ELKHORN -- Stuck at home during his freshman year of college due to the COVID-19 pandemic, Benjamin Brauer decided he wasn't just going to play video games, but stream them. That led to the launch of his YouTube channel "bd1p" which now has 104,000 subscribers.
"I went through different phases with it, different games and niches," Brauer said. "When I was a kid, I would play Lego video games, and there was definitely a niche to be filled there. I just started making videos on the history behind Lego video games and different things like that. People found it interesting and they just kept watching. I've made a living off of it, so it's a pretty good deal."
His videos feature challenges for a variety of different LEGO games, Minecraft and even "Goofy Funny" sketches with his friends.
"I have to figure out what people want to watch and what they're interested in," the YouTuber said. "I can't just go, 'I'm going to play this game normally and people will be interested.' I have to find different twists and challenges for it. But at a base level, I get to wake up, play a video game, edit a video, write something funny or interesting about it and then publish it."
Brauer and his friends Zachary Barker, Eduardo Valadez, and Alejandro Huerta, are wrapping a new creative project set to release on March 27: a horror film titled "The Beast of Bray Road."
Allegedly first sighted in 1936 in rural Jefferson, The Beast of Bray Road -- a wolf-like creature -- saw several-later sightings reported during the 1980s including contact with vehicles and animal remains around Bray Road.
Brauer said he first heard of the tale in seventh grade in Elkhorn.
"It's a super interesting thing, it was national news for a good year," Brauer said. "A couple of my friends and I are all really into watching movies and hanging out, we found ("The Beast of Bray Road") online. We watched the whole thing and our first thought was, that was not great. We were not thinking we can do anything better, but we can definitely make it more faithful. I think the focus should be on the town and people's reaction to it, and not just some regular run-of-the-mill werewolf story that could be taking place anywhere."
Unlike 2005's "The Beast of Bray Road" -- a direct-to-video horror film -- the crew sought to capture the heart of their hometown. Every shot that's in the film was shot in Elkhorn.
"We all spend our time as teenagers walking down Bray Road trying to find whatever we could," he said. "I think shooting at home where we grew up allowed us to put a lot of nostalgia and personal attachment into the movie. I wanted to avoid getting burnt out and feeling like I wasn't attached to the project at all, so we shot at locations relating to our childhood as well.
"There was a scene shot at my elementary school and at a lake that I grew up near. Even where we went out to eat in-between shoots, that was all at places that we ate at or were at growing up. It helped us feel more at home and more comfortable. I think too being around friends and family because we shot over the holiday season as well, it just felt very much like home. We were able to be more free and comfortable, and be ourselves and authentic with the process."
Directing and producing their first film, the crew spent time researching cameras for low-light shooting and purchased GoPros and different lens attachments for the camera. Luckily they already utilize several lights and microphones for streaming that could be used in production. The editing software is also the same Brauer uses for his videos.
"A lot of it is pretty amateurish," he said. "And instead of trying to combat that, we leaned into it. lWe made our characters in the movie amateur YouTubers who don't really know how to use this stuff professionally. We don't want to try to disguise the fact that we're not making 'The Godfather.' We're making a low-budget film."
Brauer certainly has ample experience streaming video-game content and producing sketches, but directing a film is a different animal. In 2025 with the internet, quality of cameras and professional editing software readily available, what might have been a leap in the past is now more achievable.
"We have the internet and we can look these things up and get different informational sources on it and figure things out for ourselves," Brauer said. "Even a phone camera nowadays is nearly just as good as a professionally-graded camera would have been 20 years ago. So if we didn't really want to spend that much money, we could have cut out $1000 bucks from the budget and just used our phones. Obviously, we didn't do that. But having the options and the freedoms available to us has been liberating."
Brauer, Barker, Valadez, and Huerta, faked their disappearances to draw excitement towards "The Beast of Bray Road" trailer release, like the marketing campaign for "The Blair Witch Project" released in 1999.
They may have an online following -- which met some backlash due to the marketing -- but this movie isn't for that audience. This strategy was for getting the project out for the people of Elkhorn and to stir the urban legend back onto the scene.
"We printed off a bunch of missing-person flyers with the four of us," he said. "We drove around and gave it to Hansen's Market, a couple of bars, a barber shop, a library and other public places that have a lot of foot traffic. And then we had my dad, who was very helpful through all this, make a Facebook post pretending that I was actually missing. He had to delete it because he was getting so many calls, which I guess was at the end of the day the goal.
"We made a social media page attached to the poster that was posting updates on the search and we left like fake evidence around our shooting location so that people could retrace our steps. When they finally watch the movie, they're kind of living through what they were trying to solve when the marketing was going on. I think it's a really cool interactive aspect of it."
In Elkhorn, Brauer received messages from high school friends and family with excitement for the project, and obviously happy that he wasn't in fact missing. The marketing campaign back home was a success and now all that's left is the horror film's release set for March 27.
"I just want to have people who are interested in film, know us, those who don't and anybody who appreciates eloquent life and the history of the town, to come out and just see this thing that is made for them," he said. "I want to, in 50 years, dust it off in the basement and show my children that I made a thing about this random town, even if it goes nowhere. I wanted to be in the conversation. I want to revisit this part of Elkhorn's past that I wasn't alive for, but was obviously very influential on the town."
