About the Production

Sleepless Nights began production in 1999, in the early years of digital filmmaking. The idea was to make a gothic melodrama a la Dark Shadows for the home video market, which at the time was flourishing.

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Working on a tiny budget and using a "prosumer" camcorder (the Sony VX-1000) and a largely inexperienced cast and crew, the film was completed in a series of 2-3 day shoots scheduled over the course of a two year period, whenever sufficient funds could be raised.
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In 2003, the completed film was picked up for distribution, made its way into Blockbuster stores throughout North America and was considered a modest financial success. But filmmaker William Hopkins was dissatisfied, feeling that the film's postproduction schedule had been rushed, its edit needed tightening and the overall look and sound of the standard definition production needed sprucing up.

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Now, on the 20th anniversary of the film's original release, and with the help of original producers, Howard Nash and Frank Cilla, Hopkins has gone back to the film to give it a complete makeover, re-editing it from scratch, picking up the pace, polishing performances, improving picture and sound quality, and uprezzing it to HD while preserving its original 4x3 (1.33:1) aspect ratio.

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The "revamped edition" of Sleepless Nights represents a much greater commitment of effort and time than would normally be put into a low-budget, direct-to-video production, but Hopkins feels it was worth it. "We managed to rescue a film from the early years of digital filmmaking, one that would almost certainly have been lost otherwise, and we can present it now in its best possible form, looking and sounding better, and hopefully providing more enjoyment to its audience, than ever before."