Well, now that Macabre Manor is done I would like to express some thoughts and "stuffing" here. This has been a really hard film to attack, thus two different "Macabre Manor"s. I believe that if you watch both in succession you will see what I was intending.
The newer version comes from a slightly better camera, a Sony MiniDV capable of capturing 640x480 at very high resolutions. In this film, the camera was set to capture at low settings because of the limited 4MB card space. After doing a couple scenes in the dark, I was also quite happy with the results. The final film looks grainy, and almost black and white at times. This should scare some modern horror fans who like special effects and gore. There really is a sense of atmosphere with subdued colors.
This film was also submitted as a final project for my Advanced Digital Media class. The teacher of the class has a large background in art, and pushed my thinking into weird places. My three works of the semester (only one movie; others were pictures) dealt with minifigs in a world our size. But what the teacher did was push my mind into abstract thinking, and this movie came of it. A lot more came out of the whole class, but Plato's allegory of the Cave still makes my mind whirl.
So, having someone fuel a project which is not their own might be a step back (or away) from what you're normally doing. I felt this way during the whole piece. I made it look artsy with a gothic feel, but without the gothic charm. Had I been on my own, surely you would have seen more goblins, and mucus filled monsters. The movie turned out to be (very simply) a guy getting chased down in a manor he was paid to go in, and he dies. End of story.
While the lacking story goes on, the abstract thinker might piece things together differently (to create a movie wholly for themselves and different from others perspectives.) The heart in the film is a device used to move the main character across the screen. The heart is pulling him away. The other device that leads him to the house is money. Questions abound "Why did that guy turn into a tree?" "Why did that guy come out of the ground?" Another fall into abstractedness, where the viewer will make their own meaning.