Into the Pines BFA Thesis Film Campaign

Hi everyone!

My name is Griffin Day and I’m a student at Emerson College and I’m the writer and director of Into the Pines. I am currently in my third year of college, and last fall I was given the option to apply to the college’s BFA program by pitching an idea for a film that I could create in my final semesters at Emerson.

Into the Pines is a huge combination of things that inspire me in my everyday life, abstract ideas and feelings that all come together in this story of humanity, technology, and our natural world.

Story

The story follows two main characters, Samuel and his girlfriend, Grace, who live in the basement of Samuel’s parents’ house. Samuel is a shut-in with strong social anxiety; he hardly leaves the house and spends almost all of his waking hours online in one form or another. Everything begins to fall apart when Samuel begins experiencing hallucinations of a dark and mysterious figure who is oddly familiar with him. Samuel’s mental state begins to decline rapidly and he finds himself drawn to the great northwest wilderness.

Themes

Into the Pines surrounds two core themes that I find ever present in my daily life: humanity’s changing relationships with technology, and our relationship with the natural world around us. I grew up in the Snoqualmie Valley of Washington State, around 40 minutes east of Seattle, right in the foothills of the great Cascade mountain range. Growing up in such a place, a love for the outdoors quickly took hold of me. I grew up hiking and exploring the local state parks, which quickly turned into a love for trail running, rock and mountain climbing, mountain biking, and skiing during the winter. All throughout high school I taught skiing at my local mountain and branched into backcountry ski touring when the pandemic hit. I took great pride in sharing my love for the mountains with others, through teaching or just trying to bring people together in our natural spaces.

Our ongoing and ever-changing relationship with technology is something that I also find fascinating, and I want to use Into the Pines to explore this idea further. I’m 21 years old and I grew up with technology progressing and maturing as I was maturing. I remember when my parents had old flip phones, and then they got Blackberry phones with large keypads, and then we had some of the first smartphones, old Android bricks that I would use to play games on. My generation grew up online, and I think that has had undeniable effects, positive and negative, on people my age.

Some of the most influential films I watched as a teenager were 80s and 90s sci-fi films that theorized how our future would look. Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner was one of the first and most impactful films I watched. The film critically questioned what it means to be human, and what it means to be alive. It envisioned a future where man and machine became so similar that we had no true way of telling the difference between them, challenging that they could be one.

I want Into the Pines to question our current reality and what our relationship currently looks like with technology in our lives.

Influences

I’m taking a diverse variety of inspirations, films that may not have anything in relation to one another, but I find little things in each that I love that I want to pull into this project. Visually I aim to create an authentic feel using simple and beautiful cinematography, Gregg Araki’s The Living End is a massive influence here.

A dominating influence on the project as a whole, visually, tonally, and especially sonically, is David Lynch’s Twin Peaks: The Return. Most obviously, there will be an overlap in location. In the 1990s, the first two seasons of Twin Peaks were shot in the Snoqualmie Valley, and he then returned in 2015 to my hometown to film The Return. I remember driving by the sets when they were filming, they had completely taken over parts of the town and it blew my mind. It has since been my dream to shoot a project here in my home and try to do justice in capturing the beautiful imagery and nature that surrounds it.

Gregg Araki, The Living End (1992)

David Lynch, Twin Peaks: The Return (2017)

Ridley Scott, Blade Runner (1982)

Spike Jonze, Her (2013)

Peter Weir, The Truman Show (1998)

Les Blank, Burden of Dreams (1982)

Danny Boyle, Trainspotting (1996)

Elem Klimov, Come and See (1985)

Meryam Joobeur, Brotherhood (2018)

David Lynch, Lost Highway (1997)

Tsai Ming-liang, The Hole (1998)

Gregg Araki, The Doom Generation (1995)

Budget Breakdown and Fundraising

Production will take place in mid-May of this year for 8 days. The crew will be flown out from the Boston campus of Emerson College to my home near Seattle. The crew and cast will also stay in my home with the support of my parents.

We will also be renting a lot of equipment locally as we have been having trouble allocating equipment from the institution, they have not been able to adequately support the project because of our shooting location in Washington State. This has been a frustrating setback so raising enough funding to afford rentals, especially a camera package, is very much needed for this production to go smoothly.

Aside from travel, our other major expense is craft services for my cast and crew. Purchasing enough food so that our team is taken care of while staying with me and my family is incredibly important. Depending on the day we will have to feed anywhere from 6-10 people every day.

I am incredibly proud of the team we have put together, and it is absolutely necessary that they are taken care of while they are giving their valuable time to this project. I can’t do this without my cast and crew, and I want to make sure that they are taken care of. All my food costs are currently going to be coming out of my own pocket, so any support will be appreciated.

We are setting a goal to raise $5,000. With this goal, we will be able to cover our rentals, including a camera system, lights, and grip equipment, among others. We will also be able to allocate a portion of this to craft services, covering expenses that I already will be burdening.

We understand that not everybody can support the project financially, but there are so many more ways you can help us if you want to! Share our Instagram page, @intothepines.bfa, with friends, family, and other film lovers alike! If you know somebody who might be interested in our project, tell them about us! You can share this GoFundMe page with friends or on social media and follow it to stay up to date with us as we near production!

For people who support this campaign, we want to sincerely express our gratitude. All Donations will receive a personalized thank you message from the director. Keep in touch with us over Instagram, @intothepines.bfa, where we will be continuously thanking you all! Signed posters by the cast and crew, digital posters, and other goodies will soon be available through our Instagram!

Team

Griffin Day – Griffin Day is the writer, director, and cinematographer behind Into the Pines. He recently worked as director of photography on his first feature, 8pm-8am, which is currently in post with an expected release this spring. He previously directed Turkilino’s: A Hero’s Story, which was an official selection to the Tokyo International Film Festival and New York Tri-State Film Festival.

Sofía Farrés – Sofía Farrés is an executive producer of Into the Pines. She has recently been working on the To Be Damned miniseries, which she wrote and directed and is expected to be released Summer 2025. She is also working as a producer for Lexington Production’s upcoming short film, The Sundowner, and previously co-wrote and produced Turkilino’s: A Hero’s Story.

Claire Statczar – Claire Statczar is an executive producer for Into the Pines. She is best known for her work producing One for the Road, a Stephen King film adaptation that was recently awarded best horror film by the Chicago Indie Film Festival. Fresh off the set of Opulence, a dark experimental thriller that is currently in post-production, we are excited to see what she brings with her meticulous planning and tenacity.

No raffles, sweepstakes, giveaways, or promotions are offered in exchange for any donations made on this GoFundMe.