Last minute changes

After having had time to go over the recent footage, than talk with Derek about how shooting went and all, I decided to make some changes to the scene that was just shot. So I'm not going to post any of the footage, I'm scraping it outright and redoing the scene completely. Normally, and given how often this has happened lately, I'd never do this - but I have sunk a lot of time, money and energy into this so if I'm even slightly iffy on something it becomes reshoot time.

I only have a few pictures to post right now, only 2 from the "Exorcist Hallway" (as I'm calling it), don't want to give too much away. The rest are behind the scenes photos taken by Moe Chandler.

Holly McGee in mighty empty hallway.

And at a mighty locked door.

"No, no, you don't stab her like that...like this!"
(Some fine directing by me - luckily there were no
fatalities, that knife is really sharp.)

"Like this?"
That's Draper in costume. He's wearing a ski mask under
the hood so there's less work removing his face in post.

Damn right.

Much easier then permanent tattoos...
Me drawing on Kim Bradford's face - just something
to pass the time.

Ooh, scary purple colours.

And you can put your weed in it. Or you can put prophecies about
the end of the world in it too, your call really.

Okay, so Mulder wasn't really helping too much,
other then being a sandbg for the tripod.

The last couple shots of with Derek Martin and Kim Bradford in them are of the original idea for the flashback sequence - while it looks pretty cool, it was just too confined and way too much useless dialog. So after the talk with Derek, I decided to trim the talk way back, make it a little more efficient and make the scene a little more unusual and interesting (hopefully).

My main problem was I couldn't find a really large empty space that I could light just right, so I went with a smaller space - problem being it really limited the shots I could take. So when Derek was up to reshooting, the only problem was finding a larger space. On Derek's suggestion of totally changing the environment to something else - it kind of opened things up a bit. The final version of the scene will really depend on the location. Obviously not something too abstract, because the audience will spend too much time wondering what the hell is going on. And not something too boring or what's the point?

Now the only other problem this presented was in needing Derek to look older for the "present day" scenes. What I'd hoped to do was simply have about a month for him to grow his hair longer and a bit of a beard (and trying to use makeup to make him look older can come off kinda crappy so I wanted to not rely on that too much).

My fix was this, nothing brilliant, although it should add that little something-something to the overall feel of the story. The character of Grayson is pretty much a player in the world of magic and all things creepy, so it stood to reason that there was the possibilty that perhaps Grayson had found in his travels a harmless way of slowing his aging. Which will be a minor point in a couple scenes and let's me off the hook without derailing the whole thing too much with waiting months between certain shoots. This also ties together a few smaller insignificant lines already in the movie too, which is kind of cool...I think that all makes sense, if it doesn't, don't worry about it.

I'm hopefully shooting this weekend if the weather holds and it should be the last of my major exterior shoots (thank god) and then it'll be onto a huge pile of interiors and that's when all the cool stuff happens. So there's a lot more to come.

Oh, and for all those folks out there waiting on the edge of your seats about the burned out pixel problem, it has been, more or less, officially resolved.