In the past couple of weeks, I released two new short films on my official NHS Films YouTube channel: Night of the Ghoul and SirCooly's Late Halloween Special. These films are pretty special in a way as they were produced with a second independent company that co-founded with one of my friends who has been wanting to make and star movies.
20X Productions was founded by Parker Barton and myself when he originally came up to me to make a historical fantasy short film involving samurai, ronin, and mononoke (vengeful spirits in Japanese folklore). The interesting thing about Parker is that he has Autism, and he has numerous projects and ideas that he has been wanting to make a reality. The fore mentioned historical fantasy is one of them. I, myself, am an individual with Asperger's Syndrome (which is considered part of the Autism Spectrum Disorder), and with my knowledge of film making, I decided to help him with this project.
After helping him with writing his first script, I approached his mother, Christina, about the film, and after reading it, she became very supportive of the project to the point where she got involved with the production. We also got assistance from Parker's younger brother, Jonathan (who also has Autism), and several of our friends who are also on the spectrum.
Though the project has still yet to be filmed, we eventually created several side projects that eventually became our first films produced under 20X Productions. These were the aforementioned Night of the Ghoul and SirCooly's Late Halloween Special. We still aim to finish making the first short that we came up with, and still, we have started thinking up more ideas that we want to put to film.
In Parker's own words, "20X Productions is a company of me and my friend Nolan becoming actors. Also a company that allows any friends of the Barton brothers who want to audition."
In both Night of the Ghoul and SirCooly's Late Halloween Special, Parker plays as a Ghoul, which the make-up and costuming of his own choosing is based off of research that he did for the project.
In SirCooly's Late Halloween Special, I played as SirCoolyDAwesome, a character of my own creation that I originally wrote for a project that eventually was cancelled.
Christina, who has a major part in 20X Productions, believes the best aspects of 20x productions films is that there is a role for anyone. "We take an idea and make it happen."
Night of the Ghoul was an idea originally by Christina, who wanted to make a film for Halloween, and after Parker and I put ideas together with Christina, we were able to shoot a short 3 minute film for a Halloween 2020 release.
As said before, we have a couple of new ideas we're currently developing, and we aim to shoot and finish the Japanese folklore inspired historical fantasy short film that started it all.
If you would like to see both Night of the Ghoul and SirCooly's Late Halloween Special, please be sure to click on the links to their respected YouTube pages.