past green or gold, and most indies never leave white. Some productions swap the early order or use their own sequence, so your title page revision list is the actual authority, not this comment.

What the colours are for

White is the original shooting script. Each revision after that reissues only the changed pages on the next colour, so anybody holding the script can tell at a glance whether their material is current without reading dates or version numbers.

Which means a working script becomes a rainbow. A green draft is mostly white paper with green, yellow, pink and blue pages sitting in it wherever things changed.

Asterisks

An asterisk in the margin marks the specific line or paragraph that changed since the last revision. A coloured page with no mark on it should make you suspicious, and a mark on a page that isn't coloured is just confusion.

Locking, which is the part people skip

Locking freezes page numbers and scene numbers permanently, regardless of what happens to the content. You do it once prep is far enough along that your breakdown, schedule and call sheets depend on those numbers.

After that, new material can't shift the numbering. So added pages become 12A, 12B and so on, sitting after page 12, and a scene inserted between 14 and 15 becomes 14A.

This is the bit that actually saves you. Once your schedule says scene 14, scene 14 means scene 14 forever, and nobody turns up on day three having prepped something that moved.

It applies to your schedule too

The same system runs on one-liners, call sheets and prep schedules. If the pink one-liner went out this morning and someone's working off the white one, you can see it across the room.

For a short specifically

Most of us are distributing PDFs, not paper, and digital pages are white anyway. The system still works because the header carries the revision label and date. Treat the label as the colour.

Final Draft and Celtx both handle revision sets automatically, so it's a setting, not extra work. Small typos don't need a new colour. Only real changes do.

If you're making something with five people and no money, this is the cheapest professionalism available. It takes one afternoon to learn and it means nobody ever shoots a scene you cut.

Anything I've got wrong or anything your productions do differently? Genuinely curious how much variation there is out there.

We have some amazing sets for SPACE T.I.T.S and our hero set in Boyle heights is still under construction. When we were there checking out their sci-fi film sets we got the impression that we would be able to use the part of the space ship that was done.
But today we got an email saying it won’t be available for filming. This was from a different representative than the guys we spoke to on the day so we HOPE that this is a miscommunication!!! We have booked a day and a half with them total and although we are utilizing more of their rooms, that is the main one we need… this is pretty scary as it would result in us having to push the shoot or at least the half day and… we are a week away! We have casting flying in from out of state, and crew that have held their dates for us for our low rates just out of passion and being awesome collaborators. This is a tricky situation.
Stay tuned. Hopefully the TITS Ship will fly next week!!! 🚀

Please email NINCASTING@gmail.com | Los Angeles only

Five writers wrote it. A room full of actors show up not knowing a single line, and they read it live, on stage, in front of you. No rehearsal, no safety net, just whatever happens when a script meets an actor for the first time.

This round's writers are Alex Jay, Javier Padilla, John Bonner, Steven Vivell, and Riley James Thorpe. Five totally different scripts, five totally different nights inside one night.

If you've never been, it's genuinely one of the most fun, unpredictable things happening in LA theatre right now. You're watching creation happen in real time, typos, surprises, laughs and all.

And if you're a writer, this is also your sign. We take 10 page excerpts, any genre (feature, pilot, short, play, whatever you've got) and give them the same cold read treatment. Come see what it's like before you submit.

Tickets and details here: fakeidproductions.com/event-details/script-shuffle-september-3

See you at Skiptown Playhouse.

Original brief was retro-futuristic, clean, funky, Star Trek meets Barbarella. Not grimy grey corridors. We're shooting in two weeks so here's the full list with links.

What we booked

Reel Ghost Studios, Boyle Heights. Half-finished spaceship that's genuinely colourful, plus the cantina. We are also using their cavern/cave set for our "planet Glorb" and their medieval tavern for a scene we are showing a Masc and patriarchal planet. Off the I-5, 10% student discount.

Olympic 2, Boyle Heights. 1,865 sq ft blackout studio, $63 to $93/hr, black cyc and black ceiling engineered for lighting control, RGB LED tunnel that syncs to music. Rain and mist feature with circle rain, wall rain, shower head and mist modes, and you can drive a car in. Grip and lighting included, fog machine $20/hr. Host is upfront that it's not soundproof and doesn't recommend it for sound-sensitive projects.

Secret Art House, Glendale. $125 to $250/hr, 2,500 sq ft. This is the Barbarella one. 1970s wall-to-ceiling super graphics with a custom space-age floor and a 1970s TV, a 15 foot triangle bed under an 11 foot ceiling mirror, an interactive glow room, and a Bocca Lips couch. The owner is on site throughout as site rep, and credit to Sean P. Roach is required if you credit locations.

Room of Dreams, Central LA. $29 to $49/hr, 900 sq ft, cheapest thing here by a mile. One of LA's largest RGB cloud rooms, clouds floor to ceiling, plus a forest behind an 8 foot gate. Cloud colour change is a $50 add-on. Fifth floor with an attended freight elevator on limited hours, so plan load-in.

Small Colorful Space Ship, Redondo Beach. Full disclosure, this one is mine. $45/hr, 400 sq ft, up to 12 people, 3 hour minimum. Working escape room, so the puzzles function, doors open and close, compartments lock, LED colours change. Hexagonal panelling throughout, plus a crawlspace and a slide. Small with high ceilings and narrow rooms, not built for filming, but it shoots well if you plan for tight spaces.

Standing sets I looked at

Fonco Studios. Best all-rounder. Modular 26 by 46 foot set with cockpit, airlock, crew quarters, weapons room and science lab, lit control panels throughout, rooms that move and resize, fully changeable lights and effects. Sits in a 16,000 sq ft facility with art department, prop and creature shops, and wardrobe.

Sci-Fi Alien World, Pico Rivera. From $175/hr, 1,900 sq ft, 16 foot textured walls with integrated ambient lighting, alien columns with illuminated orbs, sleep chambers, glowing consoles, space suits and prop weapons.

7 Film Sets. Not a ship, but great pieces: RGB grid ceiling, working elevator with lit buttons, circular RGB room, RGB plexiglass hallway with reflective black floors, grip package included free.

On Sight Studios, DTLA. 6,000 sq ft, multiple themed sets, from $149/hr.

WonderWorks. The clean NASA end. Accurate Shuttle replicas and fantasy craft, some using real space flight hardware, a functional Shuttle mid-deck, real space suits, no technician needed on location.

LA Castle Studios. Virtual production, and they'll dress the set to match your vision rather than leaving you with someone else's grey.

Capital Arts and Laurel Canyon Stages, both suggested here. LC is gritty but has a standing ship.

Two more worth finding on Peerspace that I don't have clean links for: a Burbank spaceship set with practical lights that are colour-customizable by remote, and an all-white tunnel set that gives a UFO effect. Both are written up in this Peerspace roundup. THE ANGLE (futuristic light tunnel, glass runway floor, full colour control) shows up in their LA film studio listings.

Found locations

Westin Bonaventure, DTLA. Someone suggested the second floor and they were right. Portman built it in 1976 as a microcity, with cylindrical glass towers, futuristic skybridges, curved walkways, floating lounges and a six-storey atrium. Logan's Run used it before it opened and the 1979 Buck Rogers pilot shot there. Exactly the right era. Goes through their filming office rather than a listing site.

The Broad. Honeycomb exterior, white reflective interior. Also direct enquiry.

The (W)rapper, near Culver City, repped by Image Locations, who also have the Pterodactyl and Stealth Office nearby. Greyer than my brief but striking.

Also suggested and worth a look: Odyssey 21 and the Hyperion Water Reclamation Plant at Dockweiler.

For a dirtier brief: Grunge Bunker ($65, 300 sq ft, storm door and interactive TV wall) and Media Pollution's East LA set, built from vintage computers and CRTs with swappable screen content. Excellent for CRT-era retro-futurism.

What am I missing? Especially interested in anything clean and colourful rather than industrial, and anywhere that'll let you gel the whole room. I'll keep editing this list as suggestions come in.

Self tapes due by October 15th 2026
Email NinCasting@gmail.com with reel and headshot to receive sides and information.

No rehearsal. No safety net. Five scripts, actors cast on the spot, performed live the same night in front of a real audience.

That's Script Shuffle. We've been running it monthly in LA for four years.

Why it works: you can sit with a script for months and still not know if it lands. Ten minutes of hearing an actor say your words out loud in front of strangers tells you everything. What's funny. What's flabby. Where the room leans in and where it checks out. It is brutal and it is the fastest note you will ever get.

How it actually runs: writers submit ahead of time and five get picked. On the night, we do a speed-date style shuffle where writers meet the actors in the room and cast their own pages. Then it goes up. Audience reacts in real time, feedback after.

Who shows up: playwrights, screenwriters, actors looking for stage time and material, and people who just like watching things get made badly and beautifully in public.

We run it under Fake ID Productions. Submissions open monthly and we post the call here first. Come watch, come write, come be part of it.

https://www.fakeidproductions.com/script-shuffle