Moonshine of the Damned, Production Journal #2

Finally got a finished craft of the script - at least this latest carnation of it. I had added another character to help further complicate things and it seems to have worked pretty well so far. While I won't go into details since I'm trying to keep a lot of things in the series as under wraps as possible, but I will say this new character is called the Zombie Eater. Just another level of oddness to the plot.

It runs about 71 pages, I had hoped to trim it back a bit to make it shorter and easier to shoot, but I've cut back as much as possible without gouging into the story, so this could easily be stretched to a full feature length movie if I wanted - but I'm not too concerned about it for now. 71 pages it is.

In other news, I'm working away on some minor props and designing some makeups. Still struggling with the budget, so I've been working on finding ways of cutting back and doing things a little less expensively. One of the things I'm looking at trying is  making my own plaster bandages - in order to do the life casts, I think I have 4, maybe 5 to do, I'll need plaster bandages for the support shells of the alignate mould - however, that stuff is really expensive when you need the amount I do.

Normally just a single face mould isn't too bad, $20 or $30 usually does it. But I'm doing a full head and shoulder mould of up to 5 people...that's going to suck up a lot of money. So I'm hoping the medical gauze and plaster of paris technique I've been looking into will do it. I budgeted the using regular plaster bandages would have run me round $300, not looking forward to spending that much money on something that I can't reuse. The alginate I have no choice, but I'm fine with that.

As far as the other props go, I've got my Zombie Heads all set to go, just need more latex and polyfoam to crank out more. And while this wasn't written into the script, I feel I need to do this to add a little more flavour to some shots, so I'm making a few body parts. I've got a hand, that's need as a stand-in first and foremost, but I'm going to throw in a mangled up version in there somewhere as well. I'm looking at possibly doing a foot and maybe even a whole leg if the budget happens.

At lot of these props are just background stuff, not plot crucial.

Here's the Zombie Heads, at least 4 of them. I'm planning on making a whole lot more and eventually jamming them on pikes. The original one, the upper right, was painted somewhat more natural flesh colour, but the others I went with a greenish tone that I really like. There's a cartoonish quality to them I really like.

Another prop I did this week, a fake rock. Pretty simple stuff, but it was in the script and while not totally necessary to have done it in foam, I like to do things safe - a foam rock is way safer to have the actors waving around than a real one. If you're interested in how it was made, I did a post on that earlier this week: http://bureau51.blogspot.ca/2013/04/making-fake-rock.html

Clay hand. I didn't sculpt this entirely, it's from a life cast, I did need to clean it up a bit since the clay didn't settle properly in the mould leaving some gaps and ridges here and there.

And, I did up a quick concept for the Spike Zombie Head Mace for the series, I'm hoping to get this made as soon as possible, just need more supplies.

I'm hoping to get to doing some prosthetics sculpted this week, I'm doing some of the hero zombie characters and mostly likely starting with the Pale Zombie character.