All the small things...

Of course I shouldn't be writing this blog right now. Makes no sense. Far too much to do.

I need to take a minute every so often, though, so this seems as good a way as any.

Inhale. Exhale. Too much to do, man, and TOO LITTLE TIME.

Suddenly, everything's got a time limit. A prop that we want needs to be shipped over, and won't get here on time. We run out of cheques in the chequebook, and the replacement won't get here in time. I want a haircut, but there isn't a SINGLE SECOND between now and August 9th when I'm going to be able to get one.

No time, and the small things just keep getting bigger.

Inhale.

Exhale.

[Grosse Point Blank] This is me breathing. [/Grosse Point Blank]

One week to go...

And things are starting to get a bit nuts. My brain is at the point where it won't shut down. Sleep is becoming difficult, as I panic about minor details.

We had a cast readthrough for Hellbride on Friday, and I'm delighted with how it went. My cast are going to rock, and I couldn't be happier.

On the KK side of things, we're still holding a handful of auditions for some of the smaller parts.

I keep forgetting who's involved with which movie, and talking to HB people about KK things. I wonder how long before this starts to annoy people. All the set-dressing fabric for our wedding venue turned up today; a delicated shade of lemon drape that we're going to end up showering in gallons of fake blood just because that's the kind of people we are.

Meanwhile, I've been trying to organise a remastering of TrashHouse prior to US release, to allow me to do some colour-correcting that never happened before the UK one. Don't know if it's going to happen, but it might.

Crane

We have a crane. Every time I look at it, my mind plays a fragment of the They Might Be Giants song 'They'll Need A Crane'. If my mind doesn't stop doing that soon, I might go nuts.

The crane, as you'll probably have guessed, usually has an obscenely expensive camera mounted on the end of it, and therefore also makes me nervous that its about to break or fall over and scupper both shoots by destroying our one and only camera. So the crane makes me nervous, and also makes my mind sing songs. I approach the crane with caution.

We also have a proper boom pole, and the mic even has a baffle. A baffle is one of those things that looks like part of a sheepdog and covers up the microphone. It eliminates wind-pops and serves to make the shoot look more professional than it probably is. The TrashHouse shoot didn't have proper boom poles or baffles. Although if I remember rightly, we did have a really cheap home microphone gaffer-taped to a wooden stick at one point.

Keys tomorrow

Tomorrow we get the keys to our filming units, which pretty much marks the end of pre-production and the beginning of production. I've been running numerous tests on our new kit over the last few days. We've got a load of new sound equipment that I didn't want to end up using untested, the drawback being that sound is not my strong point and therefore I'm not the best guy to test such stuff. My tests concluded that noises that go into the mic end up getting recorded. Hopefully this is sufficient. I'm sure when our sound recordist turns up he'll be able to look at the matter in even more detail.

We had a gimp mask turn up last week, which features in one of the death scenes in KillerKiller. I have learnt that gimp masks exert a strange pull to people in the room, just begging to be put on. I have also learnt that everyone looks terrifying in a gimp mask. It's not a sexual kink I've ever understood in the slightest, to be honest, but seeing the effect that thing has on people's features I understand it even less. Gimp masks are scary folks. And I'm now obviously delighted to have one on my Ebay history. Right next to the cheerleader outift, just so nobody thinks I'm fucking weird or anything.

Heard from Screen Entertainment that apparently TrashHouse is going to be put up as a legal download in both the US and the UK some time soon. I'll keep you posted on that as I hear anything.

Casting complete

More or less. The last couple of major roles have finally been offered and accepted, after a final auditioning day on Tuesday.

Props have also been getting sourced at a rapid rate of knots. My Ebay history used to look so tame and respectable, (early 90s indie CDs, mainly), but now it's chock to the brim with nasty-looking surgical equipment, sinister masks and so on. God knows what I look like. Ordering a wedding dress later in the week will probably make the history look worse rather than better at this point...