202 posts?

I just noticed I recently passed the 200th post mark. That's a lot of rambling.

We had another shoot on Thursday night, it was long, but not overboard. Everything stayed on schedule pretty well. The last of the major scenes and the minor exterior shots are all done. I've been spending the day converting all the footage into a more editable format - it's a long uninteresting process, still better the capturing from miniDV.

One of the cooler things we accomplished was an alternate ending for CRONUS. I had a plan that if my original actor for Satan, Kier Kenny, didn't show up (which he didn't the first night because of personal reasons and he was very apologetic about it) I had a backup. I decided anyway to shoot the backup ending even though Kier did show on a later shoot.

The ending has Satan showing up and retrieving his (or her) Gateway Key to Hell, the alternate version was still Satan, but a female version played by Heather Panton. While Kier's Satan was very simple and to the point, he did a good job, however there's a much more interesting visual with Heather as Satan. I made a last minute prosthetic for her since I felt the viewer might need a bit of a push in realizing this strange woman who appears out of nowhere is actually the Prince(cess) of Darkness.

I'm wondering if someone can debunk this for me, in doing this alternate ending we talked a bit about how none of us could think of anything any of us had seen before that had a female Satan for no good reason, other then just do it. Any else know of anything we might not have thought of?

The prosthetic was so last minute in fact, it barely came out of the oven at 4 pm for a 7 pm shoot. It wasn't perfect, but it looks pretty good.

Speaking of prosthetics, I think I made a total of 21 sets of prosthetics for the movie. Not all were used, I would just fill up another mold when I found I had extra foam left over from whatever one I was specifically making at the time.

Other then that, I've made a few tests to see how well the footage converts to black and white, so far so good.

There's minimal CG involved this time around, which I'm pretty grateful for. Most of it takes place at during the end scene.

I'm hoping to get a rough edit done this weekend, as I also hope to get Natasha's dubbing done this week. As well I think I should be able to crank out the trailer to be ready for Monday, I just need to find some decent music, I might find something temporary for now that fits well enough.

And now, pictures!

Makeup time again...

SATAN!

And out of makeup...

Going over lines for the last scene...

Shooting the scene...

Pretty much done for the night...

Up next is the tentatively titled: The Monkey Rodeo: Rich's All About Monsters. A quasi children shows which has children writing letters to Rich, a guy who knows all about giant monsters. I use the name Rich because the actor's name is actually Rich, so I reckon he'll pretty much be playing himself in this. Instead of it being a single short, it'll be a series of 30 second shorts. Shouldn't take more then an hour to shoot all of Rich's footage and the rest will be gathered over the course of the summer.

After that, The Monkey Rodeo: Bimbo Zombie Killers! I've done a little pre-production it, but will be stepping it up big time in another week or so to meet the shooting date of the first week of July.

I'll post some stills from the movie over the weekend most likely.