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For a very long time, Jason Pavlik of Darien, Illinois was highly intent on making a FRIDAY THE 13TH fan film.  Planning to start it several times, possibly countless times, but never getting anything off the ground.  Whether it'd be lack of resources, time, money, or whatever else, it simply never happened.  Come early 2003, with a mere post in a dicussion thread at Fridaythe13thforum.com by Jason, he & I got into contact with one another.  First emails, then phone calls, and eventually in-person.  It was a joint desire to create a FRIDAY THE 13TH fan film that brought us together, and we were both very anxious to get to working on it.  Weeks passed with Jason being quite busy between his classes at the College of DuPage, with his band Red X Rebellion, and other concerns.  Meanwhile, I was in the early months of my now year and a half unemployment streak.  My anxiousness kept on building and building as I kept on pestering Jason week after week about it.  Then came Memorial Day weekend, and equipped with my family's JVC S-VHS camcorder, Jason, his girlfriend Heather, and myself ventured off to Waterfall Glen in DuPage County, Illinois to shoot some preliminary scenes for what was then titled "FRIDAY THE 13TH: PILGRIMAGE."  Nine minutes of footage was ultimately shot on that day through a varying number of takes.  Not a very productive day, and the plans to shoot further scenes later on were short-lived.

A few weeks later, as just a fun activity and exercise for myself, I chose to edit together the existing footage.  The nine minutes worth was edited down to a little more than three minutes worth.  Not a very satisfying movie at all.  It wasn't until September that I actually scored the short and added opening and end title credits to it.  It debuted online Tuesday, September 16th, 2003.  A few hundred downloads in the many following months, but no reaction, no response, no feedback.  Didn't really matter since it was such a painfully incomplete piece of work that was never dubbed anything but "test footage."

But come 2004, I had the desire to do something more with the movie.  There were several planned scenes, which were good, but obviously never shot.  Also, one cut always bothered me, but with the footage I had, there was no way around it.  So, I chose to shoot some extra footage and a new scene.  Though, with Jason & Heather now relocated to Miami, Florida, it really wasn't possible to include them in any such plans, but Jason gave me all the encouragement I needed - "go for it."  I did a bit of planning in March, and focused on shooting insert shots of a lake - one to certainly be seen as Crystal Lake in the completed movie.  I had just the right place in mind.  A sizeable body of water in Orland Park's Tampier Lake.  A very nice lake with a pleasant atmosphere and very welcoming grounds.  Though, not even a week ago, May 9th I believe, I found an expotentially larger lake along 107th Street in Lemont, IL.  Don't know it's name, but I'll certainly do more research and location scouting on it for my next fan film project.  Anyway, in early April, I went out to shooting various shots at Tampier Lake.  The first outing did not produce desirable results.  The lake looked too bleak, and it was too cloudy, rendering the beautiful gleam of the sunlight reflecting off the water moot.  I went back a few days later when it was much clearer out (and much less windy).  I got far more shots from various points around the lake, and the results were much better this time around.

In the weeks leading up to more pleasant weather in the Chicagoland area, I tried to find a place to shoot the new scene, which would star only myself.  The location was near impossible to find - a narrow, isolated stretch of road with dense forestry on both sides.  The closest I could find would still be subject to some degree of traffic, but I had already settled on another location.  A somewhat isolated Bachelors Grove Woods forest preserve parking lot off of 143rd Street in Oak Forest, IL - about a mile west of the infamous and heavily reported as haunted Bachelors Grove cemetery (which I have been to many, many times without a singular supernatural or paranormal incident to report on).  The scene to be shot is one I had scripted for quite a long while.  It was when we still planned to finish shooting the fan film in May / June 2003.  Major thanks goes out to my wonderful sister Diane for helping me shoot the scene on the afternoon of Saturday, May 8th.  Couldn't have done it without her or anyone else.  It's difficult to operate a moving camera while acting in the scene at the same time.  But she did a good job, and has received a '2nd Unit Camera Operator' credit in the movie.

By the time I had completed shooting this new scene, I had already begun editing together Jason & Heather's scenes with the lake footage and such.  But with all the footage now completely shot, I could go full force on the editing.  I shot and edited my scene in just one day, but I had to return to the location again the next day for a pair of establishing shots (the first two in my scene).  But then, no more shooting.  Just editing.  I let Jason preview the rough cut - no music, no titles, no screams, no transitions or dissolves.  He suggested the idea of the classic FRIDAY white out to end my death scene.  That was the biggest obstacle in the editing process.  I had done such a dissolve in the original edit to transition from the opening credits to the first shot of the movie.  It didn't have the desired effect, but it wasn't very important.  I tinkered and tinkered with the dissolve, but nothing better came about for this re-edit.  I went searching on Google.com for a plug-in transition, and I found out one....but it was a demo.  A demo which places a large red X over your video.  Essentially, and obviously, it was useless.  So, I kept on hunting and hunting for what seemed like an eternity.  Hours and hours of searching and about 10 Google searches later, I came upon nothing.  It wasn't until the ideas from both Hank Braxtan of BraxtanFilm and Guiboche at the FanMadeTrailers.com forum that I got the right idea of how to do it in Premiere.  Simply put, an additive dissolve coupled with keyframed enhancements of the 'Lightness' feature in the 'Hue & Saturation' video filter in Adobe Premiere 5.1.  The only other thing that caused any bit of trouble here was getting the speed of the clips just right, and the freeze frame to be just that - one singular frame.  Ultimately, a computer screen snapshot and the marquee tool in Photoshop remedied that problem.

The last phase of the editing began with the scoring and putting together the opening and end credits sequences.  Scoring for the scenes from the original cut were not difficult as I used the same music clips, but some re-timing was required where insert shots were added.  The main task was my scene, and for that, I throw another big "Thank You" out to Hank Braxtan for giving me over 30 tracks of FRIDAY THE 13TH score tracks.  Most of them from the first four films.  I used the one entitled "The Next Victim," a piece of score from the third FRIDAY THE 13TH.  It fit just perfectly with my scene.  I also used a small snippett of score from another track for the fade out from the Dylan/Heather make-out scene for a bit of dramatic closure to fit with the fade out.  The only part of the whole scoring that I'm slightly disappointed with is that the music in the Dylan exposition scene isn't loud enough.  In the original PILGRIMAGE edit, the music was a little too loud, and made some of the dialogue in that sequence a little difficult to discern at times.  I wanted to avoid that, and unfortuantely, the music doesn't come out as prominently here.  Though, if you listen with your headphones (which I highly, highly reccommend as there is some suttle audio bits in the movie) you can hear that score much better.

The final, final pieces that need to be finished were the credits.  For the opening, I really wanted to use the original intro to "Wounded Ground," which Jason had composed back in 2002.  I had heard the intro on an old demo recording, but with a rattling snare drum in the background, I coudln't use that original recording.  So, Jason agreed to re-record it for the opening titles, and a fine job he did.  It is a truly moody and haunting piece of music that really sets up a chilling atmosphere for the movie.  Also, it fits well over my animated FOREVER HORROR logo lightsweep I created in Adobe After Effects 5.5 (Production Bundle).  I added in some signature FRIDAY THE 13TH sound effects to heighten the mood of the music and to help give a slight bit more dramatic dynamic to it, but not much added as the music is effective on its own.  Now, the very last bit to compelte was the end credits.  The credits were created in Adobe Photoshop CS, edited together in Adobe Premiere 5.1 with the use of the additive dissolve, and the 'motion' feature for the scrolling segment.  I had agonized over what music to put over it.  I really, really wanted a song, but it had to be dark, heavy, and brooding.  The first thought was towards Alice in Chains, mainly "Get Born Again."  Though, the lyrics didn't gel with the movie.  They simply weren't appropriate to it.  I searched and searched, and finally, I settled on probably my favorite track from the 1919 - ETERNAL Black Label Society album - "Life/Birth/Blood/Doom."  That tolling bell, that slow, heavy brooding sound was the best fit for the end credits.  I edited the credits together to best fit the song, as you have or will probably notice.  I used the program Peak DV 3.21 for Mac OS X to edit together three parts of the song - the intro, the start of the chorus, and the outro chorus.  I edited it together seemlessly.  Peak DV has really proven to be a highly valuable audio editing tool for me.

Before everything could be completed, I had to apply a widescreen matte to certain footage which was accidentally not shot that way.  Unfortuantely, Final Cut Pro & Express were being seriously stubborn programs.  It was a tiresome process that lasted too long, but eventually everything was completed, edited, scored, and so on and so forth.  The last step was compression for the web.  Experimentation was really the only thing holding me up here.  I wanted to utilize the Sorenson Video 3 codec, but the file simply came out too large for download (about 229 MBs, if I remember correctly).  I eventually settled on the old trusty MPEG-4 codec, but I kicked up the bitrate to 536 to ensure the best quality possible.  So, I uploaded it after 10pm on Sunday, May 16th, and that was the end of it all.  It's available for your download and your enjoyment.  Please, send us feedback on it, or post your comments at the thread on Fridaythe13thforum.com!