I know you guys are just dying to know how this past weekend went (those of you who weren't actually there). Well, let me tell you.
It was certainly more of a challenge than the weekend before. We only had one location, but we had about twice as many shots to cram into the same amount of time. And speaking of cramming, there were about 40 people packed into a relatively small house.
We needed a lot of zombies so our diligent make-up crew got to work in the zombie factory pretty early on. But as usual, they did an astounding job churning out new and grotesque creatures. It's just incredible how good the zombies look! It's hard to believe they're OUR zombies!!
It was our first time working with extended dialog so we had to make sure the sound and blocking were spot on. We ended up re-working a lot of things in order to get everything done. We also made a lovely little mess of the house we were shooting in. Luckily, the owner left town before he saw the place. Dom, Faye and I went in Monday night and cleaned our arses off. It actually looks better than now than when we found it, but I was definitely worried for a while there. About half the mud in his yard had been transported and ground into his floors. And his yard is another story. It was rain soaked and very muddy and unfortunately, we had to be out there for pretty much all of Sunday tramping around and shooting our fight scenes. So by the end of the day it was a swamp. We purchased some grass seed and hopefully that will revitalize the yard eventually. But for now it is a horrific mess. I wonder how much film crews with money pay people to shoot in their houses.
We watched the footage last night. Everything looks pretty good! Especially the shot where Faye spit blood on an actor's face to simulate a spurting neck wound. I know our actor wasn't too keen on getting spit on, but it really did look amazing. It's actually the one blood effect so far that we don't need to punch up in some way. So thankfully, our actor was a good sport about it. Faye decided that from now on, she just needs to spit blood on everybody. All the shots are there, though and SO FAR it seems we will be able to get everything done in the time we scheduled. We will definitely have to do some ADR though (which is a whole new ball of wax). We will also need to do shoot some blood splatter in front of a green screen this weekend in order to bloody the thing up. (It's apparently harder than you would think to get blood to show up on camera…right now our blood level is at about a PG-13. Not NEARLY bloody enough).
One weekend left to go. It's not going to be an easy one either. It's ALL fight and zombies (which makes it sound really exciting!). We're learning as we go along and we're ready to kick ass!
January 26, 2005
Categories: Uncategorized . . Author: Baxter . Comments: Leave a comment