Our filmmaking story began in 1994 with a school assignment: to produce a report about a retirement home. The film was recorded on an analogue Video8 camera and was a great success at school. We were only thirteen or fourteen at the time, and the project began mainly as a bit of fun and an attempt to earn a better Czech-language grade.
Encouraged by that success, we made our first fiction film, The Devil’s Kidnap. We filmed after school without a prepared screenplay, improvising the story in front of the camera. A year later came the horror film The Day of the Living Dead, during which we also recorded our first making-of documentary.
In 1996, we began The Fateful Kidnap. Production lasted more than a year, and some scenes had to be reshot because we had visibly changed in the meantime. The original four-hour version was later cut to approximately two and a half hours.
In 1997, we made Area 77, inspired by The X-Files. To preserve image quality, we edited the film directly in the camera. Production was also interrupted for two months when the camera broke down.
In 1998, we moved from analogue Video8 to a digital three-chip Panasonic MiniDV camera. The Case was our first digitally shot film. After a long break, we began the ambitious Resurrection project in 2002. Difficult conditions prevented us from completing it, but we edited the eight scenes that had been filmed.
In 2003, we adopted the name Sunset Film Production, expanded the team and began devoting more time to scene preparation, props and lighting. Darkness Falls was completed in the spring, followed in December by the short psychological drama Dragon’s Ruse, which later received recognition at film festivals.
In 2004, we completed the Land Rover clip and the music video for Easy to Go by LUS3, which later appeared in a chart show on Czech music television channel Óčko. The following year, we produced Imperfection of the Beloved from a screenplay by Lenka Moravcová.