I'm not sure I can even remember what we did, but we did a bunch of it. I know a lot of what we did was wait for things to get set up... as is normal.
Saturday we lost several hours due to an unpleasant situation. Everyone was ready to shoot (I think) pretty much on time, but at 9:00 our leading man called in to say he was running a bit behind and was driving slower because of all the cops.
He has a horrific drive for our little project, since he is in Louisiana during the week for an actual paying project.
Apparently, the cops got him anyway. So that's something like four tickets in the last six weeks or so... but the real kicker was the warrant for the unpaid parking ticket. So he spent the weekend in jail.
Of course, we didn't know this on Saturday (though it was the leading theory), so we waited longer than we should have for him to appear. Not so good. Eventually, we dropped the scenes with him in it (or used a body double, which we conveniently have on hand) and went on. Behind schedule.
On the upside, a couple of the cast wrote an amazingly funny song about it and sang it for us during lunch Sunday. It was awesome; they will have to sing it at the cast party if we ever finish this thing.
We had something like 13 dead people to paint, so we did. My makeup team is great! They do most of the work, so I can manage and work up the FX and generally lounge around napping.
Michelle was doing arms and torsos again this week and she came up with a great advance in our arm and torso technique. Using the paintbrush and bodymakeup (with extra water or sealer), we get only mediocre results. Hard to get rid of streaks and beading, even with stringent Witch Hazel application.
So she patted over the wet makeup with a nifty makeup sponge to smooth it out, just like we do with faces, but using more sponge so it's faster. Or something. Anyway, this seems abvious enough after the fact. It's not as FAST as it could be, but it's fast enough and she was able to keep up with the faces, which is what counts.
And it looks good. So that's great. All of our work is, overall, looking better. Of course, some days the actors' skin just doesn't take the makeup... or has spots where it takes far too well. It's aggravating! I can see why the industry wants digital actors...
Anyway, we shot Victoria in the back Saturday, blowing ghost-dust out her front.
I did a quick test on a squib tube (very) full of powder and it failed to blow. Powder just doesn't flow in a tube; it compresses and blocks the air flow.
Last week or so, fortunately, I had worked up a nice squib design using some simple origami on a vinyl glove, duct taped into a triangle, with the air tube zip-tied in a hole in the thumb and a blowout window exposed near the bottom of the whole thing. Ummm, I'll post pictures someday.
THIS was invented for head hits. The normal tubes feed air from above. I needed a packet to feed from below without spilling all the fluid out. So the tube sticks up to the top of the packet and the fluid collects in the bottom instead of spilling out.
These, then, are what I use for all of my powder hits. They are beautiful.
I also was to do a wet hit on Mr. Clark, the kindly old neighbor. This was a reasonably subtle effect to soak through his shirt to show the gun hit on the entry.
This failed to work, which was REALLY ANNOYING, since my wet hits ALWAYS work in the lab.
Doing some debugging, I discovered that the end of the tube that connects to the squib was cut at too severe an angle and it didn't make a seal. I had cut this off in the field after the tube was routed through his clothing, and I didn't think the angle was bad enough to fix. I was wrong.
So I got a high-speed leak instead of a blowout, and it just wasn't right.
We'll fix it in post.
Sunday, we had a mob of dead charge the last two living in the house, and they blow holes in two of 'em (Rafaella, played by Melissa, who is very intense). The dust hits looked great, there, too.
Then they ate the two living folks. I couldn't get crazy with blood, sadly, since they wanted to preserve the carpet and walls for later shoots. Too bad! I was ready for a bloodbath!
Instead, almost all of the blood was delivered by mouth, so it was tricky getting ENOUGH blood in the mouth to (a) look good, but (b) not make 'em gag or leak before we were ready to show. We ended up increasing the mouth load with each shot, so the scenes did get bloodier as we went along.
Oh, and there was some chewing of "meat", too, using the test cast I did of the leg I sculpted last week. So that was cool.
Unfortunately, with all this cool stuff Sunday, we ran late. Which comes after running very late on Saturday because we filmed after dark, on purpose. The actors were getting pretty cranky by the time we were done.
So I'm kinda tired, but I'm getting used to that.
Posted by Edwin at June 27, 2005 10:22 AM