In May 2008 my friend Michael Herzog wrote in his blog that he doubt that a filmmaker could do a short without crew or equipment.

I thought about that and decided to make an experiment: I wanted to create a short completely by myself without any help by others and the worst and minimum equipment you can possibly think of. So I did use for "Umgeben" (which is a german word for "surrounded", in this case better translated as "trapped") only a no-name webcam that was connected to a laptop and a small mic with headset quality. In a few scenes I fixed the webcam on a tripod with a tape, in others I fixed it were ever possible. I was lucky to have a wide angle converter for the PS2 Eye Toy-Cam, so I could use that to film complete rooms (I taped it on the no-name cam).

To make things even more difficult I decided to create rules for filming and post production.
- production within 20 hours
- not more than 2 takes for every shot. This means: Only two chances to get everything right.

For sure its no surprise that most of the production time went on the edit in Sony Vegas, were also most of the cheesy FX was created. One exception is the scene were the camera moves out of the window and reveals the creatures. That was done in Apple Motion because of the 3D-movement.

One Part of the music and sound was created by me while the other part was taken from the Freesound Archive (freesound.org/). Since the sound of the mic was terrible I had to rebuid nearly every noise in this film.

In the end I am very satisfied with the result of this experiment because I got the impression it works although the technique of the equipment was one of the worst one could imagine. But the next time I won`t torture you again and do a short with more professional equipment, I promise ;)