Although director Jay Holben and cinematographer Christopher Probst have worked together in various capacities for more than a decade, Descent marks the duo's first writing collaboration. Fresh from their successful director / cinematographer partnership on The Night Before, Holben and Probst teamed up to pen and produce this terse thriller in a very short period of time.

"An opportunity arose to utilize resources to make another short film," explains the film's director. "Descent is actually an idea that I had years ago. I've always been fascinated by the psychology of human behavior in elevators - it's one time in our daily lives when we're confined with total strangers and a lot of people are extremely uncomfortable with that. The idea of being trapped with the one person you feared most in the world was very intriguing to me. Christopher was hesitant about the idea at first, but once I began writing the screenplay, he came on board. As soon as I had a completed draft, Christopher made a pass at it and then we would ping-pong the various drafts back and forth until we got one we were both happy with."

With a script locked, Holben began the process of casting. "I knew immediately that April Adamson would be perfect for this role," Holben attests. In addition to her role in his short The Night Before, Holben had just re-teamed with Adamson on the short thriller Mindgame, which he was co-producing and photographing. Finding a killer was a little more difficult, but Holben called an actor friend who had a wonderfully devious look. "Rob and I met quickly one afternoon and talked about the script and his ideas and I welcomed him aboard the project."

Renée Madison Cole was the next to come on, but in a different capacity than the ill-fated Vanessa. During the search for viable shooting locations, Renée foolishly offered up her apartment in Los Angeles' famous Park LaBrea complex. Christopher and Jay went to scout the apartment and immediately fell in love with it. Christopher and Jay were then discussing the role of Vanessa and both immediately thought of Renée. Luckily, she was an incredible trooper and actually took great joy in lying in her own bed for several hours in gallons of slowly coagulating movie blood.

As the production neared its shooting dates, trouble loomed on the horizon and suddenly the availability of the resources that made the project possible - now fell through. The production was forced to push their shooting dates to reacquire the necessary resources.

"I was crushed when we had to push," recalls Holben. "In the feature world, these things happen all the time, but in the short film world, where everything is done on favors and donations, things can crumble so easily if they run into a couple bumps in the road."

One of the casualties of the schedule change was production designer Marny Nahrwold, whose work brought to life the hospital room in Holben's The Night Before. Stepping up into Nahrwold's shoes was Kevin Boyle, part owner of 360 Degrees, a design firm specializing in commercial and music video art direction. Kevin originally signed on just to design and construct the elevator set, but wound up offering his shop as a sound stage as well and constructing a key prop at the last minute. Kevin's contribution to the end result was invaluable.

New shooting dates, which fell on the week of July 4th, were locked. With only two weeks until shooting, preproduction moved quickly forward, but securing a key location proved problematic. A suitable existing office building, with a real working elevator, continued to elude the filmmakers. From the onset it was decided that the majority of the scenes inside the elevator would have to be shot on a custom-built set with removable walls and open ceiling, to accommodate the camera and lighting. "Initially, Christopher and I were looking for something very specific," recalls Holben. "but, any building with an elevator had corporate ownership and getting permission to shoot for free, or next to free, was nearly impossible so we began scrambling for any place to shoot."

With equipment pickups happening in the morning, filming was to still set begin on that same evening of Monday, June 30th at a small company in Santa Monica where scenes for Andrea's office were shot. As the camera and lighting packages were being picked-up, the diligent efforts of Descent's associate producer, Douglas Bankston, paid off with the securing of the office lobby and functional-elevator location - the last piece of the puzzle was in place.

With the filming now in full-swing, the production moved on the second day to Park LaBrea for the scenes depicting Andrea's discovery of her dead friend. It was determined early on that the filmmakers would keep the bulk of the shoot - the elevator interiors - as late as possible in the schedule to allow Boyle time to construct the set. Since a practical elevator location wasn't found until after construction had begun, Boyle had to work backward and create his set and then augment the practical location to match the set.

The following two days, the production moved to Boyle's 360 Degrees facility in Gardena, California to shoot the elevator set. To accommodate a limited window of opportunity to shoot in the practical office building, the third day of shooting became a split between the stage work in Gardena and a company move to the real elevator in Sherman Oaks. Although originally slated as a 4-day shoot, it was then determined that an additional "skeleton unit" shoot day was required to shot the interior of a closet - where Andrea hides from the killer - the nighttime exteriors of Vanessa's apartment building in addition to an establishing exterior of a downtown office high-rise and some much-needed inserts. All in all eight different locations were photographed in five days with two and a half days spent on the elevator set at 360.