When a brutal car accident takes place in the desolate backcountry, the only onlooker is Clive, a lonely man who lives nearby in an isolated shack. As he approaches the scene, he sees the girl of his dreams, dead among the debris. Certain that she is “the one,” Clive will do whatever it takes to keep her by his side. When the victim’s sister and boyfriend arrive, they quickly become unwitting hostages.

Making Cold Storage was easily one of the best times in my life. We had a fun, different kind of script and we were working with a great cast, an outstanding crew, and a director I happen to be pretty fond of.

The film was shot in 25 days for a budget of none of your business. Somewhere between Titanic and Plan 9 From Outer Space. (If you really want to know what it was, there are places you can find it.) The locations included a variety of spots in North Carolina: Charlotte, Mount Holly, Tryon, and especially the lovely town of Saluda.

Saluda stood in for the non-existent town of Rainerspoint, Tennessee. It is located in the mountains of North Carolina, about 45 minutes from Asheville. Initially the town was not too keen on us coming in and shooting. Apparently another low budget production had come in the year before and “played Hollywood”, acting like big shots, treating the people of the town like peasants, and generally making asses of themselves. Sort of the exact opposite of how I like to run things. So I had to attend a town meeting where anyone could ask me questions and then they voted on whether or not to allow us to shoot there. I guess I answered everything correctly. They gave us the okay and we shot there for five days. It was miserably hot those days but everyone was troopers for us. One of the best things that happened was on our last day of shooting, as we were wrapping up, one of the staunchest opponents of us coming to shoot came up to me and thanked us for coming. He said he was wrong and we did our profession proud. Those are the things you live to hear.

Another cool aspect was the sets we built for the show, courtesy of Production Designer John Sanders (who has gone on to become the props master for a little show you may have heard of called The Walking Dead.) Sets included the inside of Clive’s cabin, the cellar, and the interior of the well. The outside of the well was also built and transported to our cabin location.

Our wonderful crew included the talented and unflappable Lyn Moncrief as our director of photography. Lyn and Tony instantly built a rapport, with Lyn being able to take the feeling and mood Tony wanted and transforming it to a visual look that told the story with movement and light. From the dark loneliness of Clive’s cabin to the rain-soaked finale, Lyn gave it flare and atmosphere. And nothing phased him, no matter how tough the production got. We took to calling him “Laidback Lyn.” When we do our next project, you can bet Lyn will be the first we call to shoot it.

We also got to go to California to do the post for the film, including color correction and sound mixing. The folks are Westwind Media were a delight to work with and did a great job on giving us a wonderful finished product.