In 2004, Hall took a turn behind the camera as a writer and director on a semi-autobiographical feature called Lighting Bug. This time, Hall returns as writer-director of Laid to Rest, a chilling story of a woman who wakes up in a coffin having no memory of who she is or how she got there. "It's my second feature, but my first foray into horror," attests Hall. "I grew up wanting to scare people and I've primarily been doing that over the years with prosthetics and makeup effects, creating things that go bump in the night. Over those years my interests have evolved a bit and now I'm interested in making my own movies to scare people." (Laid to Rest will be released by Anchor Bay Entertainment. Trailers and information are available at www.laidtorestmovie.com.)

The project was shot completely digitally on the Panasonic AJ-HPX3000 camera in the AVC-Intra codec. "We went all-digital," explains Hall. "We just locked picture last night and we've never used an inch of tape. We've been working with the full-HD version since day one and it's been fantastic."

Hall had previously directed a music video utilizing the Panasonic AG-HVX200 P2 camera and he fell in love with the format. "I was really impressed with that camera and I loved the workflow. It was really easy and we were able to cut in full HD — it was phenomenal! I thought, at first, that we could use the HVX to shoot Laid to Rest, but the more I looked into the prospect of blowing up the images from the HVX to film, the fact that you're not really getting 1080 shows up in the blacks and lots of compression. But then I found out about the HPX3000.

"The more research I did on the camera and the more clips I downloaded that people had shot with it, the more I fell in love with the images," continues the director. "Everyone has been jumping on the RED ONE, but I've worked on films with that camera and I'm a little scared of it. I don't think it's there yet. I don't like the proprietary hard drives, don't like having to have a tech on set who is the only one who knows about the camera... I'm much happier being able to buy hard drives at Best Buy, if necessary."

Laid to Rest was photographed by cinematographer Scott Winig, who also operated one of the dueling HPX3000s used on the project. The decision was made to shoot it in the AVC-Intra codec, which, in April of 2008, when the film went into production, was a move not without risk. "The codec was just being released, basically, so that was a little scary," attests Hall. But any worries were soon forgotten.

Laid to Rest was largely shot on location in Annapolis, Maryland, and Hall traveled with his editor, Andrew Bentler, who worked on set with Hall all the way through production. Hall explains, "We also had Charlie Anderson, who was basically half camera assistant and half editorial assistant. He would get the P2 cards from set, bring them back to the edit room, download them and transcode the media and hand it off to Andrew, who would then be cutting the material we just shot that same day."

Bentler set up shop on location in Maryland in a room with his assistant editor/camera assistant Anderson. Anderson would download the media from the P2 cards through a Panasonic P2 Mobile AJ-HPM100 and then make a duplicate backup copy. "The P2 Mobile is really a nifty deck," says Bentler. "You can download two cards at once in about 12 minutes, review the material right away without transcoding and not tie up a computer system with simple downloads — it's a great tool."

The production carried 10 16GB P2 cards, five for each camera, but whenever possible Bentler and Anderson did not delete the cards, but rather kept media on them until the end of the day. "We'd format cards at the start of each day and give the cameras clean cards every morning, but when we could we kept the media on the cards all day long in case Rob wanted to see something right away," Bentler says. "Then we could put the P2 card in the Mobile deck and he'd have instant access to anything — even stuff they just shot. Otherwise he'd have to wait for a transcode. We also kept the media on the P2 cards as a third backup just in case. There was just one day on the shoot that we cycled through more than five cards per camera, so of course on that day we had to format them early to reuse them."

After the media was downloaded from the P2 cards through the P2 Mobile to a hard drive and duplicated, Anderson would then, using his own Final Cut Pro workstation, transcode the AVC-I media into Apple's ProRes 422 and then duplicate those files, handing off one copy of the transcoded media to Bentler who would incorporate that into his edit.

"We backed up the MXF files off of the cards, so we had two copies of that and then we also backed up the transcoded media," Bentler says. "That way, if we lost a drive of transcoded media while we were working, we wouldn't lose the time to re-transcode the MXF files as we’d have a backup to run with right away."
The production ended up with 15 1TB drives to hold the entire completed project, including backups, renders, visual effects and outputs. All of the drives were FireWire800 daisy-chained together and were a mixed bag of brands. "It wasn't the best solution, but it worked," Bentler recalls. "We were sort of adding on as we went. One of the great things was, with the P2 media, we could just get add-on drives. In Annapolis, Maryland, it isn't very easy to find a FireWire 800 drive, let alone a specific brand, so more often than not we wound up with Western Digital MyBook drives, which work fantastic for backups with no problems at all."

The Laid to Rest team shot for 24 days in Maryland and, by the time they wrapped, with Bentler was cutting throughout principle photography, they had a nearly complete rough cut of the movie. "We basically had an assembly when we got back to Los Angeles," concludes Hall. "That is absolutely phenomenal. There's no way, if you were shooting film, that you could do that. Even if we were shooting tape, we could possibly have achieved this, but the decks are nowhere near as portable and compact and it would have been much more of a struggle. Shooting completely digital knocked a lot off the production cost. For a film that is under a million dollars, and totally self-financed, that's a significant factor.

"The thing is, with this digital technology, you really have budget-less films because the quality is so fantastic that no one can really tell what you spent on the movie," Hall explains. "To me, that's amazing because it means nearly every dollar is ending up on the screen rather than spending it on film, lab and telecine costs. I have become a huge fan of the P2 workflow. In fact, I think I'm going to get a P2 tattoo!"