A young woman arrives in the woods around Chiswick Park an hour after receiving a worrying phone call from her best friend following a date with a weird guy.

Gunnersbury Triangle is a small, peaceful reserve next to Chiswick Park station. It’s not as grand as Richmond Park, but it’s a lovely place to go for a stroll. My BFF Melodie Shirazi and I used to take candid photos there. When the sun dips beneath the trees however, the place becomes rather unsettling, a perfect place to make a thriller.

At this point, we had spent several years making silly YouTube challenge videos, but on the month of Halloween, we decided to do something different. I came up with the idea to write a creepy found-footage flick. Melodie is not a filmmaker, but she’s a natural on camera. It was a simple filming process, around 2 hours to film and then an hour on a separate day for some retakes and to make sound foley. We didn’t use DSLRs, lights or mics, only Melodie’s iPhone. I gave her a few instructions, barely wrote a script for her because I wanted her to sound as natural as possible when filming herself. I would be out of her eyesight to give her space (and to stop Melodie from ruining the take by breaking into giggles), then she would press Record on her phone and start her performance. We started filming at sunset and after a couple of takes, it was already getting dark. The long shadows freaked Melodie out, which in turn improved her performance. Sometimes a bit of trauma helps a long way.

Her ex-boyfriend helped us out a bit with the sound foley by dragging Melodie across the floor as she screamed for help. And my uncle Jim Meacock lent us one of his sinister tracks to put under the end credits. From this fun little passion piece, my dad Nic Penrake came up with a feature script called A Few Hundred Pounds, which he then adapted into a novel.