A psychological horror feature film directed and edited live, with production teams distributed across separate locations, connected only by NDI network streams and a shared will to make something that had never been done before.
When the world locked down in 2020, most productions stopped. HERE & NOW saw a different possibility. In The Shadow It Waits was conceived as an experiment: what if a feature film could be made not just remotely, but live, with the edit happening in real-time as the cameras rolled, the final cut existing only in the moment of its creation?
The technical architecture was built entirely on vMix for live production switching and NDI (Network Device Interface) for low-latency video over IP, a workflow borrowed from live broadcast and repurposed for narrative filmmaking. Camera operators at separate physical locations fed their streams to a central director/editor who made every cut live, in response to performance, in real-time.
“A technical marvel that is also genuinely terrifying. HERE & NOW have created something unprecedented, a film that could only have been made this way, in this moment.”
ABC Melbourne, 4.5 Stars
The genre was chosen deliberately. Horror is built on anticipation, on the tension between what you show and what you withhold. Live editing is intrinsically tense. There are no retakes, no alternate cuts to fall back on. Every decision is permanent. The anxiety of live production became, by design, the anxiety of the horror itself, a perfect formal alignment between the production process and the emotional experience of the work.
The result received wide critical recognition, with ABC Melbourne awarding 4.5 out of 5 stars and noting both the technical achievement and its artistic weight. As a landmark in live cinema practice, In The Shadow It Waits established that remote live filmmaking was not a crisis workaround, it was a legitimate and powerful creative methodology.
