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Carland aims for pickup of TV pilot

Gaffer Greg Hudgins and director Ben Carland watch a scene on a video monitor.

FLAT ROCK — As Ben Carland watches a computer monitor, two actors playing sheriff’s deputies drag Matt Burke out of a cabin and handcuff him to a porch rail. The actor strains at the short chain of the handcuff.

“Headache!” shouts Carland, who is directing the shoot.
Burke squeezes this head with his free hand.
“Bang. … Bang.”
Burke reacts each time Carland shouts the cues.
It’s a Friday afternoon in the backyard of a historic home in Flat Rock whose owners have agreed to let Carland and company take over two cabins. One serves as the set for the TV pilot they’re making. The other is for lunch, makeup and wardrobe.
Amber McCleerey snaps a slateboard.Amber McCleerey snaps a slateboard.If it’s far from Hollywood, the shoot has the look, feel and nomenclature of a movie set. “Camera’s on the move,” crew members shout. Set assistant Amber McCleerey calls out a scene name and snaps a slate board. An actor stands alone in the grass, breathing and twisting and shaking to get into character. “Action,” Carland says.
There are enough cast and crew members to form two football teams, filling jobs that roll by at the tail end of a Hollywood movie: gaffer, sound mixer, VFX coordinator. There’s even a caterer, who happens to be Carland’s mother, Kathleen.
“It’s been so much fun,” says Damian Duke Domingue, a veteran actor who plays a social worker. The cast is small — Domingue, a mother and father, a possessed boy and two sheriff’s deputies — and all are from Western North Carolina except for Reid Meadows, a 10-year-old from Atlanta who plays Reese.


Something doesn’t add up

Actors Matt Burke and Reid Matthews perform a scene in 'Possession'Actors Matt Burke and Reid Matthews perform a scene in 'Possession'The storyline is standard enough. A mom calls the cops and a social worker when her estranged husband barricades himself and his 9-year-old son in a shack in the woods. But something’s not right with the boy and Domingue’s character, Kent, figures it out by hypnotizing him.
“How it’s revealed is really nice,” Domingue says of the script. “Things do not add up. The kid has secret powers. It unravels very fast in a neat little, ‘Aha, ewww.’ The reveal is really nice.”
If a 30-minute sci-fi story with a surprise ending sounds like “The Twilight Zone” or “American Horror Story,” that’s what Carland is aiming for. He is pitching a TV series that’s open sourced — available for story creators everywhere to take a shot at.
“Stories can span to fill multiple episodes, can be completely independent of the characters or worlds in others, or bring back popular characters and arcs from prior episodes to explore stories further,” the producers say on their “Monster of the Week” website. “It’s a fantastic way to have a lot of fun with open-ended storytelling. A throwback of single serving sci-fi, thrills and chills on an ever-blank canvas.”


‘Monster of the Week’

The fall leaves dapple the high afternoon sun at the backyard cabin. Carland and his camera operator film the same scene over and over, from different angles. In one of the last outdoor scenes, Reid, as the possessed boy, walks out to the porch where his father is handcuffed to a rail. The boy is supposed to glare at his father. Reid can’t help but crack a grin, so they rehearse the scene. Carland coaches. They get it right. Reid glares, then stalks away, out of reach. Burke, as the father, howls in anguish.
Wrapping up the shoot on Friday, Carland was already eager to take the next steps to try to get the pilot, called “Possession,” on the air.
“Starting tomorrow we’ll be editing,” he says. “Over the winter we’ll add visual effects and music.” The show should be done by spring. “We’ll probably show it around here first.”
Then what? “That’s when the fun begins,” he says. “We’ll send it to some companies that we have ties with. In a perfect world, we’d be looking at one season, a batch of episodes” to launch the “Monster of the Week.”