Goodnight Grace

Welcome to Goodnight Grace

What if the people you trust the most are lying to you…?

Goodnight Grace is a short horror film written by Alex Hanson and directed by Shaista Roshan and produced by Alex Hanson, Jake Godfrey and Kagan Aytek Dincer. Motivated by her strangely prophetic nightmares, a young Grace questions the intentions of her overbearing parents, only to learn more about them than she can handle…

Synopsis: Twelve-year-old Grace lives with her loving yet overbearing parents Phil and Lara. After a series of nightmares, Grace begins to wonder why they are so adamant she stays out of the basement. Questioning them only leads them to more and more hostile behaviour, leading Grace to decide she needs to see what’s down there for herself.

Goodnight Grace
Genre: Short/ Horror
Runtime: 12:30min
Format: Digital / REC 709 1920×1080 HD / 2022/ Colour/ Stereo/16:9 / Canada

Meet The Cast

Hope pittman

As GRACE

GRACE EMILY MILLER

As FEMALE GHOUL

Nicole Charles

As LARA

Rick harkness

As PHIL

ALEX HANSON

As MALE GHOUL

Meet the Keys

SHAISTA ROSHAN

Director

She is an avid traveler with a love for all things film and chocolate.  She’s had the film bug from as far back as she can remember,  her Logitech webcam home movies can definitely attest to that. She decided to feed her curiosity about storytelling kickstarted her film career after pursuing a B.A in Film Production & Design from Indiana University Bloomington. Since then she’s had the fortune of building a trajectory working as a Director & Producer across several TV shows, documentaries & commercial campaigns in the USA, Middle East & India. She’s always enjoyed the idea of being able to sculpt a story from the ground up and aspires to continue to learn and grow within Canadian market and share stories through her lens through the immense love she has for the art form that is filmmaking

Alex Hanson

Writer/ Producer

Alex Hanson has been performing as an actor and musician since he was thirteen years old. Realizing all the fun stuff happens on the other side of the camera, he’s recently transitioned to the life of a producer and writer. His recent accomplishments include writing and directing the psychological horror short Cleaning Out and producing Love and the Art of Despair. Goodnight Grace is his attempt at a modern fairytale. You can decide for yourself whether or not he succeeded.

Jake Godfrey

Producer

Jake Godfrey is an Ontario based Producer and Cinematographer. Jake began making movies with his twin brother about 20 years ago on a Sony Handycam HDV making stop motion animation with his childhood Lego. Since then, Jake has completed a B.A. in Film Studies from The University of Western Ontario and has completed various freelance projects for the likes of Camp Celtic and Hempsmith. Jake then was selected to join Sheridan College’s Advanced Television and Film program, where he has worked on a variety of short films. A lover of nature, motorsports, and science fiction, Jake is an unrelenting positive force on-set, and aspires to produce and shoot feature films.

Kagan Aytek Dincer

Producer

While studying Computer Engineering at the Middle East Technical University, his whole journey started when a friend who was interested in photography introduced him to DSLR. After leaving engineering with a passion for cinema, he graduated from another university with a degree in “Radio, Television and Cinema” and came here to Toronto. The biggest feature is that his survival skills are very high because instead of doing grocery with all the money he found, he either made a movie or visited another country. “Toronto has been my best stop and it looks like it will be the last. The first reason why I choose to move to Toronto is for self-realization and if I could achieve that, I came to be a light to someone who wants to realize themselves anywhere in the world with my films.”

Kezia angelica

Director of Photography

Kezia Angelica is a passionate Indonesian cinematographer, who moved and lived in Melbourne Australia for seven years, and is currently based in Toronto, Canada. In the last four years, she has worked as a filmmaker, making short films, commercials, and music videos. From a very young age, she has loved telling stories through visual images. Falling in love with filmmaking, it has always been her dream to be a cinematographer for feature films.

Kirk Percival

Production Designer

Kirk Percival is a Canadian born filmmaker and a passionate admirer of a diverse range of cinema. He is one of the creative minds behind the cult independent feature film The Lad Goodbye, which boasts a small but dedicated internet following.

This film was made possible by these talented people:

Goodnight Grace
Performances by:
Hope Pittman as GRACE
Nicole Charles as LARA
Rick Harkness as PHIL
Grace Emily Miller as FEMALE GHOUL
Alex Hanson as MALE GHOUL
—————————————————————–
Directed by

Shaista Roshan
Produced by

Alex Hanson

Jake Godfrey

Kagan Aytek Dincer
Written by

Alex Hanson
1st Assistant Director

Sneha Sharma
2nd Assistant Director

Rena Pilgrim
3rd Assistant Director

Carlos Del Solar Vela
Director of Photography

Kezia Angelica
Camera Operator

Tara Grundmanis
1st Assistant Camera

Daniyal Shah
2nd Assistant Camera

Jeremy Zheng
Grip

Jeffrey Wu
Gaffer

Sara Grabauskas
Grip/Electric Swing

Carter MacIntosh
Colourist

Jason Bergen
Production Designer

Kirk Percival
Costume Design

Sara Grabauskas
Prop Master

Qiwei Zeng
Set Decorator

Patrick Borgers
Assistant Set Decorator

Kennie Harrington-McKenna
Editor

Gustavo Bernal
Assistant Editor

Young-Hau ‘Jony’ Hwang
Composer and Score by

Ihab Mansour
Location Sound Mixer

James Zhou
Boom Operator

Jamal Weekes
Sound Design

James Zhou

Lenoardo Zhu
Makeup Artists

Abby Schonnop

Josie Carnovale

Nicole Cox
Set Production Assistant

William Grecco
COVID-19 Officer

Timothy Young

THANK YOU!

Gallery

The Making of Goodnight Grace

Director’s Statement

Goodnight Grace is a 10-minute horror film unlike any other. Not only is it a mixed genre of the drama, horror, and thriller genres, but It’s also a story about exploring the human dimensions and relations between a child and its parents. It’s a film that slowly unfolds as the loving and nurturing façade of Grace’s ‘parents’ peel away, leaving Grace with scars that aren’t just skin deep.
I remember being consumed by the script from the moment I read it. Something about it kept calling out to me and made me want to delve deeper into fleshing out Grace’s story. One of the things I felt passionate about in the making of ‘Goodnight Grace’ is that I wanted this film to have its own language, both visually and tonally, which I tried to achieve through the different worlds I tried to create within the film itself of vision, reality, and the basement- which we treated with different moods with the composition and lighting throughout the film.
Short films come with their own set of challenges; you must be able to tell a story impactfully within a short span of time. This calls for everything to be aligned, especially when you are on a tight timeframe to film. Goodnight Grace was not only heavy in terms of its content, but also its production design and makeup elements. Making sure everything worked in unison was challenging but it all came to fruition as the rhythm of the overall film was carefully crafted together as a team.
The padlock was one of our main motifs, where I saw it as a character in itself, and was often revisited throughout the film. It was important for me to have the audiences experience and almost feel as though they were discovering the different worlds along with Grace throughout the film. I played with the music composition, pacing in the edit and overall silence in a few parts of the film to really draw in the viewers and invite them into our twisted world.
I did not approach ‘Goodnight Grace’ as a small film, we only had once chance to tell the story once so I wanted to make sure we utilized all the resources as best we could. While this film toys with darkness, change, curiosity and the ‘what now’ – I wanted the film to maintain the sensibilities of a child and highlight it vulnerability and innocence to some degree.
By highlighting real horrors and disturbing possibilities of life by those you often ‘trust’ the most, it will challenge audiences to re-examine their own fears while giving them an unforgettable cinematic experience.
-Shaista Roshan
Director – Goodnight Grace

Writing a Nightmare

I was living in my parents’ basement surrounded by keepsakes from my own childhood when I started feeling trapped. What if I never make it out of here? What if I’m doomed to be one of those guys that never leaves his hometown? What if I’m a boomerang kid who’ll never make it on his own in the real world?
When I found myself tasked with writing a short screenplay, all my little fears wriggled their way into the story before I even noticed what was happening. For me, I just wanted to write a more grounded version of Neil Gaiman’s Coraline. What if there was another world hidden away inside your house, but that world was very real? It was only when I finished my first draft that I realized I’d saddled Grace with all my own anxieties. Worse, I plunged her into those anxieties headfirst like a stowaway made to walk the plank.
Sorry about that, Grace. You deserve more than what you get.
That’s the thing with writing a horror movie though. Sometimes you, or someone on your team, will come up with a horrible idea, something that makes you want to puke it’s so vile, and because it’s a horror movie you feel like you’ve got to at least try it. It took us a long time to find the right ending for the story and I’ll always remember the day we did. All of us felt this heaviness in our chests as we realized what we were going to do to a twelve-year-old girl.
Of course, it’s all just meant to be fun. There are no secrets in my parents’ basement, besides the man in his late twenties finishing up a film school postgrad. But, when you start letting your own fears steer the wheel, that’s when you start writing a horror movie. It’s not about ghosts and killers, although spooky monsters certainly help. It’s about what scares us and why. It’s about finding your deepest insecurities and turning them up to eleven.
Grace is a much braver person than I’ll ever be, and she goes through so much more than anything I ever will (hopefully), but I need to commend her for planting her feet and facing her fears. That’s something I could only ever write about.

– Alex Hanson
Writer/ Producer

Producing the Nightmare

Making a film is never a smooth sail. Even the most meticulously planned and relatively simple shoot will always at one point, or another run into a snag or two.
Our short shoot took place over the course 4 days, and 4 locations. Sounds simple right? Even better, our incredibly talented team was extremely excited to be working on this project. First two days we shot inside Grace’s house. Should be easy… but our production was slated for the August long weekend. That means from square one, getting hold of transportation and holding onto it extremely difficult.  
Then there was the heat. Shooting in a narrow house with a crew of close to 30 was an interesting challenge to begin with, but to make it even more difficult the soaring temperatures of the summer meant that inside the house it was a hot and sweaty event. That meant time between takes requiring hair and make-up touch ups, and constant breaks for the crew to remain hydrated and not pass out. Also, the increased level of stress and agitation that comes with being hot all day.
The real icing on the cake happened just after lunch on day 2. Looking at the weather forecast, our day that would be spent pretty much entirely outside was now looking like it was going to rain. If don’t get those scenes, we can’t finish our film. The result was a rather dramatic sequence where myself and one of my co-producer’s Alex had to make a flurry of phone calls. I made them our locations, to beg for moving our permits and adjusting our timelines. Alex, to our cast, where the sudden change of schedule created yet another problem: a scheduling conflict. After another sequence of extremely stressed-out phone calls and nearly having an emergency casting session, we we’re very fortunate and did not have to juggle our cast. One more problem solved.
But then came the final day, and one more final hurdle. Arriving on location for our sinister basement shoot day, Alex and I discovered that one of our principal actors for the day was feeling sick, and unable to come in due to our COVID protocols. After frantically re-writing the script on the fly and organizing a 5th pickup shoot day in two weeks, we luckily were able to rapidly adapt. The result is something that I am extremely proud to have been a part of. Have I rapidly aged while making this film? Perhaps… but I think all the effort was worth it and has translated across the screen. Our team is incredibly talented and worked through some extremely difficult conditions to make this film a reality.
-Jake Godfrey
Producer