Valhalla came out of the air.

 Working in conjunction with Brooks Institute & Glynn Beard, director Jacob Strunk had procured a Sony CineAlta camera package for use on his short film Sand Country.  There was a very limited amount of time the camera would be available.

 Two weeks before production, an image conjured itself in Strunk’s head.  He saw, in vivid detail, what would become the opening shot of Valhalla.  Strunk saw the chance to shoot the film on 24P HD as an opportunity to tell a story revolving around remarkable detail.  He immediately made a phone call and got the camera for two extra days.  Two days…in two weeks…and there was no script yet.

 That night, Strunk sat down and wrote the first – and ultimately final – draft of Valhalla.  It was one sitting, one evening, and in one frantic session, the film appeared, trailing behind a blinking cursor on his screen.  The story virtually wrote itself as Sutton (Beard) stumbled through an eerily empty house.

 With ten days until the shoot, Strunk took the script to Beard for his opinion.  The next step was casting.  The film’s production would be small, with the narrative surrounding but one character.  Finding the right person for that character would prove harder than he first imagined.

 Strunk’s first two possibilities dropped off the project, citing reasons he could only chalk up to an embarrassed lack of interest in something so seemingly morbid and, well, odd.  It was here that Beard stepped in.

 The two had collaborated before.  Beard appeared in a featured role in Go Man Go, a short film produced for the Pioneer 2880 Project which Strunk wrote and directed.  Strunk had also served as Assistant Director on Beard’s film Success, the first installment in a series of nine short films.  Strunk knew Beard could act, he had seen it before. 

 And with that, Beard was cast in the role.  The match proved to be perfect.  With Glynn Beard acting under Jacob Strunk’s direction, the space proved a fertile bed for creativity and the two fleshed out the character – and the film – together.  Beard beautifully found the character Strunk had envisioned and each scenario, only weeks prior typed out in that frenzied writing session, became rich with life.

 The shoot went more smoothly than it should have, and the crew moved admirably quickly.  Beard soon realized Strunk’s method of bringing the character to the screen as realistically as possible was shooting as few takes as possible, capturing genuine moments instead of rehearsed actions.

This method proved more than effective at bringing through the camera and onto the screen the atmosphere, emotion, and raw feel Strunk was looking for.  The film in his head found itself footing and came into being.  The momentum from the shoot carried him into the editing room, where he cut the film into the final product, a perfect representation of the twisted vision which had come to him two weeks earlier.  A screening with Beard, sound man Dale Angell, D.P. Johnny Bishop, advisor David Roy, and Strunk's own mother proved the film succeeded in creating a world of its own.

 And so, a mere two weeks after the idea’s inception, Valhalla came into being…out of the air.