INDIE SPOTLIGHT: Interview with ‘Keelhaul’ Short Film Filmmakers Dakota Daulby and Harrison Houde

A swabbie aboard a stranded pirate vessel discovers something hidden beneath the ship’s planks, an ancient and living secret bound to the sea, and to their captain’s past.

Filmmaking is a collaborative art form. And when you find your people, your filmmaking tribe if you will, the inspiration flows, the energy runs high, and the focus is dialed in to make the best film possible. For independent filmmakers, resources are key, as time is precious and budgets are incredibly limited. But back to the filmmaking tribe… if you can (respectfully) corral your team to carry out a collective vision, you’re off to the races.

That’s where Harrison Houde and Dakota Daulby, producers and co-founders of Vesperia Films come in. These two creatives are carving out their own filmmaking paths, and collecting filmmakers along the way that they are both in awe of, want to support and want to learn from. One of these filmmakers that they’ve brought into the mix is writer-director Edgar Cortés Campoy, with their latest short film Keelhaul. A seedling of an idea that producer and actor Dakota pitched Edgar… and well… continue on to our in-depth conversation about the making of the proof-of-concept short film, their overall creative collaboration, the importance of sound design, to their collective ethos.

Sadie Dean: How did this story initially take shape? Was it the title, the characters, their encounter? And then of course, looping in your writer-director Edgar [Cortés Campoy].

Dakota Daulby: It goes all the way back to the Beverly Hills Film Festival… I met a filmmaker named Edgar Cortés Campoy - a really cool filmmaker from Mexico, and he had a film that was screening beside ours in the same block. And his was a period piece, about the Aztecs, and it was just super awesome. And at that time, I had this this notion about this horror pirate movie swirling in my mind. And I was like, ‘I don't think I'm the guy to write this one. I want someone with a different voice and a different approach.’ And I saw Edgar's movie, and I was like, ‘This is the guy.’

We chatted a little bit at the festival... and we met up and had coffee, and I pitched him this idea, and I was like, ‘I want you to be the guy to tell this story with me.’ We chatted about how.... we haven't seen a pirate world in this way. We wanted to tell a story that was really grounded in reality, and was very much true to the time, like how they speak, and also the mythology that they believed in, because these people believed in that stuff, and it was very much real in their world, and it affected them. The mysticism of being on sea and the creatures around that.

So, we came up with these ideas, and we tossed drafts back and forth for a better part of a year, and we kind of had this way bigger version of the film we wanted to make. It was gonna be super expensive… And I was off backpacking, and Edgar says, ‘OK, screw it. I wrote this teaser version of the film. We're going to shoot it in a garage, and we have this amazing production designer named Jannik [Ehret] who's going to come on and build the whole thing literally in a garage.’ I was in South America, and I'm like, 'I'm back in LA for a week, so we'll just shoot it when I'm back, before I go off.' Because I was doing a six-month backpacking trip, and then I was off again in Europe.

So, we shot this thing, literally in a garage, with Edgar's vision, and all these are really incredible talented people that just literally came out in a garage and...

Harrison Houde: A very small single car garage. [laughs]

Dakota: [laughs] What we've learned through this process, working with Edgar and Julia [Rose Weisberg] his wife, we’re doing her next film, is you don't need crazy budgets, you just need the right people. Keelhaul was the perfect lesson of that. Put the right people together in a garage, and you can make something amazing.

Sadie: Building tension through the sound design in the movie. What was that process like?

Harrison: Edgar edited the film, and… I think Edgar has a great vision for that kind of stuff as well, in general. The sound design is so important, because otherwise we all think we're still in this garage, [laughs] in Silverlake, and we need to feel like we're on a pirate ship and stranded in the middle of the ocean.

Dakota: We met this guy named Andrew Cronin. He had just graduated a couple years ago... He doesn't have a ton of experience and he was super eager. And we're like, ‘OK, screw it. We'll give him a chance. He obviously wants to be a part of it, and we don't have a huge budget, so we just need someone that's down.’ And he just crushed it. He did it in his bedroom, and did an incredible job. And then they kicked it over to a guy named Pete Osterlund, who is this great mixer and sound designer. He put it all together and did the leveling and took the sound vision and brought it to life.

Again, it's a good lesson in how sound can play a character, right? The sound is very much a character, and for the feature version, we envision it to be more of a character, of course. And there's no music in this movie... the creaking and the swaying of the ship is kind of the music.

Sadie: Yeah, it's so good. I'd like to talk about the creative decision behind adding captions to the film. As a viewer, I really appreciate it, because it just really helped me lock into following what these two guys were going through or talking about.

Dakota: Edgar's the driving force behind all of that. I think one of it, it's on a practical sense, because it's old English, so it's not something that people are used to hearing. And for a short... we only have 10 minutes, right? So, for some people, it takes little time to catch up to that language, that type of speak.

So, without the captions, I think there's a worry that people have no idea what's going on, [laughs] so there's a practical sense to it as well.

The film's very stylized, like the aspect ratio - it's all part of the aesthetic of the film. If you notice the way the captions are written, it's written in the speak in which they say it. It's not translated to modern English, in a sense. I think it's part of that immersive experience, and it's supposed to pull you in and also help you to make sure you understand what's actually being said.

Sadie: Well, I think we could all just agree that Edgar is just a genius, and everyone should hire him. There’s a lot of takeaways from this film, one of them being knowledge is power. And there’s a great tonal shift of power between your character Dakota, Corsiare, and Stede. Being so close to the material, how did you approach your acting without giving away too much with a look or a reaction?

Dakota: It's a lot of conversations about the story and the pretext of story with Edgar and understanding. I have a larger version of mine, so we obviously understand the bigger scope of it. It's taking a lot of that history that we don't see on screen and bringing it with you into that scene. Because this is one little moment of a larger experience. So, it's the desperation that these people have gone through, and it's the disease that they're dealing with.

And in the larger version, these guys are essentially out there trying to find riches and wealth and in the way that they're doing this, they're being punished... you have to watch the film, of course, to see what that is. But there's a mysticism of them truly believing that they've done something wrong, and that the sea itself is punishing them, and then for them to correct that punishment, they have to....

Sadie: Everyone has to see the movie to get it.

Dakota: [laughs] Yeah. So, I guess coming into it as an actor, you just bring all that pretext with you. And then it's the rehearsal with Joseph [Schwartz], who plays Stede, and finding those little moments and those beats. It's kind of like doing plays, you have to find those ebbs and flows within the larger scene, where you can find the moments of tension and the moments of reversal, and where I had the upper hand, or he has the upper hand, and it's kind of a cool power dynamic that you're constantly playing with.

Sadie: That atmosphere again, your DP [Natalia Moscoso]and production designer [Jannik Ehret] just did such a great job and in making it feel so claustrophobic.

Dakota: What was really amazing for Harrison, with our company Vesperia, we have a lot of creative that's driven by ourselves, of course. But about two years ago, him and I were like, we want to expand beyond ourselves and meet other filmmakers like Edgar. We're doing Julia's film, his wife's film coming up, and we just did a film with Dean Norris, with another filmmaker named Chadrick [Preuss]. Our goal was we want to find other voices that we can collaborate with and tell different types of stories that are not necessarily fully our stories. So, this was one of the earlier ones that we've done, and it's been a fantastic experience. And it's proving that people like it which is pretty cool.

Harrison: Yeah, this is the second thing we shot with a different director.

Dakota: It's pretty exciting. That's the whole thing about filmmaking. It's fun to collaborate with other people, because they have a different perspective on film and how to tell a story, and then you mash those two perspectives together and create something together.

Harrison: It expands our network in a huge way, but it also expands our ability as well. Every time you're on set, you're learning something or you're doing something different. Like, we did a pirate ship in a garage. We haven't done that before. We did a sci fi thing with someone else. We hadn't done that before with a spaceship. We're always learning something by working with new directors that have different ideas and they have different ways of shooting and different styles of directing. It's a free shadowing experience for us as directors as well. We can see how other directors work and pull the things we love the most.

Dakota: Yeah, because everybody has their own way that they talk to the actors that’s really good, or their approach to shots and how they set it up and how they work with the camera is really interesting. You start to grab the little bits that are awesome and kind of create your own little tool chest of things.

Harrison: You realize certain directors use certain techniques, and you go, ‘OK, I can steal that.’ [laughs] It's free.

Sadie: [laughs] It's free film school. What was the impetus of starting your own film company together, especially with a focus on short films right now?

Harrison: I guess there's a few answers to that question. The reason we are even doing short films is in the hopes that these things are essentially IP creation, so we can turn them into a feature, or turn them into a series, and essentially get an ROI that way, and start making money. We're in the film business. [laughs] So making something in that sense, and being very strategic, of like, ‘OK, there's an art to it, but there's also the commercial aspect to it in the business side.’

And we want to find that happy medium, especially in the indie space. I think in the indie space, people either go one way or the other often, and we're trying to find that. It's such a sweet spot to try to find, and we're also still working at that, but we've started to find our small successes in the last couple years with our first two features. One, we just finished. It's done, and it's called Tight Lettuce. And the other one is an option feature; Dakota directed the short called Vance. It's our vampire thing, and we're working with executive producer Michael Hirst, out of London, and his daughter's company, Scarlett Hirst - her company is called Siblinc. We're kind of their first feature they're developing with that company. So that's something we're pretty excited about as well. And I say this because, that's the goal is to turn these things into something bigger and basically continue doing that. We have 17 projects that we're working on. [laughs]

Dakota: Both the movies that Harrison mentioned both began as shorts. Even Tight Lettuce too was originally a short that we had raised a bunch of money for, and we ended up just skipping the short and making a feature. So that was pretty cool.

Harrison: I don't think anyone's ever wanted to give $60,000 back to the investor and going, 'never mind’.

[all laugh]

Dakota: I think first and foremost, we love making movies, right? And that's where it drives from, for sure. But Harrison and I also, we started off as actors, and there's no control as an actor. You're always at someone's beck and call, which is fine, you're auditioning.

We wanted to create our own artistry. We want to be able to tell our own stories. And we want to do that on our own volition. We don't have to wait for someone else's 'Yes'. With that said, obviously, in filmmaking, we also have to find the money. And there's many no’s in different ways that you have to run into too. But at least it's your own drive.

And it's how much him and I work and we have a guy named Jan Sikora who works with us, who's our development coordinator. It's up to how much we all put in and if we're willing to work really hard and we're out meeting people and pushing these stories along, we can find successes and we have been. So, it kind of gives you some of that control back in a wonderful way, and frees you up. So that's a big part of it, I think, as well.

Sadie: What’s so great about your approach is you're bringing your own experiences from working in the industry in different facets, and you're not discouraged, if anything, you're just have more of a drive. And I love that you're both open and excited by the prospects of collaboration and networking and learning on the journey. So many filmmakers can easily get discouraged just by all of the advice they’re given along the way of what to do, what not to do, which paths to take, which ones to avoid. I feel like at the end of the day, just beg steal and borrow from what works best for you in that moment or for that project.

Harrison: For sure. We definitely knew this from the get-go, but there's no one path, and we tried to go down every single path, and some of them have barriers up. So, we just turn around and then go find the other one. And then on the way back, this is gonna be a crazy analogy, we find a machete, and we start cutting a new path. [laughs] And then it's like oh, we didn't know this was here. We're just finding new ways to make movies. We just want to figure it out, and we're open to lots of different ways of doing that. And there’s no one way.

Dakota: Early on we spent a lot of time when we're younger, going like, 'What is the way to make a movie? What's the right steps?' And everybody that's 10 years ahead of us would just be like, 'Well, there's no right way. You just keep going.' And you hear that, and you go, 'But there has to be a way!' And then you keep going, and then someone goes, 'No, there's no right way. You just keep going.' And then you keep hearing that over and over, and eventually you're like, 'Yeah, they're right.' [laughs]

Harrison: …It's always changing, and the goal posts always move. And there's never really a true answer. We’re like let's just keep going with all the things we have. And somebody's gonna like this at some point, and it's gonna be the right project for the right person on the right day with the right team. It's unexplainable. You just have to keep throwing your stuff at people in the right places at the right time, I think.

Keelhaul is having its US Premiere on Tuesday, February 10, 2026 at the 41st Santa Barbara Film Festival in the Narrative Shorts 1 Block at 6:00 pm PT at Film Center Auditorium 4. Second screening on February 11, 2026 at 8:00pm in the Narrative Shorts 1 block.