Dear Santa is a film in which a little girl tries to tries to tempt the spirit of
Christmas by staying up all night to see him, the consequences of her actions shape
her life forever. Cindy is the main character who is played by Joslin Johnston, and
she portrays the young girl as we would see Christmas Eve through her eyes. We
wanted to try and surprise the audience in to thinking that this was going to be a
happy Christmas, “typical” film, and at the end twist it in to a film that would leave a
lasting impression on everyone. I felt that the idea of a man entering someone’s
home at night and everyone being ok with it was a “horror” idea in the first place, so
why not run with that idea.
When we were brainstorming ideas on a winter horror film, we felt as if
everything we thought of had already been done. The inspiration behind this film is
that Christmas time is always a happy and joyful time of year, so we wanted to make
something that gave everybody a different kind of feeling. This film was produced
the week before Christmas, and we released the final product on Christmas Eve.
One of the many challenges of this film was arranging our on air talent. In the
pre production stage of this film, we didn’t know how we were going to find a little
girl to play Cindy. One of our producers actually knew of a girl that wanted to be an
actress for Disney channel, Jocelyn, and after seeing how committed she was to
acting, there was no question that she would be Cindy. Once we had that settled, we
just needed to find an actress to play Cindy’s mom. Very last minute, another one of
our producers’ wife decided that she would play her mom.
It took us 14 hours to shoot this film, from eight a.m. to ten p.m. Since the
timing of the film goes throughout the night, and into the morning, we had to shoot
the film backwards. We started with the morning/day scenes then did the night
scenes. We had to manipulate the lighting so that it seemed like a happy sunny
morning, instead of a typical, overcast, winter day.
The lighting in the house that we were using for the film was very dim,
tungsten lights. So we had to bounce and manipulate the lighting to be as soft as a
regular house light as well as adding some ambient light to help influence the
natural light that a window would let in.
The editing process actually went very smoothly, the only problem was that
we didn’t have anyone to play the voice of older Cindy as the narrator. Eventually
our producer talked his mom into narrating, which she did an incredible job at. The
final postproduction was finished the Friday before Christmas. The comments we
received were just as we were expecting, the audience didn’t expect that such a
tragic event could happen in such a cheerful time of year.