Day 5 over and done with.

Day 5 on Bimbo Zombie Killers! Undead in the Water is over with, without too much fuss. It was a bit of a pain to schedule since one actress couldn't make it, but in a way it all worked, because there was no way we'd have gotten it all done and we got done the worst of it. So next time, much easier.

Here's all our crap, you can't see most of it actually, but it's all there. I realized once we got the location I'd forgotten the sledgehammer prop, so thankfully, Julia ran back to Hazel Grove and got it. That was pretty damned awesome of her.

A friend of Tim Wartman's came along as our zombie for the day - it wasn't until I was soaking him in blood that I realized what his shirt said. And even he didn't get the significance right away - but we got a good shot of it, so hopefully it read well under the blood onscreen.

The fake axe in the arm gag worked perfectly, pretty damned happy with how it turned out.

I think John is loving that shotgun, he does look pretty bad ass with it.

Okay, not so bad ass here.

and Tim Gormley showing off one of the props of the day.

Cast shot, from left to right: Mark Wells, Tim Gormley, Tim Wartman, Julia MacDougall, Julie Laforest, Mary Gaudet, John MacDonald and Bill Pineau.

To was the first time I was doing two shoots in one day, luckily the second was too big a deal, but I realized pretty quick how terribly unprepared I was for it. Hopefully it'll all turn out.

And finally, the best line of the day:

And don't forget, we've got 18 days left on the fundraising campaign, we need all the help we can get. There's a link on the right sidebar.

BZK! 3rd Day of Filming

Day 3 almost didn't happen, long story but it was due to waiting on finances - luckily it all worked out and it did happen, with an added shoot later in the day making up for the one missed on Day 2.

Another cloudy, damp, humid day - but what else could I really expect, the previous two movies took place under the same conditions. We were shooting in the forest with a pretty thick tree canopy so I wasn't too worried, so far rain hasn't cancelled anything.

Since the first scene was pretty simple as far as zombies went, I decided to just go with facepainting instead of full prosthetics - the zombies will appear for less than an minute and their involvement was only half an hour or so - in fact we were ahead of schedule upon finishing with them.

We shot out of sequence to accommodate the fact one of our actors/makeup artists had to get to work. Awesome of her to come out early and get covered in fake blood though and then have to go to work.

I decided to test out my new method of hosing down zombies with blood. Just a $7 pressure sprayer. Not perfect because it creates too much of a symmetrical spray, but still it does the trick.

Everyone seemed a little too eager to get messy - but that's what zombie movies are all about.

Today would have actually been cancelled if not for our lead actor, Tim Wartman, wrangling up enough zombies for us. I have nearly 60+ people supposedly who have signed up and most of them pretty much consistently ignore our calls for zombies. I'd like to say I'm surprised by that, unfortunately it's typical around here.

Upon seeing this picture I was rather disturbed that Krista's leg could do that with any discomfort - at least she never said anything and it was totally her choice to do it. Don't know how well it reads on camera, but it looks messed up here.

Shooting this was all based on that one severed arm prop Tim's carrying there - without it the shoot was pointless. I got it made in time and it looks pretty decent on camera. I actually have a whole post I was debating on about these kinds of props and their place in a movie like this. We'll see I guess.

The full cast from the first half of Day 3. A pretty awesome, eager bunch and hopefully what turns out to be one of the more memorable scenes from the whole series.

There are more images of the sequence we shot with Tim after the rest of the cast left, but I'm keeping them all under wraps until the series goes online - I don't want to spoil it, but I think it'll be pretty awesome.

We finished WAY ahead of schedule, 2 hours in fact. So I was a bit relieved and was able to take a break before getting back into things for the second part of the day. Which was pretty easy as well and turned out good I think.

We hauled most of our leads back to Scales Pond for a quick scene.

Here they all are - so far they've been a really patient bunch, putting up with most anything I've thrown at at them. I think they really hard stuff is behind us now and we're into the just regular stuff on dry land.

Overall it was an easy day. There was a bit of confusion with the second half, not sure what happened there still, but it's over now.

Now onto prepping for Day 4 - which is going to be a bit of a nightmare. Technically it should be easy, but there's just so much to do and too many zombies needed it could be a disaster. Here's hoping for the best. And I'm going to do that other post I was thinking about. See you next week and I'll leave you with the Best Line of the Day. Tim might've found his calling as a physical comedic actor.

Not technically the BEST line, but just silly out of context (and even in context):

Holy crap, your arm fell off!

One of the simpler FX for the BZK! web series is a severed arm. I've never actually done this before, but I know the basic principles. This shouldn't be really taken as a proper "how to" sort of thing, but that's your choice.

I wanted a cheaply made fake arm for an actor to run around with, it had to be durable and take a beating while still being light and cheap. So silicone was out, although it would look pretty realistic. I thought about urethane rubber but I don't have enough experience so I finally settled on a latex, foam filled arm. This was the cheapest method I could think of.

The supplies were simple, some alginate - I think about 4 lbs was used. Monster Makers Clay, which can be melted to a liquid. Water based clay for making a 2 part UltraCal 30 mould. And finally some latex from Monster Makers and I tried using their expanding polyfoam to fill the arm with.

First, I had the actor come by, Tim Wartman, and I made a very makeshift frame for the alginate. Here's where I made my first sort of mistake. While this worked, I think the alginate I chose and the frame were all wrong. This alginate was filled with fibres for more vertical surfaces and the frame should have just been a tube - didn't have access to better frame building materials, so we had to do this.

While there's nothing really wrong with the alginate I went with, I do think it was the cause of some of the air pockets and lumps in the mould. Here I poured in the first batch of melted clay. My next mistake.

It took some time to fill it all up and let it harden again.

Here's the final clay arm. It wasn't so awesome looking.

You can see here the ridges that each batch of melted clay created. It probably would've worked better had I done one large batch, but I just didn't have the means to do that at this time.

Here's it is after I resculpted most of the surface details. I got tired of it after several hours and thought, "it's going to look cheesy anyway, why am I wasting all this time?" So I cut corners and called it done.

Forgot to get a picture of it with just the clay wall before the first coat of UltraCal, but here it is after that first coat.

And here it is with the first half of the mould done and ready for the 2nd. I kinda suck and 2 part mould making, especially something this big. I've done some decent ones in the past, but I was sort of in a hurry.

And here's what's left of the alginate mould by the way.

So, there's nothing really to see at this point, it's too hard taking pictures while I'm working. So with the 2nd half of the mould done I cleaned it all out - and I was surprised how easy demoulding and cleaning was. I was really expecting a bit of a fight here and it pretty much just popped apart.

With the final mould done I filled it with tinted latex - which is impossible to show since it's inside the mould and I can't take a picture while I'm filling it. I let that dwell in the mould for a bit - for anyone wondering what the hell that means, for latex for form a good skin you need to just let it sit in the mould while the UltraCal does its magic and sucks the moisture from the latex forming a skin.

Then you dump the excess latex out and let it cure. I left it in the sun for most of the day and overnight and thought that would do it. Unfortunately there's just no way to check, so you have to hope for the best.

The next step was to just assume the latex had cured and fill it with expanding foam. I've used Smooth-On's Flex FoamIt but thought I'd try Monster Makers foam - I had no idea it began to work so fast and here's what happened within what seemed like 15 seconds.

Luckily I had some Smooth-On foam and went with that. Filled it up and let it sit, demoulded it only to find the latex hadn't cured in spots so the foam crept though and nearly ruined the mould, I think I got it cleaned out well enough and I'm trying a 2nd now.

Here's the first arm from the mould - it's far from perfect, but for our purposes it actually is kind of perfect. There's some major surface defects, pock marks and the like. One of the fingers looks a little crushed too - however, for the scene I need it for first, the arm's been used to fend off a horde of zombies so having it look a little battle weary is just fine.

 It's not painted at this point, that'll come tomorrow for a shoot the day after. It's pretty lightweight and totally safe to smack someone with, you'll feel it but it doesn't really hurt at all. Can't wait to shoot with it.

If you're reading this and thinking "Wow, that's just fascinating and awesome. I only wish there was a way I could help out, like donate money to this web series or something" than I highly recommend you follow this link: http://igg.me/p/110014?a=53757