Director's Bio:

Erik Soulliard was born in Lebanon, Pa. on November 25th 1973. From a young age, he knew he wanted to act and be involved in the film community in some way but found little opportunity locally. Erik earned a BS in Speech Communications from Millersville University. Inspired by a screenwriting class, Erik wrote his first script entitled “Syncopation.” Directly after earning his Bachelors degree, Erik moved to the New York Metro area and began acting in student and independent films. He quickly earned a great deal of experience in strong supporting and lead roles. Unfortunately, many of these projects went unfinished for a multitude of reasons. This lead to the decision that he wanted to take a project into his own hands, therefore, guaranteeing it would be completed. Soon after, Erik wrote the short film “Interrogation.” It was an ultra low-budget experimental piece with a touch of film noir. Through these experiences and other projects, Erik put together the core relationships that would support him in tackling a much larger project. In the fall of 2005, Erik wrote the feature film script for The Creek. Shooting took place in his hometown of Lebanon, Pa. With the assistance of an amazing crew, unbelievable weather, friends and family, the shoot wrapped principal photography on June 3rd 2006. Erik completed post-production on February 1st 2007 using a Final Cut Pro edit suite he built in his basement. Over the course of many projects, Erik has developed a great interest in editing and post-production. He enjoys the luxury of being able to direct a film and then cut it to maintain his original vision. He is however in no way musically-oriented and was extremely fortunate to recruit Andrew C. Strauss and Tim Jesiolowski to bring The Creek to life with their amazing score. Erik is currently writing his next feature and auditioning in NYC for independent films.

Director's Statement :

I’ve always been drawn to the creative spirit of independent filmmaking. Throughout the past 7 years I’ve contributed my acting and crew talents to many independent shorts and feature films. After writing and directing my first short “Interrogation” I decided to take on a feature film. “The Creek” is my first foray into feature filmmaking. The script was written over the summer of 2005 and from there pre-production began. By the spring of 2006, I secured the cast, crew and locations. As with most low-budget films we were dependent on the kindness of family, friends, and the many actors and crew members who were gracious enough to lend their talent to our project. All of our locations were generously donated to us by local businesses and friends. Even our set pieces were provided by a close friend’s mother and grandmother’s ongoing yard sale. With all this help, we began shooting April 27th 2006. Everyone involved had and needed to maintain full-time jobs throughout shooting so we shot Thursday, Friday and Saturday evenings from sundown to sunup for six consecutive weeks. The majority of our shooting was outside and we were dependent on an early spring to supply us with nice lush trees and foliage but along with that would come rain and lots of it. The rain came every week but what I can only explain as the grace of God is the fact that it always rained Sunday through Wednesday. In the end we were only forced to reschedule one shooting day due to rain.

An outside DV night shoot in the woods presents many obstacles. The largest of these is the sheer amount of space that needs light so as to supply the camera with enough information to create nice clean blacks. My Director of Photography, Jason Contino, got an extremely good deal on a 5K light which allowed us to light a broad area with one source. This freed up our lighting package so that we could fine-tune certain areas of the frame and spot out specific areas in the background. It gave us a greater appearance of night and moonlight while giving the camera more to read in the background helping solidify the blacks even more. All of this lead to a better experience color correcting than I originally anticipated.

Planning ahead, organization, and the collaboration of everyone involved is the only way this film was made. I can’t even begin to include everyone here but suffice it to say that PA to Grip to Investor everyone involved was integral to the production of The Creek.

Anecdotal Accounts :

Two weeks after principal photography wrapped, the entire cabin location was flooded by the nearby creek. The water flowed over the roof of the cabin and the trail to the set was blocked by downed trees and debris. Re-shoots in this location were a challenge.

It rained three to four days virtually every week of shooting but only one day had to be rescheduled for it.

The actor who plays Coop is 6 foot 7 inches tall. His obvious height advantage over the other players was blended into the scenes by placing him in holes, ditches and gullies.

Gaffer/key grip, Chris Evans, will forever be known as Sasquatch. He earned his nickname after spending long hours lighting distant trees in the woods and then scaring everyone by suddenly reappearing on set.

Body doubles for Angel and Emily were used in one scene of reshoots. The doubles scene blended seamlessly with the existing footage and even the main actresses themselves thought they shot that scene.

The Creek Poster: