A SHORT and spooky family movie for Halloween is the way a Bournemouth film and video company decided to show the wider world what it does.

Treehouse Digital has documented every part of the production of its eight-minute movie Treaters through short documentaries online.

And it has arranged a public screening at Halloween, with the film printed on 35mm celluloid for the occasion.

Treaters is billed as a “fun, spooky ride, with suspense, thrills and chills that will make you so giddy, you’ll feel like a kid in a candy store”.

A series of documentaries online show how it was written and filmed, how the sets were constructed and the visual effects and post-production were done.

Producer Chris Musselwhite said: “What we’ve learned is that the product, which is the film, is not the primary goal. It’s to show the process.

“We set ourselves the goal of this is being released at Halloween. By setting that deadline for ourselves and publicising it, it meant it would be huge egg on our face if we didn’t deliver. Our aim is to over-deliver.”

Fellow producer Paul Hamblin said: “We wanted something we could just make and be able to show and have complete control of.”

Boscombe-based Treehouse makes family movies and TV shows and produces commercial videos, from web testimonials to full-scale TV productions. It also provides post-production facilities.

The core team are locals who did not go to either of Bournemouth’s universities, but are keen to use the talent coming out of the campuses.

Chris said: “We set out to make our own intellectual property and get something going in Bournemouth. The reason we didn’t go to London was because there’s such a pool of talent here and we wanted to draw on that.

“We have various backgrounds prior to Treehouse. It’s a really good spread of skill sets that we bring to the table. We took a business risk by saying let’s create our own production company and make creative work.”

The documentaries accompanying Treaters aim to record the production “warts and all”. Paul said: “We’ve shown pretty much the entire process.”

The team paid for a single 35mm print of the film for showing at the Shelley Theatre by Darren Payne, who runs regular film shows there. “We wanted to show it at Shelley Theatre just so we could hear the film ticking through the projector,” said Paul.

In recent years, Dorset has produced feature-length horror movies K-Shop, made in Bournemouth, and the zombie film Stalled, shot in Wimborne.

“There’s a growing group of people making stuff,” says Paul.

All this activity suggests the area could have its own film scene.

“People are moving towards that. It just needs to grow and needs more people to help it grow,” says Paul. “It probably needs to be taken a bit more seriously locally.

“Our aspiration is film and television but we’ll never stop doing what you’d call commercial work – company videos, adverts and things like that – because you learn so much from making them.”

More about Treaters, and tickets for the free showing, at treehousedigital.com/treaters/