The shoot for The Tell-Tale Heart began in late summer of 2004, over a two-week period. This two-week chunk allowed the production crew of Chris and Dan Flynn, co-producers and co-directors, and lead actor Sarah Hartley to capture on digital video the bulk of production footage at its two locations in Franklin, MA. The end of principal photography led to the year-long period of post-production efforts. Editing from hours of digital video footage on a Final Cut Pro system, Chris, as the editor, was able to distill the production to a rough cut 15 to 16 minutes in length. While this rough cut was able to give the film some shape and structure, there was still months of editing work ahead before the film got to its final stage.
There was also the major sound and visual-effects work involved. Research and development began on the effects work in the form of the now-famous "vulture eye" shot in the first part of the film. Chris knew that this one shot would serve as the make-it-or-break-it shot for the entire film: if this one effect shot didn't work, then the rest of the movie wouldn't work, because the story was driven by the narrator's deep paranoia of this vulture eye. There was no doubt that Sarah had the acting abilities required for the movie. But the effects for the old man's vulture eye were treated as a character as well. Plus the effects requirements for that shot, if it were to be successful, would more or less dictate the amount of work done for whatever other shots would eventually come up.
The toughest effects shot in the entire film would end up being not a shot of the vulture eye, but of a window that didn't exist at the location when the narrator was being interrogated by the police officer at the end of the film. That shot required what is known today as 'motion tracking', although the capabilities of Adobe After Effects, as useful as they were for the rest of the effects, couldn't cover the necessities for motion tracking. So Chris had to do the laborious process of adjusting the position of this window, frame-by-frame, throughout a shot that goes to almost a minute long. And the majority of that minute featured this window, even when it would have been seen behind the narrator's head after the camera moves in to a tight close-up.
The sound design for the film covered a lot of territory as well, the biggest challenges being the scenes when the narrator is dealing with her inner paranoia of the old man's heartbeat. The most elaborate sound design would end up being the creepy decapitation scene. To preserve the terror and grossness factor of the story, Chris did not pull back at all from making the sounds as creepy as they needed to be. The final sound result was tremendous. Then there was some ADR recording and narration done whenever Sarah was able to come back to town on break from her schooling in New York.
The final cut of Tell-Tale Heart was finally approved by both Dan and Chris by August of 2005. After a year's worth of intense work, they were finally able to reveal the film to the world. The final product was a film that not only kept the flavor of Dan's original animated short intact, but was also able to stand on its own as a piece of video entertainment that fans have enjoyed since it initially aired.

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