So here's an update on where things are with the movie - why it's taking so long and all that crap.
As of today, all of the dialog has been recorded and synced up in editing. That's another hurdle finally overcome and the one that's been taking the longest. I've only two scenes left to add some zombie noises into and then it's just the sound effects and soundtrack.
It's taking forever to finish this movie. I said that shortly after wrapping in the fall of 2013, if we don't get the dubbing done in the next month - it's going to take forever...and it did and still is.
It's because of this movie I gave up filmmaking as a hobby, not because the actual shoot itself was terrible, in fact when it worked it worked great. I loved working with the actors, even the few times where scheduling was a bit of a pain in the ass, it was still a decent experience. It's all the crap that came before and after those parts.
I've stated all this before, but I'm stating it here as I'm going to link this to the Indiegogo site for an update as well. We were 3 months late in shooting in 2012, we were waiting on a grant that was massively delayed, as a result we had slightly less than 2 months to shoot a feature movie, called Undead in the Water at that point - and I had to get all the FX done and prepped as well (since that was what the grant was for). We shot for a month doing the scenes that had little FX, only to have two lead actors have to drop out which meant all that footage was useless.
In the rush to get somewhere near completion things just went south so badly between scheduling, weather and some uncooperative extras I had to scrap it. It sucked, but at the same time it was good. It was because of the time I had to spend on this I missed out on attending HalCon that year and business suffered a little because of it. This is another reason I'm quitting filmmaking, it's an expensive hobby with no return and takes too much time away from my business which is my only source of income.
BSo now we were guaranteed to be a year behind schedule. I rewrote the whole thing - twice actually, the original second version (called Moonshine of the Damned now). This version require new and different FX, meaning a portion of the grant money was wasted in the initial attempt, I had to raise a little more and luckily it all worked out. There were more scheduling issues which forced a 2nd, shortened version of Moonshine of the Damned - which was fortunate since there was no way I could have raised enough to do that version.
We shot the shortened version of Moonshine of the Damned over the course of the summer of 2013. It went pretty smoothly from what I recall, there were no last minute actor drop outs - although there were some recasting issues. We had an incredible bunch of zombie extras this time around making it much easier as well.
However, when we finished we were all a little exhausted. I was busy with work as well during the last couple months of the shoot and it was hard to finish up a final edit, which was of course needed before we could even think of starting on the tedious process of redubbing every single line of dialog in the movie. I don't shoot for sound, so it was all scrapped and redone - not the greatest method of doing it, but this is low budget crap folks, we do what we have to.
Being out in the country and not having a portable recording studio - because, let's face it, if I could afford a portable recording, I could have afforded to have the sound capture live during shooting - it was hard to get folks out here for dubbing. The edit wasn't finished until late November I believe, although there was a decent rough cut for viewing earlier, it wasn't good enough to start syncing up any vocals.
Then of course winter hit - and no one wants to come all the way out here in the winter and I don't really blame them. Eventually when spring came along in 2014 I was able to start getting some dubbing finally done - but for a lot of people involved, nearly 90% of whom have jobs and families, summer is a busy time of year, so this dragged out until pretty much until January of 2015. Combined also with the fact I had my busiest year ever, working nearly 20 hours a day, every day from August to the end of October - which wouldn't have been able to do if I was still trying to make movies.
That's it up to today, more or less.
Now it's on the the sound effects. For those who haven't really given it much thought, let this sink in a bit before asking how long it will take, I have to add every single footstep every time they're needed, every little creak, fart, whoosh and whatever. It's going to take a bit longer than five minutes, I can tell you that. Why wait until now to do it? I like to have the dialog in place and work the sound effects around it afterwards, doing it the other way around just creates more work since I would have to then readjust all the sound effects a second time had I done them first.
And then we're onto the soundtrack. I have several different artists lined up to hopefully speed up the process. My friend Scott Parsons will create a main theme and some variations, this will set the general tone of the soundtrack which the other artists will follow, having been assigned various scenes to work with.
All in all, it's been a hellishly long process. Not one that I particularly enjoyed but will definitely be glad to see over and done with. And the movie itself is actually a pretty decent, campy, stupid movie.
And, as a side note - the whole movie was nearly lost as the harddrive it was stored on nearly crashed on me. Luckily I was able to back it up and everything's safe and still slowly moving forwards.
When will it be done? When it's fucking done - that's all I can say anymore. It's a question I'm tired of, although I understand the asking, I just don't know. Hopefully soon and definitely this year.
