Cast: one narrator, total, same face across all twenty rooms. Cast for deadpan and ghost-story cadence, and for hands: he must be able to wrap an over-under coil, clean a brush, and label a card without looking. The audition scene is still "They do." (beat) "To the dollar." delivered while doing something else correctly.
Location: one apartment and its parking area, total. Every room is a corner of it in the dark: the desk, the kitchen, the hallway, the living room, the closet shelves, the open car hatch. Tight frame plus black void does the work; you only ever see one practical, one work surface, and two or three props. If a setting wants anything the apartment does not have, cut props until it fits.
The light rig (KK): the practical IS the key, every episode, and every practical is either owned or under five dollars: the film light with CTO, the range hood, a bedside lamp, an assortment of desk lamps, a clamp light, a trouble light, a battery work light, the TV, the laptop. Hide any boost behind or inside the practical the same way the v1 650 hid inside the campfire. Flicker only where the source would flicker. The v1 rig itself returns, undisguised, for Episode 10.
The props run (one trip, under twenty dollars total): colored printer paper, brads, foil catering trays, bubble wrap, a thrift-store vase (buy two), and a receipt-paper roll. Everything else prints at home or is already in the apartment: call sheets, vouchers, maps, LOC signs, the day-out-of-days grid, continuity stills, the paper tape of figures, nine name cards, a lint roller, a cutting cape that is honestly a towel.
Wardrobe: one base outfit for the whole series, never changed: a dark jacket or flannel over a plain dark tee, jeans, boots. The timeless crew uniform; it belongs in every room. On top of the base, at most ONE worn accessory per episode, always something that department actually wears, always from the closet or the hardware store:
- 1: a pencil behind the ear. 2: a yellow safety vest. 3: rolled sides in the back pocket. 4: leather work gloves, one on, one in the back pocket.
- 5: strips of camera tape stuck along the sleeve. 6: sleeves rolled, marker in hand. 7: a side towel over the shoulder. 8: headphones around the neck.
- 9: the jacket still zipped, indoors, at midnight. 10: exactly the v1 outfit. 11: HMU blacks (the plain dark tee alone), a towel over the forearm. 12: reading glasses pushed up into the hair.
- 13: a beanie. 14: no accessory at all; hands clean, the tidiest he ever looks. 15: a kitchen apron worn as a shop apron. 16: reading glasses low on the nose.
- 17: the cloth tape measure draped around the neck. 18: a hoodie with uneven drawstrings. 19: a blazer over the tee. 20: a puffer vest.
The conservative alternative is v1's answer: the identical outfit in every room, no accessories. If continuity anxiety wins, take it; the rooms still do the work. (One prop note: for Episode 11, run the cape over a fuzzy blanket first, so the lint roller has fur to find.)
The three desks (so ten desk episodes never look like one): the inventory is a small white minimal desk, a big black office desk, and a small brown standing desk with a height motor. The audience must never meet the same desk twice; kill it with assignment, height, angle, light, and dressing density.
- White minimal: Episode 1 (warm gooseneck, tidy stacks, shot frontal), Episode 12 (cool tablet up-light in a black room, shot from high), Episode 18 (one low raking swing-arm, shot from the side). Same desk, three light temperatures, three angles.
- Black office: Episode 9 (bare expanse, frontal: one monitor, one face-down phone, and all that empty black is the point), Episode 8 (the opposite: surface crowded with drives and the binder, monitor side-glow, shot across the corner), Episode 16 (the desk vanishes entirely under the spilled tape).
- Brown standing: Episode 14 at its lowest height (a small wooden school desk), Episode 17 raised and shot side-on with the tape measure stretched across it, Episode 20 raised and shot frontal, and he STANDS, because DITs stand, and the change in body language is a free new room.
- Episode 5 gets no desk at all: two stacked equipment cases play the camera table, which is how camera actually wraps.
The desk rule: the desk is never the subject. Frame past the edges, let the light and the dressing own the surface, and change the height or the angle every time. A moving blanket thrown over any of the three turns it into a fourth.
Setting blocks (group by corner, one evening each):
- Desk block: Episodes 1, 9, 14, 16, 18 (five desk corners in one evening; the desk map below spreads them across the three desks).
- Glow block: Episodes 5, 8, 17, 20 (screen-lit surfaces: camera cases, edit desk, VFX desk, DIT table; see the desk map).
- Rooms block: Episodes 7 (kitchen), 11 (the werewolf's chair), 19 (living room screening), 6 (the grid wall).
- Doors and car block: Episodes 3 (hallway of doors), 2 (car hatch in the parking area), 15 (closet shelves), 12 (stills desk).
- Floor block: Episodes 4 (cable wrap in the blacked-out living room), 13 (folding chairs), then strike the room bare and shoot 10 last, on purpose.
Coverage per tale (three angles, all repeatable): A-frame locked wide (narrator, task, practical in one tableau); B-frame tight single for the lean-ins, whispers, and the certain lines; and an insert pass of the hands doing the task, shot immediately after each tale while the dressing stands. The tighter the frame, the better the apartment disappears; when in doubt, punch in.
Shoot plan: four settings per evening by block; five evenings for all twenty, in one location with no company moves. Run each tale twice, one full take, one at a faster clip for cutdowns. The task must be performed correctly on both; the audience is crew, and a badly wrapped stinger will cost more comments than a bad line read.
Sound: unchanged from v1. Everything in post, all fauna from SFX libraries, reactions placed in the edit against the written beats. No production audio needed beyond clean dialogue. The rooms do not get room tone; the forest is the room tone. The kitchen, the hallway, and the parking area will each have their own noise floor: shoot them late and quiet, and let the crickets bury the rest.
Writing surface note: the ritual is fixed. Each episode now gets to be itself in three places: the tale, the one grief line in the deflation, and the task. If an episode is not landing, fix it in those three places. Never touch the ritual.
Cutdown map: unchanged from v1. Native 50 to 65 second vertical per episode. The 90 second hero anthology can now cut ACROSS rooms; five rooms in ninety seconds sells the format faster than one campfire can. Teasers stay 15 seconds: one tale's worst line, wolf howl, card.
Release order: unchanged from v1 (season one is Episodes 1-10 with Episode 10 held as the series finale; the bank is season two). A note on choosing: v1 and v2 are the same campaign in different clothes, and now the same building. If both get shot, run v1 as season one and v2 as season two, or A/B the two stagings on Episodes 1-3 and let the numbers pick the wardrobe for the rest.