The weather just doesn’t want to let up. We’re five and a half months into the year and we had like 4 sunny days. The last couple of weeks were rainy and cloudy, couldn’t get anywhere dry. To make the most of the crappy weather I started experimenting at home with some video ideas. They all turned out rather creepy with ominous ambiance, which I like, but might not be for everybody. I’ll try to explain how these were done, and show the final products as well (vertical video warning, these are for the tiktoks).
CRT in garage
The first one I made. A classic trope of a dark room lit only by TV static on a CRT screen.
The Samyang 16mm lens (which I used for all of these) allowed a nice shallow focus depth centered on an old carpet, so the screen is a bit out of focus. The TV static is a video from YouTube, playing on my laptop connected to the monitor.
Abandoned CRT
This is a bit more elaborate. The monitor is seemingly working by itself in a dark forest (which is my backyard), showing the same forest in daylight which slowly turns to an ominous noisy eye looking around (the eye doesn’t really show, but it’s there).
The footage on the monitor (5th video) is again played by my laptop. It was captured a couple of days prior, and edited with the noise and eye overlay. The forest is a bit too dark, so I had to improvise some lighting with my phone, it turned out well in my opinion.
Abandoned CRT 2
Continuing with the theme of a self-aware abandoned monitor, this time I stuck the CRT on a tree between two branches. The monitor shows a CCTV feed of a camera a couple of meters back. the character approaching the monitor recognizes themselves but a few seconds later the image starts to disappear into the noise. Suddenly the image clears, but the character is no longer visible on the screen, which terrifies the character into an unknown fate.
It took a while to figure out how to do this properly. I ended up using some OBS trickery to turn the live feed noisy and make myself disappear. I recorded half a minute off of the camera without me being visible, stuck another half a minute of green screen before it and added the previous TV static as a transition. This video was then added as a source above the live feed with a Chroma key filter. This made the video transparent until the noise and the prerecorded video took over. I also added a helpful countdown so I could see when the scene starts. (6th video)
Creepy boiler room
A swinging lamp turns on, revealing a creepy ugly boiler room then turns off again. This works better on tiktok, because of the video looping.
There’s not too much to describe about this, it’s a creepy room with a hanging lamp. I tried using a 150W tungsten bulb connected to my E-Bike battery (54V instead of 240V), but that was a bit too dark. I then went with an old car headlight bulb connected to a 12V cordless drill battery.
