1202 Day 8

Matthew Trumbull, Sarah-Doe Osborne, Virginia Logan, and Mary Murphy look at some newly-made nanobot zombies.

My bathtub is like a crime scene.

I'm really enjoying the "unlit" look of this picture. I'm willing to face reality and note that the Panasonic GH3 sinks the dark part of the image all on its own -- giving everything you put in front of it a kind of "filmy" look. And with a 5300K light balance the image just looks... well kinda nice in my opinion. We have nice colors but they don't get weird on us. 
I have a small 4x "AA"-cell battery-powered florescent light mounted to the front of the spiderbrace the camera rides on. This is working fairly well for us. It really only reads in closeups but in mediums it gives just a bit more "oomph" to the frontmost part of the image.

In-between scenes, Virginia Logan knits in uniform.

 Everywhere we shoot in my apartment building has nice lighting (at an f2.8 and 1600 ISO).

Steve Deighan, Matthew Trumbull, Sarah-Doe Osborne, Virginia Logan, and Mary Murphy. This is a fun gang of people to fight the zombie apocalypse with.

The images we get are very color-correctable but honestly all I really want to do is drain a bit of color from the whole thing and then walk away. But we could swing to blue or green or sepia as much as we really like. Yup, the blacks are unrecoverable (see Sarah-Doe's pants for instance). But the midrange gives us a whole lot of room to work in. Still, the image is pretty nice as-is. As far as I'm concerned.

Bad guys go up the stairs: that's Steve Deighan, Matthew Trumbull, Tarantino Smith, Maya Graffagna, and Sarah-Doe Osborne.

Woe!

“Woe to me!” I cried. “I am ruined! For I am a man of un-bar-b-qued lips, and I live among a people of greasy ribs, and my eyes have seen the King, and tasted the food at Soul Flavors which is now closed.
Woe.
For years I found Soul Flavors in Jersey City to be the best soul food I'd ever eaten. Now, 'tis tru my cousin did introduce me to Red Rooster in Harlem and yea verily I do pronounce it as good as Soul Flavors. 
But it's in Harlem and I live in Jersey City. 

In sadness I post this bunny.

Just up the street from where Soul Flavors was is a real hole-in-the-wall Polish restaurant. Every single thing I ate there -- stuffed cabbage, stuff chicken breast (mozzarella), pierogies (of course), and sauerkraut, were delicious. And helped take the edge off my speechless sadness at the demise of Soul Flavors.

Day 7

La Reine de Mars waits to roll sound.

Clark on his first day. The awesome super at my building let us use the part of the basement I'd never seen before. This scene Clark blows it up watching his mother/zombie get killed with a baseball bat. On a side note, what rating were we going for here? On another note, I'd asked his mom if seeing his mom get killed would qualify as either traumatizing or awesome and she allowed that for him it would be clearly on the side of "awesome".

Dirk Voetberg as the sleazy landlord Bennicker before he comes to an untimely end by whomever that is behind him.

We stuffed Clark in a closet. He got me back:
Him: "Did you write this movie?"
Me: "No."
Him: "So you're just the director."
Writers everywhere rejoice and smirk.

Annalisa Loeffler going after a robot with a baseball bat. That's a Pandora Machine bag in the background which the Producer took away for the final shot. Many thanks to Virginia Logan for her baseball bat. Apparently kids these days all use aluminum bats. Back in my day you weren't allowed to play with aluminum bats.

Annalisa Loeffler's new Facebook picture.

Dirk Voetberg looks on while Clark slates a scene for Annalisa Loeffler.

Okay, so this is Annalisa Loeffler's new Facebook shot.

Annalisa Loeffler, Maya Graffagna, and the Queen of Mars look at video tap (yes, after years of not having tap, we have it once again) which doesn't actually show up when you take a still (meaning that the duration of the frame that is actually shot is not transmitted to the monitor, we are all otherwise actually looking at the frame you see above.)

Annalisa Loeffler and our little tribute to Sleep No More.

Clark in front of our two walls. These walls were built by Marcie Kintish and are freakin' beautiful to shoot. In fact that wall you see on the left is staying right there -- I'm gonna live with it. It's like a big piece of art on that wall.
Someone left those salt and pepper shakers in the front hall of my building yesterday for someone to take and I decided that someone would be me. It turns out they're electric salt and pepper grinders.
Clark wouldn't touch those pancakes. His loss -- they were delicious.

Die Königin Mars.

Notes

Here are some notes. 

 

1.Eiko Eiko (soundcheck, trade fours)

2. Twilight of the Ice Nymphs (Gentle Giant-esque Ethan song in 3/4)

3.Goth waltz (from http://diatomaceousearth.bandcamp.com/track/magnetic-waltz, 10.30.13--- Lou, you are a mad man! esp. from 12:20 onwards)

4.Porcupine's Dream

5.Spacy thing

6.Imaginary Opera

7.E drone/funk thing

Guitars

A couple weeks ago Lou came into rehearsal having met this dude on the street. Rubytone are mostly guitars with amps built into them, but there's other things too.

This is Max. He's a 6-string bass guitar.

Undercovers

There's a thing which is available now and which I wish I'd had back when I was a production sound mixer.
One of the biggest hassles with recording production sound in a movie is the clothing noise actors' costumes make when you're hiding lavalier microphones on them. You can drive yourself crazy by making little "footballs" of gaff tape and using bunches of moleskin and whatever else you can find, in order to make a kind of rig on the lav mic in order to keep them from rubbing against the clothes they're behind.

Undercovers -- made by Rycote -- do the thing you want them to do. They're stupidly simple double-stick pieces of tape like wigtape, with little fuzzy felt covers which go over the lavalier microphones.
I will admit that where before I might rig a mic and then spend a long while listening to it to make sure it wasn't rubbing, I now will rig a mic and then walk away -- never listening to it until we get to the edit bay. (I know. That's totally not pro of me. But I'm the cameraman for crying out loud. Why do I need to listen to the mics?) Still, it's about the confidence that I have in a mic rigged with Undercovers that allows me that sloppyness.

Day 6

 Today we had a treat as Dirk Voetberg and Chance Shirley were on set. We made Chance do camera for us. And Dirk played Bennicker in Steven J. Niles' Dead Residents.

After Dirk is shot by the robot, he reaches around and finds a piece of his brain implant chip.

Dirk makes a good headshot.

We also made Chance put on the robot costume. Here Laura fixes his carapace while Virginia Logan looks on.

We had to cover up Chance's beautiful blond locks don't you know.

Zoom in so you don't see his left arm and you'll get the idea.

I cannot get this bunny to post to Facebook

Celtx Scheduling

For the last few movies now we've been using the free program Celtx for scheduling movies, not just writing the screenplays.
I'm pleasantly surprised at how good the program is at dealing with schedules. I mean, I realize that on this movie we're shooting I've showed up on set having no idea how we're going to shoot some things. But that's my fault, not the scheduling software.

But Celtx could be even more perfect. Yes. There's further for it to go. 
Things I wish Celtx would do:

• More easily combine duplicated characters. I don't know why characters get duplicated. I wish they wouldn't. But it would be nice if they would easily "combine" back together again so you didn't have duplicates all over the place. 
• Do automatic page counts of scenes. You know. In 1/8th pages. Just like they do in the big time. 
• Do a strip-board of scenes. Just because sometimes it's easier to see scenes like that. 
• Automatically print sides based on what's on the call sheet. And automatically print them in that sexy half-page booklet size too. Just to save on ink and trees.

Halloween'ene

We actually rehearsed a setlist last night.

I know, right?


Lily used the fretless through her Alembic preamp. Greg's guitar went through the other Neve 1272 channel. Ethan put no compression on the bass side of the Stick (and, honestly, I think I removed all the compression on his channel too.)

Handcuffs of the Present

So I'm walking down the street and I casually look in a window and see this.

I saw the orange one first.

They only had the two of 'em. And they were $15 a piece and I couldn't talk 'em down.

Somebody's gonna need to modify them or put some sort of thingy in-between them.

They knew I was desperate. They knew I'd do anything. But now we have the handcuffs of the future.

Handcuffs of the Future

We need handcuffs. But you know, from the future. There are these nice-looking things. I don't think they actually exist.
Much breathless reportage occured when someone filed for this patent on cuffs which could administer electric shocks or drugs.

Here are the images for our police badge. I forget which one we got.

We got this dark one.

We need at least one control panel which goes on a wall.

Ecig in the Movies

Matthew Trumbull occludes Sarah-Doe Osborne while Tarantino Smith looks on.

My eldest brother, Dave, custom mixed this nicotine-free haze stuff for this e-cig he lent us for the movie.
Matthew Trumbull took to it right away. It's amazing how, without any flavoring added, I can't smell this thing at all. I mean, I can smell our regular theatrical hazer.* But not this stuff.

Right now I have three lights rigged to the front of the camera. This movie is supposed to be entirely the camera inside the robot and security cameras. I'm not really shooting the whole thing that way. But I am shooting the movie much more "flat" than I usually do (see the above image). That may very well take to color correction better. We'll see.



*I may be wrong about that.

DR D5

Today was the first day of our "delinquents".

The brilliant Matthew Trumbull as Teevo, the lovely and talented Sarah-Doe Osborne in her first non-android role in one of our movies. I swear she's better and more beautiful in each of our movies. And the unnecessarily handsome Tarantino Smith loses at cards to the pretty girl.

Matthew Trumbull as a troublemaker

You can get lost in Sarah-Doe's eyes, which is how she beets you at cards.

The fantastic Tarantino Smith knows he's being had.

Our own Don Arrup who's worked with me since Hamlet (he played Polonius) is awesome as Blink.