Producing genre when the effect has to land first time.

La Grossesse was three years in the making before a single frame was shot. Directed by Renç Uran and shot by Neusa Alcalde, it's genre — body horror — and it had everything a small company should probably be frightened of: stunts, SFX, VFX, supporting artists, a rave, and moving vehicles on a crane. Four days, one of them the vehicle work at Longcross — this is the rest of it.

We love genre. It's the lifeblood of what we do, and it's also the least forgiving thing to produce on an independent budget. The schedule was built backwards from the effects rather than the pages, because a gag that has to be right is the only thing on the day that money can't rescue.

That meant sequencing the day around what could only happen once. Prosthetics and SFX gags dictated the running order; anything that could be recovered in post moved to the end, and anything that couldn't went first, while the crew and the light were still fresh.

Crowd scenes are where independent films usually show their budget.

The rave was the hardest thing to hold together: smoke, strobe, a room full of supporting artists and an operator handheld in the middle of it. We put the money into bodies, haze and light — the three things that survive the cut.

What we'd say to anyone attempting the same: you are nothing without the team around you, and complicated days are the reminder. Renç trusted us with three years of his work; George and I spent the shoot making sure the difficult things happened early and the impossible things got cut honestly rather than attempted badly. Now into post we venture.

What genre teaches you about producing

Genre forces you to be specific. A drama can survive a vague afternoon; a body horror cannot survive a gag that doesn't read. That specificity works its way back through the whole schedule — you know precisely which minutes of the day matter, and you stop spending money on the ones that don't.

It's also why we keep taking these on. If you can produce stunts, SFX, VFX and a crowd scene in four days without anyone getting hurt or lied to, the ordinary jobs stop being frightening.