Moonshine of the Damned, Production Journal #15.

Day Nine has come and gone - and it went really, really well. I estimated about 5 hours, plus some time to shoot some other cutaways that would allow one actor to be over and done with and another to not have to return until the very last shoot. We ended up being done 2 hours early and even after the additional shots, and doing a makeup job, still came in under an hour short of what I'd expected. I was pretty exhausted afterwards, which I usually am, but I still managed to get the scenes edited shortly after it was all done.

I've always meant to edit right after filming while it's still fresh in my mind, and for once actually did so after the last shoot - which I'm lucky happened since some shots were no good and had to be redone - so I was able to get the actor back in time before he shaved and threw out his costume. Good timing and it reminded me I should be a little more pro-active in getting this done.

I don't want to end up in the end with missing footage and a pile of work I just don't have the energy to wade through/ I started organizing all the footage by scenes tonight and I'm going to attempt to get some major editing done - there's only maybe half of what's shot so far that hasn't been edited, so it's not too bad just yet.

So here was our cast for the day, we had just enough zombie heads on sticks to go around for the picture.

I've been fortunate up until this shoot to have had nothing but smaller shoots with only a couple actors (aside from the opening stuff) and today was our first return to that and the next few shoots are more or less the same. Hoping to get it all scheduled so we're done early to mid-September, we'll see how that all goes.
 

The biggest snag we had was one of the actors, John MacDonald, had shaved his head - I meant to remind him a week or so before the shoot and didn't and literally 2 days before this shoot he did it. Admittedly a small thing, but just one of those things you can't get around - unless you have the opportunity to have him put on a hat.

Normally, this would feel like it was added and forced, but we had a really good spot to put it in without slowing things down or causing things to feel too out of sorts. Most might not even notice we did it on purpose

We even got to hose someone down with blood today. We had another Zombie Eater appearance that left him a little bloody - possibly causing some continuity issues if you don't believe he'd clean himself up. I might go back and use some other footage or even reshoot a couple closeups later if I don't think I can live with it.

The biggest issue of the day was once we got the prosthetic on for this sequence, I noticed there was a huge tear in the back on the neck, luckily it just meant we could only shoot him from one side so it was unnoticeable and upon examining it when I got home I noticed it was the one place on the inside I hadn't reinforced with latex. So I'm hoping it'll last for the very final shoot so I don't have to make another one.

And today was Ancelene's last day, as well as Mark's. We ended up shooting a little extra into another scene to take care of them.

Overall I think it turned out alright, not perfect - but these things rarely are. When you're shooting something like a sledgehammer to the face it's hard to have it turn out exactly like you thought it would, we got it covered well enough though that with some sound it should work.

And since it was Ancelene's last day there was a couple minor shots I needed to get and redo to fill in some gaps. One didn't quite turn out like I'd planned, but I'm going to see if I can rework it without having to reshoot it again.

And then came the sledgehammer to the face. This was actually in the original script and when it came time for the rewrite I made to to keep it even though it happens completely differently than before - even a different character hitting her.

The worse part of this was keeping the piece on until we were ready to shoot. The hammer, with only part of the handle, was glued to the prosthetic after a quick paint job and finally glue to Ancelene's face, so she had to wander around with only one eye, holding up the sledgehammer so it wouldn't pull the makeup off. And rather than go all the way back to the location, I brought some of the location to us - just a pile of leaves since the ground where we're shooting is littered with them.

And that's it. Another day over and done with, everything pretty much turned out as expected. Got a shoot next weekend as well that should be interesting and I'm seeing if I can shoot a little more to get around some scheduling issues that might cause more delays.

Moonshine of the Damned, Production Journal #13

So this scene, in the script as 4A - where the character Freebird (Heather Panton) encounters some zombies and first comes up with the idea of the Spiked Zombie Head Mace. In the original script these elements were much more drawn out and it was just a bow and arrow she created, in the 2nd major revision it was the mace. In this version, there are about 3-4, possible more sequences all mashed down into one sequence.

It got postponed from June 30th, we were going to shoot it on my birthday, but had to cancel due to illness. No worries, because we got to do it today and it turned out awesome. I already edited it and I was a little worried at first I might've missed a few things and whatnot, but it all went together really well and I'm pretty damned happy with how it turned out.

The scene is significant in a couple ways, it represents the first really FX scene. Not overly huge on FX, but it did take while to do it all - and you have to consider, I'm doing all this myself with no help. It's a lot of work to break all this down and try to get it done on time and done well at that.

It involved one of our hero zombies, referred to as Angry Zombie - played awesomely by Angela Corrigan. Angela is fairly tall and thin and athletic, so not only was she the right size for a zombie, but could probably handle the physicality of it as well. First thing was to outfit her with some Out of Mouth Dentures, it was a little problematic since I don't have a vehicle and neither does she so we had to do this whenever there was even the slimmest of opportunities, and eventually it worked out.

Here's the finished dentures. Now, I've not even done enough work with this stuff to even be called an amateur. These were my 2nd attempt at them and they worked pretty well for what was needed. I ended up making a mould for the teeth themselves rather than trying to sculpt them by hand. That turned out to be a good idea.

It took a couple fittings, but we got them working well enough for the shoot.


And I had to create all these. It doesn't look like a whole lot of work when you see them just sitting there. But each head had to be cast in latex, cured and filled with polyfoam. The latex can take awhile to cure and with one mould, it can take a while to do this many. Once cured I had to damage each one, seal that up and once cured added some gory bits and wait for it to cure again and finally painted them all.

Then came the task of finding the right size and shape sticks to mount them on, which required a lengthy hike into sweltering hot, mosquito infested territory, the stick had to be cleaned up, all the little branches and crap removed and finally sharpened on both ends and head the heads jammed on. It was a lot of work, it took a long, long time and they're only onscreen for maybe 20 second in this one scene, but longer in another.

If you're thinking, "Wow, that's a lot of work, what a waste of time since you only see it for a couple seconds" then quite frankly, fuck you, you're probably an idiot and please stop reading, go away and find something better to do with your life, like help lepers or something. The whole point of this project was to go this distance, to create more work than you'll really notice onscreen. Why? Because I wanted to, that's it. This crap is what I do and I love the shit out of it, so if I can find an excuse to make a bunch of messed up severed zombie heads and jam them on sticks, than I'm going to do it.

Next is the Single Spiked Zombie Head Mace. The idea here is that Freebird grabs one to defend herself, realized it's a decent weapon and jams more spikes into it later on. So I had to make a 2nd mace with just one spike. The full spiked head will now be painted up to reflect the mess made on this one.

The staff from the original full spiked head was taken and put onto this head, since originally I didn't have the time to make a new staff. Since then I've made a new one and fixed the wobbly staff problem, so the Spiked Zombie Head Mace you'll see in the rest of the movie will look much better now.

And now, on with some pictures from the shoot. Here's Angel and Heather before we started.

The blind eye look was sort of a last minute idea. I had the contacts and since I knew Angela was fine with them, I figured we give it a try and hope it didn't mess up her depth perception to much. Luckily, even though it did, she was still cool with going for this look. It really added an extra little bit to the character and I think this will end up being some of the best zombie makeup in the movie.

Here I'm trying to get a locked down shot that will be combined with footage being shot in Scotland. We'll have this one shot with our footage and theirs combined, otherwise Freebird will just be watching the zombies in the other footage wander about.

I was just testing the camera and got this shot. No reason to post it other than it was a really decent picture of Heather.

I made this goofy looking little rig to mount my camera in, it kind of allowed me to steer it a bit more comfortably than just holding it. It could even be weighted and made into a sort of steadicam.

Some heads.

And another.

Kim took this random picture of herself while we were shooting I guess.

Finally, some zombie fighting action.

If I didn't know this was Angela lying there in makeup, I would swear this was just a prop.

Freebird after her first major zombie fight.

Angela and Heather in a couple extra "after" cast photos.

In the end Heather got bloody, Angela couldn't wait to get out of makeup, my camera survived a near whomping from the mace and we finished right on schedule. As I mentioned, I already edited the footage and it looks pretty awesome.

So a huge thanks to Heather and Angela for coming out to do this today. And to Kim for getting some awesome pictures. And now for the Line of the Day:

Not sure when we're shooting next. I've got a tentative date set on the 28th, but that all hinges on a lot of things coming together perfectly. We'll see what happens.

Blown out Zombie Head

I've started work on making the Severed Zombie Head props unique looking, I can't have them all looking exactly the same with just a slightly different paint job - something a little more drastic was needed.

So I started with the base here, seen here next to the first painting attempt.

And he ended up like this. I went with a slightly greener colour this time around as well. What I did was simple cut the latex skin out and rip out chunks of the foam inside, which was then coated with a thin coat of latex to seal it back up. I then took some cotton balls and latex and just ripped up strings of the stuff and very crudely sculpted around the wound and added some stringy bits.

After I painted the whole thing the trick worked really well. I'm pretty happy with the result. Looks pretty grizzly.

Once I get more heads made I'll just do them all up in one batch over the course of a couple days and I'll end up with a decent pile of messed up Zombie Heads. Should be fun.