fanatical!

We just finished shooting everything. Everything. We stayed up until 3:30am Friday night, then had a 7am call this morning. Just got finished about an hour ago. Two hours of sleep. I don't feel it though. At all.

Our actress was amazing, and Cody was very good too. We went handheld on most of the project, because the characters deserve the look. I have a steady hand too.

Have you ever mixed chicken hearts and gizzards, fur and fake blood together? Yeah, it's pretty awesome if you want to emulate someone tearing a creature apart.

I'll start editing next weekend. I'm tired now. And cold. But we'll have a great film. In fact, a fanatical film.

The Grind

The good news is that me and Geoff are on the same page with damn near everything.  We've got our actress lined up.  Storyboards are almost finished.  I have/had an amazing location lined up (granted a couple hours away, but a vacant, run-down/creepy dormitory fit perfectly) and am still waiting on permission/security clearance to film on location--it is at a military training facility.  It's a process, sure...but if it takes much longer, we'll be forced to move on to secondary locations.  So, we're searching for an alternate location.  I've done some experiments in After Effects on test shots...getting close to creating the look and (especially) the FX I want.  Also did some research in the audio world...my lips are sealed but we've got a neat little project going that will amp up the effectiveness of the film.  Finishing up final storyboards and building a list of sound FX for the audio kids to start work on.  The hope was to begin filming by the end of the week...the location waiting game is dangerous, and, to be honest, worries me.  It's a two-edged blade: if we get it, the atmosphere it provides will be worth the wait, but if not, we will have pushed back production a few precious days for nothing. 

Killing me slowly...

Well, pre-production for me has been quite a bit of work. I love collaborating with different individuals for projects. However, I wish that not every actor would question my ability to direct. I like people voicing their concerns; but damn yo'. Give a gal some room to breathe a wee bit. The actor that I found for the other character has been dismissed from the project, due to too many schedule conflicts. Therefore, I didn't want to bullshit around anymore. I have already found an actor to replace her. Things should be well on there way once I get in contact with the audio crew. After that, hopefully my drama on this end will be over. Thank god I don't have to edit with anyone. Christ. As far as my actor from Dwandra's class, I couldn't ask for more patience.

Everything is Smooth, so far...

Last night we had our first of two days of shooting. It went really well. I went and captured the footage, without any problems. This is a tough script to act. At first, I was slightly worried about my leading actress. When we showed up on set, she didn't know all of her lines. A few simple scenes took several takes. In the end, she got it though. I talked to Stephen and he's made plans to work with her more on the script before our final shoot on Friday. We still have the two hardest scenes left to shoot. With all the preparation we have been doing for this project, I hope it works out well in the end. Visually the film looks great so far. I am satisfied with how it is coming along. Another weird thing is that a 330 student still hasn't signed up to help during the shoot. I hope this doesn't hurt my grade. I have been posting my dates on the discussion board, just no one has replied yet.

Supplies Needed

After some good preproduction meetings, I do believe we are ready to film this week. I have obtained 3 people from the beg audio class to help with not only location audio but any odd jobs while filming. The actors and I have adjusted some of the dialogue in the script - making it sound more natural after a few read throughs. Right now we're stocking up on supplies (dog collars, a webcam, sausages, wardrobe, etc.). We have decided to keep someone on site to manage hair/makeup. Our last class meeting really helped open our eyes to this aspect.

I can't remember how much music was discussed and how much control we will have over that direction. Personally, I don't see us using much music (if any) in this piece. However, in the event that we do decide to use a score, I would like to interact directly with the composer in some way.

Final Shooting preparations

My partner and I met a few more times this week to work out exact timings for shooting and what we want to do specifically with the script. This coming week the blog will be more entertaining because we plan on shooting Wednesday night. We are hoping to get all the shooting done in one night, but we chose to start this week in case we need next weekend to finish up shooting.

More to come later.

Set-backs and Finish-ups

So, we filmed last weekend and everything was looking really good time-wise, and I was pretty stoked about finishing up this weekend. That is, until I went in on Thursday to capture some of the footage so that my editor friend could see what we've done so far.
Turns out, the tape was all messed up. Timecode breaks like nobody's business. Not a single bit of footage was able to be captured.

I was bummed. Extremely so.

But, I talked to my crew and Stephanie (my co-producer/actor), and we planned out how to fit in re-shooting the scenes and finishing up the ones we hadn't filmed as well, and other than like, 2 scenes, we finished filming this weekend (or so I hope).

I'm pretty excited to start piecing it all together and seeing how it looks as a cohesive unit. Hopefully everything looks great and we won't have to re-shoot anything else before the rough cut is due. And, depending on how much gets done, I might have an okay amount of time to relax or plot how to fix things before the cut-to-time is due. That would be wondrous.