Too much to do, too little time.

I'm taking stock of just what's left to do for Sunday's first shoot on Bimbo Zombie Killers! (and trying to ignore the fact that it could very well rain and I've rushed for nothing). I've got both Draper and Ritchie's costumes to scuff up, not too much just in a few places. I'm also going to stain them to make them look a little too well worn and too often worn. That should only take a couple hours.

A bit of a preview of Jeb.

I've got 8 jugs in various states of readiness, that's going along pretty well so far. I'm hoping the foam I ordered will be here tomorrow, each just takes about 2 1/2 hours from mixing up to demolding, I can only do one at a time and I should be able to get about 10 out of what I ordered. Plus I need time to clean them up, prime them and finally paint them. That'll be at least 2 days work.

I also had to rethink the mold a little bit, usually you'd put a board over the opening, blot it into place with a could holes for expansion. I didn't have the time or money at first and that resulted in a little more work with trimming the excess foam off and using paper mache to cover up the porous area.

The annoying thing about using expanding foam to make prop duplicates is that it takes awhile to get the amount just right. I was using what I'll call a marine grade version of the stuff (since it came from a marine supply store and called flotation foam) and I wasted enough to make a couple of the jugs. I eventually got the amount fairly close.

I had a little bit of another called Foam-It (a safer, rigid version of Flex Foam-It that I used to make the axe) and it said it would expand to 10 times it's volume. I measured the mold, it'll hold about 20 cups of liquid. So I'm assuming my math isn't that bad, but I figured 2 cups of the Foam-It would do it. Does that seem right?

That's a lot of foam.

Apparently I'm wrong and I wasted enough of the material to have made another jug. I really hate wasting this stuff. The Foam-It cost about the same as the flotation foam and I got almost 10 from it, whereas I got only 1 from the Foam-It. Mind you, the Foam-It is much easier to handle, mind you the quality doesn't seem that much better.

Ah well.

I'm also hoping to get to make the negative mold of Draper's blow out eye tonight as well - it has nothing to do with the eyeball prop, it's just a prosthetic (the latex kit for which should arrive tomorrow as well). That won't take too long, an hour or so and making the prosthetic itself only half an hour and then it goes into the oven.

I then need to do some test with pre-gluing the prosthetic. I saw it on the instructional video that came with the original kit. They applied the pros-aide (the adhesive they use, not spirit gum - this stuff is way better) and powered it so it so it could be handled and dried the glue up. Then you just wet it a bit and it reactivates the glue so I don't have to mess around with it on the day of the shoot too much.

And I need to start in on the blood soon. I'm estimating about 30-40 litres should about do it. And that's for the estimated 50 people, if more show up, I doubt I'll have enough. and I still have to make more for the July 12th shoot and for any special effects shots I do.

Other then that I need to go over the shot list, I need to contact the folks down at the park and make sure the electric outlets are turned on so I'm not running to the clubhouse the recharge every couple hours.

I think that's it...I really don't know at this point, I'm kind of just running and not thinking. With all the planning though, if the weather stay decent this is going to be a good shoot. I even have a sort of 2nd Unit Director/CameraPerson on this shoot to do the crowd stuff while I work with the leads on makeup and running through scenes. The camera's easy to use so I'm not worried about that at all.

And now to fight evil and eat leftover birthday Ice Cream Cake.