Red Ink: A Vampire Newsroom Thriller Shot to Look Like One Take

A low-budget vampire thriller set in a 1940s newsroom was shot to look like one unbroken take, The Hollywood Reporter reports. The film is Red Ink, and it came from a New York indie outfit that started out with a different plan.

Benjamin J. Murray and Michael Christensen set up Incline Studios to launch with Blood Bank, a vampire heist about a gang raiding a city's blood reserve. The production was planned for Syracuse, New York, to take advantage of state tax incentives, which are tax breaks offered to films shot in the state. The film was deep into pre-production when the Los Angeles fires broke out. Murray and Christensen shut it down.

Red Ink grew out of that setback. It is a prequel set in the same fictional world as Blood Bank, and it was made in one location for a fifth of the money and time, according to the trade paper. Christensen co-directed the film and wrote the script. Murray co-directed and worked as cinematographer, the person who runs the camera.

The story unfolds over a single morning in November 1949, inside the headquarters of Verity Press, a newspaper in the style of The New York Times. Toby Leonard Moore plays Bob Hoover, the paper's editor-in-chief. D.B. Sweeney plays publisher Walter Nash, and Mike Doyle plays Senator Conrad. The cast also includes Siobhan Fallon Hogan, Tommie Earl Jenkins, Eugene Cordero and Oona Laurence.

The look of the film is the most unusual part of the production. Filmmakers call a shot like this a "oner", a scene filmed as one continuous take with no visible cuts. The team drew inspiration from Adolescence, the Netflix drama that was also filmed in long, unbroken takes. Red Ink used the same camera system as that show, the DJI Ronin 4D, to move the camera through extended stretches of continuous action.

The schedule was tight. The crew had three days of preparation and an eight-day shoot. For a touchstone, the filmmakers looked back to Deadline U.S.A., the 1952 Humphrey Bogart newspaper drama.

Red Ink had its world premiere at the Camerimage festival in Toruń, Poland. The event is devoted to cinematography, so it suits a film built around the camera's movement.

For a studio newcomer, the path from a shut-down feature to a premiere took a detour through a single building and a single morning.