Moonshine of the Damned, Production Journal #14

Not a whole lot to go on about, we've been on a sort of break through the month of July it seems. We did have 3 shoots, but they were all small shoots - still important though and I'm glad we got them all done.

First, we finally got the opening sequence done - had to alter it in order to finally get it done, but I was okay with that and added a little extra to the end which I'm hoping helps tie it in better to the rest of the movie. We'll see.

The main difference was shooting with 2 people instead of the 3 I'd planned, so it wasn't too much of a change overall.

Both Alana and Michelle are really great to work with, so it went by pretty fast was at least a fun shoot if not a short one.

And here's the line of the day from that shoot:
And today's shoot was the first with the Zombie Eater character, which was pretty awesome. Here's the only shot you'll be seeing of him though - when I see this I wish my video camera could get awesome depth of field shots like this, but I ain't rich so I'm sticking with what I got for now.

 Here's our small cast from the shoot. All out shoots this month seemed to only have two actors.

The biggest part of the day was finally getting to work with the full head makeup piece and seeing what the Zombie Eater would finally look like onscreen, and I'm pretty happy with it so far. It's one of those things you just make it up and hope for the best. I wasn't going for the most original looking creature every and plus I wanted to keep it simple for a couple of reason - being my first attempt every at something like this. I didn't want to go overboard and I wanted it to seem a little familiar, so I think I was able to do exactly what I intended with the character.

Here's Steve out of makeup. Rather than have him suffer in there throughout a long shoot, we shot the sequence sort of in reverse to have him done with right away.

Tim fell down a lot today.

The new and improved Zombie Frog. Last year he was just a simple, kind of fragile foam latex frog, I made him out of mask latex and was able to give him a much better paint job this time around. It was a little heavier, but we managed to keep him glued on long enough to get things done.

He stuck really well to Tim's forehead.

Overall it was a fun simple sequence to shoot. We'd done it last year so this time around it felt really familiar still and we ran through it really quickly.

And here's the line of the from today:

It's been a busy couple week, despite not shooting much. I've been spending the time getting the rest of the FX as done as possible so there's no holdups and I'm not rushing last minute to crank something out for a shoot the next morning. The biggest thing to overcome was indeed the Zombie Eater, everything else after that has been so simple.

Another big prop that I finally got turned out was the Saraphine Corpse. It needed to be simple and lightweight. I used a plastic skeleton I'd purchased last year as a quick fix zombie death sequence for one of the actors, however that ended up never even being shot and totally written out in the end, so I was left with this thing so it was a pretty obvious solution.

I went with just latex and tissue paper, some might think that's a little on the simple and cheap side, but I didn't want to destroy the thing, I can just peel all this off and reuse it for something else later - so as far as I'm concerned, the least destructive method, is always the best.

Here's a quick shot of the final prop. I used an old wig, bought for last year when this was a living character and a new dress was found and distressed and dirtied up.

Here's a closeup on the Voodoo Necklace prop - it's not something you'll be seeing up close or that will impact anything - just a small detail I wanted to add because I wanted to.

And finally a look at the facial prosthetic for the live action version of the corpse prop. Not only will this be on the live actor, but I'll be attaching it to the corpse prop as well, even if you don't see it all that well.