Hearing that their school project short horror film “The Forest” won the Best Horror film award at the Austin After Dark Film Festival Fall 2025, seniors Ethan Sorensen, Van Ezell, Jaiden Ramsay, and Jared Green walk up and claim their award in shock. Shaking from excitement, Ezell gives a speech on who they are as a group – Cowpoke Studios. Their simple student film turned into an award winning film, gaining them attraction.
“The fact that we won the award, as soon as I heard that, I was shaking, my hand was shaking,” Ezell said. “I went up [and] I had to give a speech about The Forest. I went and sat back down, it was exciting. It was a shock, to say the least.”
The festival was held on Oct. 18 at Southwest Theaters. The festival consisted of the screening of many different short films, lasting around 12 hours. With around 300 films internationally sent in, only 40 got nominated, “The Forest” being one of them.
“Before, I was really shocked when I heard the news originally, because [Jared] was the one who broke it to me,” Ramsay said. “I was just kind of surprised, but I was also really proud of our group because we had asked Ms. Slavnic, no other group in our class had ever done that before. No one’s gone to a film fest, no one’s won anything, so it was really just kind of an accomplishment. I was really proud of myself and everybody else.”
Cowpoke Studios, their own direction studio, was created by Green, coming from his username on video games and social media. He also created their cow logo. Their YouTube channel consists of all of their short films Continuum, The Forest and the trailers of The Forest, and Terraria.
“I think they’re all very talented filmmakers and script writers,” Ezell said. “They all helped a lot and honestly, if we had one less person, this production would have taken an extra two months, if even being finished at all.”
“The Forest” is a story about three hikers who go and visit a new forest, The Hollows Pines forest – their last destination to check off. In the forest they hear weird voices and strange things happen as they get picked off one by one. Sorensen, being the director of the film, created the idea. His job as a director was to turn his idea into a script and show the rest of the crew how to turn his idea into a reality.
“It sounds weird, but I actually had a dream and then I just started writing down everything I was thinking,” Sorensen said. “It just built into the movie that became. Obviously I edit a bunch of stuff, but I was laying in bed and then it came to me and I just started writing stuff down. It was partially inspired by The Ritual, a film on Netflix, because I had recently watched it and I got some ideas from it. The original theme or idea came to me in a dream.”
Ezell played the character Josh in the film and his job as an assistant director was more to co-direct and help Sorensen develop his idea into a script and write it. In addition to his role as the assistant director, Ezell edited “The Forest” as a whole.
“Josh is the shortest out of all of them because I’m the shortest in real life,” Ezell said. “He’s supposed to be this overconfident and a little bit egotistical because he has to make up for aspects that he’s insecure about. Whenever Tom is all worried about Ben he’s like, ‘Bro [we’re] out of here, like I’m not staying here.”
Although she wasn’t able to make it to the festival due to a band competition, senior Arom Kim produced the film. Her job was to primarily plan the days they could film that lined up with everyone’s schedules and deal with equipment they used, checking them out from their film class.
“I honestly don’t remember how I got so deep into film, but my dad loves taking pictures,” Kim said. “Seeing his work made me like how a still image can hold more than what is just seen. My interest in film production kind of developed from that. I think film or any type of videography is just like a picture that has a bigger capability to capture values of life.”
As the SFX (sound effects) artist, Ramsay specializes in specific sounds to add suspense to the film, skimming through any film they make and adding vital sound effects that will enhance the movie. For “The Forest” the majority of the sounds were made from scratch. Ramsay also makes the trailers and teasers for their films.
“I really enjoy making sound effects because I think they’re cool,” Ramsay said. “I [watch] cool stuff on Netflix and cool shows, and it’s something that my brain picks up a lot, more than most people. Most people would watch a movie or a show and they would just skip past, they wouldn’t really notice any of that stuff. It was like an itch almost. That’s what got me into that because I feel like every time we would watch our movies, I would definitely notice sound effects were lacking or there were worse sound effects.”
Although he specialized in SFX in “The Forest”, Ramsay also played the character Ben.
“Ben is the timid, sort of scaredy cat of the group of people in “The Forest,” Ramsay said. “He’s like the guy that isn’t very sure of a lot of stuff, like he doesn’t really know what’s gonna happen next. He hides behind the other two [and] he’s just very scared and unsure.”
Recording every scene they take, Green is the director of cinematography. Being the only cameraman, he said it isn’t too difficult because he gets a shot list and the rest of the shots were improvised. As a kid, he and Ezell would record films on iMovie on his iPad.
“That’s what made me take [film] class in freshman year,” Green said. “Now I really [have developed] a passion for it and it’s something that I want to stick to and try to make a career out of. Not just being behind the camera, but all aspects of it. Acting is to the side, that’s not my favorite out of anything I could do, but technical stuff like systems we can use or special effects, I like doing that.”
With everyone in the group having jobs, sports, and academics to deal with, it was difficult to find days to film, which meant resorting to Mondays, Tuesdays, and Saturdays. They edit their films mainly at school, with it being a school project. With a total of over 300 hours spent working on the film, including recording and post-production, it took the group three months to finalize “The Forest.”
“Although it is their first priority, it’s kind of hard to work with all those shifts,” Kim said. “We only had three actors and one cameraman, so some people couldn’t find different shifts. Not every scene had everybody in the frame. Whenever [someone] was gone we just shot things that [they were] not in and we just communicated with them on text.”
Although the group finished the film, there were some downsides working together on such a very specific film made from a dream. It being Sorensen’s vision, the group said it got exhausting constantly filming and almost gave up on the film.
“We thought that we were taking forever [and] we were putting in too much time,” Kim said. “It’s so time consuming to a point where it’s just too much. At the end we were persuaded by Ms. Slavnic saying that we should still make this perfect, so that we [wouldn’t] regret it later on. We did go out and then filmed some missing shots and it turned out to be great.”
Completing the project after spending so much time editing, the group said they were happy to finally be done because they no longer had to spend all their time on it. The film on their YouTube channel surpassed 24,000 views.
“We did not expect it to turn out as well as it did,” Sorensen said. “We were like, we should probably submit this to a film festival, so we did, but we didn’t expect to actually get to where we got. We expected to maybe get finalists, and that’s about it.”
At the end of the school year, film students put on a screening of all of their short films they created. The group was not allowed to show the actual version of “The Forest,” so they had to censor it. This was a point of controversy for the group as when they were watching UIL competitions, there were more graphic films, one being about school shootings and showcasing a fake gun around campus. Also, they claim their film didn’t go against the rules.
“We have some scenes that show blood and it can be scary for people, but I personally don’t think it was inappropriate for teenagers like us to see,” Kim said. “Before we even started writing the script we had a lot of ideas of things to do that we just weren’t allowed to do because we were in school. We’ve been filming a lot of stuff outside of school because we can have free reign.”
Making films for a school program, there are obligations to what can or cannot be filmed. For example, fighting films, blood, and curse words aren’t allowed.
“We’ve watched a couple of films from past classes, people who’ve already graduated, and we’ll look at them and they seem very limited in their creativity and what they were allowed to make,” Ezell said. “Based off [of] what we did, there doesn’t seem to be as much love put into [those films]. It’s not saying that they didn’t put any effort at all and they weren’t good films, it just felt like they had ideas, but they were limited by what the school would allow them to show.”
To get in the festival, participants must submit a short film and pay the cost of how long the film is. Ramsay’s next door neighbor owns a film studio and recommended they submit one of their films.
“I didn’t really tell anyone,” Green said. “I got the email [be]cause I was the one who submitted it under my name, and I wanted to keep it a surprise that we even got nominated [be]cause it was just a cool thing. I told my parents and Jaiden, and then we got there and we won the award. Honestly, I didn’t know we were going to win that, number one horror, but I had a feeling we were going to win something because we got nominated there. I was still super nervous because there were other people who are grown adults and have a budget. There were no other kids there, no teenagers.”
Being the only teenagers there, the group got to network with popular film companies, getting contact information from professional screenwriters.
“I just don’t want to have to pay for something when I know that I have ideas that I can write down,” Ezell said. “These are semi-professionals, which is cool, but the cost of screenplays is hundreds of dollars and I’m not really willing to dish out $500 just for a script. I think that the imperfections are what make it ours and I think the more that we work on our imperfections, the better our [content] gets.
Animation teacher David Peacock is a constant support to the group and keeps up with their films. Peacock taught the majority of the group their freshman year.
“They’ve been doing more than a lot of people since freshman year,” Peacock said. “They were doing interesting things and I would say that is the main thing that separates them from a lot of the other groups, like basic color correcting. We have a lot of incredibly talented people, especially in film. It’s not like their scripts are so much better when you read them on the page, but it’s that they’re willing to experiment with trying different shots. They were filming multiple takes to make sure that everything actually looks right.”
Finding out they won the competition, Peacock said he was excited because at the end of the day, they’re teenagers with a very professional-looking film.
“I was just excited that they had gotten in initially,” Peacock said. “Also, I didn’t know the level. I wasn’t sure what age group all the other people that were submitting into this film festival were. It’s just an honor that they got accepted into the festival. When they told me that they actually won, I was incredibly proud of them. They’re doing all these little things by [themselves that] won’t suddenly make them great films, but put together make their films stand out. It’s only grown since freshman year.”
Along with Peacock, film making teacher Ivana Tutman-Slavnic is their teacher this school year in their film class. Slavnic assigned the film project to them their junior year.
“They managed to tell the story in less than 12 minutes where they have a very strong beginning, middle, and horrifying end.” Slavnic said. “It is very creative and what was really impressive is how passionately they work on that. They spent all these long hours after school, after dark, because everything had to be recorded and complete darkness and I was really so impressed. Even if you would turn off the sound and just watch the visuals, you would know exactly what is happening. Which is absolutely the top result in filmmaking.”
Slavnic taught the majority of the group throughout these past four years, having the group in the same class for the past three. Slavnic said she was sure that they would at least get awarded something at the festival, but she is happy that they’re getting recognition out of school.
“They’re a group of very talented kids and they’re very film-passionate,” Slavnic said. “I think their strength is working together because they have individual talents, that are strong talents, and they compliment each other in a fantastic way. I’ve never seen it in the class before that a group of kids complement each other [and they] work so well together. They understand each other and they push the boundaries. The sky isn’t the limit.
Winning the film, the group feels like they don’t get much credit from the school. In the weekly MavMail, students get awarded for their hard work and exciting awards and quotes. In this instance, saying “OUR students” or “McNeil film students” practically takes credit for part of their film as if the group wouldn’t have been able to accomplish this without the film program.
“Even though the gear is from the film class and doing film helps us a lot, the creativity, the motivation, and the passion that we had for this project or future projects doesn’t necessarily come from the school,” Green said. “They are lending us the tools, but they’re not lending us the creativity. It came from our energy of thinking of stuff and putting our creativity into, it’s not because we’re in this class. Whether we’re in this class or not, we’d be making things like this.”
Berlin Short Film Festival, Paris Short Film Festival, and Indiana Independent Film Festival all texted the group asking if they wanted to participate. They plan on submitting their films to as many festivals as they can.
“Whenever Jared announced it to the group, it was an exciting feeling because we saw that all the posts that we did actually gained attention from people outside of Texas and outside of our school,” Sorensen said. “It was kind of an eye opening thing that we did actually have a bigger impact than just a high school thing.
To follow along on their film journey, or even take a look at “The Forest”, their YouTube channel “Cowpoke Studios” has all of their social media links.
“I want to inspire people to also make creative stuff,” Green said. “If people have a dream of something cool, just visualize it. Even if you’re just from our school, you can do the same thing. Before we had our little channel I’ve always been super worried about what people think. Putting myself out there and putting my friends has helped me a lot with getting past that. I don’t really care anymore, nothing that people say or think bothers me like that anymore.”
