I'm near brain dead

It’s been a busy week if you’ve been paying attention. We’re so close to wrapping up filming, and everything is going as well as it can be. 5 scenes within the next month seems pretty doable.

One thing I made another little breakthrough in is my comfort with the prosthetics and doing the makeup. This is the first project I’ve ever even thought about playing around with such stuff, and it was a great learning experience - although I have to admit I still have a massive amount to learn.

I spent the day pre-painting all the prosthetics for next weekend. I have 5 people to do makeup on, 6 technically if you consider greying hair and slapping on a tattoo a serious makeup job. I wish I’d known enough to think about doing this earlier on, but I’ve been making a lot up as I go in this. I realized it’s so much easier and efficient to make up the prosthetics long before the shoot, you get so much more detail and shading - you still have to blend in with the actor, but that’s a small part of the process.

I finished roughing up the costumes for Sunday’s shoot, trying to arrange a small shoot for Thursday, pre-painting the prosthetics, checking out some music for the movie, going over the CG character for next Sunday and setting up my shots for the Flashback scenes. I still have a good chunk of work tomorrow, I’d like to relax a bit Sunday morning before I dive into what could very possibly be one of the most overboard things I’ve ever shot.

The closer it gets, the more I think about it in context of screen time. The amount of time, money and effort that has gone into these costumes is a little crazy actually. It’ll total no more then 3 or 4 minutes on screen - at best. It will so be worth it though I think. I've said it before, but it really hasn't hit home until now - it's going to be a very simple, but I think pretty cool scene.

I’ve spent the last couple days watching the “behind the scenes” documentaries for Lord of the Rings. Okay, so it’s a little arrogant to feel like there’s any close comparison - but think of it for a second from my point of view. We’ve past the 2 year mark of shooting, and actually nearly past the 3 year mark of pre-production and this thing keeps snowballing. Literally. It’s getting bigger and bigger each couple months. Not that it’s getting out of hand, it’s getting much more clearer actually.

This is all stuff I could not have ever done back when I started this. This isn’t enough stuff I could’ve thought I’d be capable of doing back when I started this. For me this has been a pretty long journey and while it still has some time yet to go, the main part is close to an end - the rest is just a massive beast sitting there waiting for me to notice it...I’m not sure what it’ll do once I have to start poking it and moving past it.

In any case, it’s getting late, I’m getting tired. I thought I’d post two pictures to justify all this work until Sunday, so here you go:

Here's Draper more or less in costume for Sunday.
Pretty impressive once you actually see it all together.

And here's a pile of makeup.
A forehead, a couple faces, some ears in that box on the left
and even a couple horns if you look really close.
The envelope under the mask on the right is
filled with Derek's tattoo's from the movie as well.

Well, here's hoping it all goes well over the next month.