Remaking Malice

As the title would suggest, I am remaking the never finished movie that started me on all this demon stuff, Malice.

I have no idea what prompted this, but the idea just popped into my head this morning and I debated doing it or not. So I sent a message to the original lead actress, Heather, and gave her the rundown on my idea. It's not that I wanted to let the project go, but I just couldn't see it be completed to a point where I'd really have been happy with it.

It suffered a massive amount of issues because of the length of time it took to make it. Continuity errors were everywhere, nearly everyone's hair changed at one point or another, some very dramatically at that. Just so much changed as we shot it that I just can't see salvaging anything really worthwhile out of it all.

The only people who would even enjoy it where those who were in it, I couldn't see myself being comfortable posting it online (and it would've been unfair not to) because of the barrage of insults and comments that would've come flooding in regarding all the problems with it.

It was fullscreen, standard def, some video glitches as well. The number of reasons not to finish it just piled up and got worse with every year it wasn't completed. So today, I decided to just let it go.

Now, the remake isn't going to be a direct remake of the original story. I'm taking a queue from the reshoot of BZK! Moonshine of the Damned, taking the best parts of the story and reworking everything into an entirely new story. The idea came from working on the grant for another project called "Conversations with Demons", which is about a world in which we've discovered that Demons exist, it deals with the social implications, not the military fighting large hordes of murderous creatures, but the simple notion of how we would welcome a race of creatures we previously only believed to be fictional and have for hundreds of years just passed off as evil anyway.

The remake of Malice will be a much simpler, and much more peculiar story - I'm planning parts of it to have no dialog for very long stretches, leaving the audience to figure out what's going on for themselves at first and finally revealing as much as possible by the end.

Malice will no longer be a human girl with an eyepatch and super strength, but a full blown Demon. I'm hoping that will remove any issues with hair continuity that might arise should it take awhile. At this point, I'm still talking (more or less) with Heather about being involved as Malice again - time commitments are obviously a consideration. So I'm hoping she's willing to wait to see an almost final script before making a definite choice.

We'll see how it all goes. I'm planning on writing over the course of the next year, planning it out as much as possible so when time comes to shoot, the bulk of the work will already be done and we can just focus on shooting instead of struggling with making things work and juggling schedules last minute.

And, the footage from the original will not just vanish, but I've decided that from now on, anytime I shoot something involving a TV screen, we'll be showing part of Malice randomly.

The Monkey Rodeo Computer Animated Web Series

I've been thinking about this for some time now. I used to do a lot of computer animation, I sort of gave it up as I moved into doing prosthetics and props. What finally really inspired me to tackle this was playing the first episode of The Walking Dead video game - the style was perfect.

Normally when I do CG stuff it's all really hi-res, high poly count stuff and that's great for visual effects and computer generated characters and whatnot, but was just too much effort and work for a whole web series - the sheer amount of modelling and detail work was just too overwhelming to even bother thinking of it for more than a couple seconds.

So when I saw The Walking Dead stylized low(ish) poly stuff I realized it'd be perfect. A couple days ago I started playing around - just testing stuff out for the moment, I'm not diving right in too deep just yet. The first character I started with was Karl Wenham, seemed reasonable since I always wanted to do more with him but hate shaving my face and all to do the makeup. This way I just have to do the voice - which is sort of a muddled English/New Zealand sounding accent.

This is pretty early on - Karl isn't bald, still have yet to really work out how I want hair to look in all this.

I've been debating as well about doing some very rudimentary facial capture stuff for the faces. I've been going through a few tutorials and as soon as I suss out whether it's too much work or not, I'll decide on if I'll do it. Lots of stuff to still think about. For instance, the whole story, but how many characters, locations and all the sets I'll have to build, so it won't be happening any time soon, but it will be happening - how epic or huge it might but, I don't know yet, but it'll be fun designing so really over the top characters too hard to prosthetic work at the moment.

I'll probably post about it every so often as I make some major milestones during pre-production.

"The Secet Lives of Demons" is finally for sale online!

It's finally up for sale online!

The Secret Lives of Demons by Karl Wenham | Make Your Own Book

So feel free to check it out and buy copies for every possible person you've ever met and make sure to get extras for any homeless folks you might meet.

For anyone unfamiliar with the whole project, it's a collection of photos of various demons. The demons were created specifically using generic prosthetic makeup (meaning it will fit most everyone) that I sell at www.themonkeyrodeo.com. Some might think the demons aee a little on the undramatic side, but keep in mind what I just said - they were created specifically using makeup designed to fit most everyone, the intention was not to create something only made for one specific model that only a professional makeup artist could use. This stuff was made for everyone who wants to use it

"TheSecret Lives of Demons" book is done

It's finally done, just got the first copy and went over it. Only a few minor spelling mistakes in what little text there is - spelled a few names wrong, otherwise I could care less about mistakes like that in this case.

It'll be going online for sale this afternoon, just uploading a fixed up copy now and double checking it once more.