Two urban explorers break into a derelict scientific institute in the English countryside to rescue a dying YouTube channel. That is the setup for Abandoned, whose teaser arrived Monday, and the film behind those 35 seconds was shot in long sustained takes, the first block running roughly 38 minutes a take.
Grace Gallagher and Cameron Wight play Jess and Adam. The film is a found footage hybrid, opening and closing with conventional camerawork and handing the middle to the characters’ own cameras. Sofie Dossi and Ashlee Montague perform in the film and are credited as executive producers.
Thirty-Eight Minutes Without a Cut
Joby Stephens directed and produced Abandoned and co-wrote it with Joe Bird and Andrew Daniel. He told British Cinematographer that he funded the film himself, and he put the long takes down to a single requirement: “Because I needed the characters to become real. Without cuts.” Cinematographer Nathan Claridge shot the opening and closing sections on a Sony Venice 2, and the handheld material inside the building came off a modified Sony FX3 rig with an iPhone 16 Pro running as a second camera. The interior plays out in four major blocks, and the finished film carries one stitch cut, added to fix a technical problem.
The Crew Slept in the Cells
The location is a three-floor complex with tunnels and basement rooms, two centuries old above ground and twice that below, and the crew lived on site in a disused prison where cells had been converted into bedrooms. A twenty-point 5G network and more than 500 meters of cable let the camera team monitor and control the rigs remotely while the actors moved between floors. Scripts went out partly redacted, with scare beats and performer movement withheld from the cast, and doors were sealed during live takes.
Abandoned had its world premiere at the Edinburgh International Film Festival and played Sitges in the Panorama Fantàstic strand, and per Dread Central it took its North American premiere at Screamfest in Los Angeles. WTFilms is handling sales, and no distributor or release date has been announced.
“The screams are real. The darkness is real,” Stephens told British Cinematographer. On a shoot with the doors locked and the pages redacted, that reads less like a tagline than a production note.
