Asylum time

And, after all that, we finally made it to our disused mental hospital location today. The location has cost me an arm and a leg, (half the budget of the movie for THREE DAYS filming), and the paperwork elements have been extremely frustrating at times. But, this morning at 6.30, our happy band rolled up to our fog-shrouded location and shot an absurd perecntage of a movie in just one day.

See, I'm getting that feeling that things are going too well again. I really don't want to get another avalanche of bad luck like that miserable Thursday on Hellbride, but dammit if today wasn't one of the very best days' shooting I've ever had. We got a huge amount done and it looked great.

I'd best get some sleep, though...

Sen-fucking-sational

Here's the God's honest truth. For all the occasional spills and heartaches, for all the broken mains connections and irritating location paperwork, this is proving to be an absolutely amazing summer. The KK footage that we've got in the can thus far feels alarmingly like it's come straight from my brain and onto the screen, thanks to the tireless work of the folks on the project. I have such hopes for KillerKiller and Hellbride; I want them to kick the hinges off the doors that TrashHouse edged open. If folks don't like them, then I think it's fair to say that they'll probably never dig my movies.

We're off to the asylum location tomorrow. It's finally time for the bit of the shoot that everyone has been looking forward to. The bit that's going to set the mood for the whole movie. The bit that's costing half the bloody budget.

The picture at the top of this entry is the first image from KK to be made available. It's of Danielle Laws, who is proving to be absolutely fantastic in this flick; alternately sexy as hell and utterly terrifying.

KillerKiller is go...

Although our weird, weekend-heavy schedule meant that today consisted largely of the cast working together on tightening up various scenes, followed by a tiny bit of actual filming at the end of the day.

Tomorrow is straight into two major kill sequences, though... Not sure whether we'll be posting photos from either of those just yet. We shall see.

One last Hellbride image for the moment...

Before everything goes all KillerKiller around these parts, thought I'd post one final image from the Hellbride set. This one was snapped by Debbie Attwell, (http://www.debbieattwell.com), and features the wonderful Eleanor James as Josephine Stewart...

KillerKiller on the horizon...

OK, so KK finally hits the lens on Monday. The biggest deal of the shoot, however, is the days that we're spending at our mental hospital location next weekend. They're going to be looooong days, and we need to get so much footage in the can. Going to be somewhat terrifying.

Having finally digitised all of the Hellbride footage, I threw together a crash edit of the first twenty five minutes yesterday. Damn, the film moves fast. TrashHouse takes over half an hour to hit high gear. Hellbride takes, like, 7 minutes. Might try to ease off the throttle just a tad when I come to edit properly, otherwise it's likely to leave folks with sore heads. Still loving the footage.

Hellbride footage and KillerKiller prep

I've been digitising the Hellbride footage on and off, in between sorting out final arrangements for KillerKiller. Still chuffed to bits with how HB has turned out, and looking forward to chopping together a first assembly and seeing how long it's coming in at roughly. It'll end up at 82 minutes, of course. I believe that every horror comedy ever made should run for 82 minutes. Any less and people feel shortchanged, any more and they start to fidget.

As a rough indicator of my mood; on Monday I bought two new albums. I bough the Thom Yorke solo album, and the debut from The Pipettes ( http://www.myspace.com/thepipettes ). I never make it much past the halfway mark of the Thom Yorke one, because I keep wanting to put The Pipettes on instead. I suspect this means that I'm pretty happy in general.

Nobody has dismantled the wedding set yet. It's rather gross, and absolutely saturated in fake blood and bits of body parts. The unit needs to be transformed into a hospital set by a week next Wednesday, but that seems very far away indeed.

Still picking up the odd costume for KK. Got our main characters' boiler suits yesterday. I love using boiler suits as costumes. They're SO easy...

And that's a wrap.

Hard to believe, but HB just wrapped principal photography. We cracked open the bubbly, and my beloved cast and crew showered me in fake blood, bless 'em.

Other than yesterday, that was a fantastic shoot. Fun, upbeat, fast and with a positive vibe. I reckon the film is going to be pretty fucking spot-on for anyone who enjoyed TrashHouse at all. And possibly even for a few folks who didn't.

One week until KillerKiller. No rest for the bloody wicked.

Luck, and the end of it

I don't know if I believe in luck, fate, karma or anything like that. But prior to 5pm yesterday Hellbride had an utterly charmed shoot, and after 5pm yesterday every single bit of bad luck that could possibly drop on our heads did, to such a degree that if it had happened in a TV show you'd have complained at how unrealistic it was.

Short version, (although the long version and extended disco remix will play in my nightmares until my dying day), runs like this; with all cast in full, blood-drenched wedding clothing, we still had an awful lot of the wedding to shoot and limited time. Because my cast and crew are, as I believe I might have previously mentioned, wonderful, they agree to stay for as long as it takes to get the sequence finished. We hunker down for a long evening, but know that we're getting great stuff in the can.

Suddenly, a mains lead gets pulled taut and snaps out of the back of the HD camera. We don't realise for several minutes that it has actually broken the connector in the back of the camera, meaning that the camera cannot take power. The battery only has five minutes life left, and cannot be recharged because it charges via the camera, which, in case you missed it, cannot take power. Various options are discussed. Phone calls are made, but we're into the evening and EVERYWHERE is closed. The nearest stockist of external chargers for our battery type turns out to be several hours away. And here's the kicker; cast availability after tonight is a huge problem, meaning that we can't even scrap the shoot and pick up again, because one of our main characters is seriously unavailable from this point on, and tonight was due to be his last one on set.

We have five minutes battery charge left to play with. I can't even see what our DP Al is framing, because to power the extra screen would use power we can't afford to lose. And we have to shoot a main character's final scene as a one-take wonder.

I haven't even been able to watch the footage back. The camera lies inert, waiting for a charged battery. Our Line Producer Nick is at this very moment making the drive to pick up the external charger, and we've delayed the start of this morning's shooting by three hours.

There was a load more crap besides, but you can wait for the sobbing director's commentary. And that's why too much good luck makes me nervous.

Shooting a Wedding Massacre

Involving ghost, guns, mobsters, slime and blood isn't quite as easy as you'd initially suspect. We've been working flat out for the last three days on the climactic sequence, (the longest I've ever spent on a single scene), and our shots-per-day rate is tiny. It all looks fantastic, though, thanks to my ever tireless cast and crew and our frankly rather wonderful make-up and hair artist Beverley Chorlton.
In an ideal world we'd finish the sequence today. I'm going to give it my very very best shot, but I wouldn't put any money on it...
Wish me luck.

Photos

In addition to the two below, there are three more photos up on the news page of Horror Talk:
http://www.horrortalk.com/news.htm
Check 'em out!

Getting married in the morning

Wow, can't believe we've gotten to the wedding already, but we have. Our mammoth climactic scene starts shooting tomorrow, and will take up the lion's share of the rest of the week. My tireless crew have been working flat out to get the scene dressed and ready for the wedding of the year, when Nicole Meadows and Lee Parker will finally tie the knot. Expect ghouls, mobsters and shitloads of bloodshed.

The wedding venue is draped in lemon yellow fabric. Once the blood starts flowing, that place is going to look like an abattoir.

Heh heh.

Baddies

This is Somebody.

I know it's a dark image.

He's a dark kind of guy.

Goodies

James Fisher and Rebecca Herod as Lee Parker and Nicole Meadows. You gotta love 'em.

Two days in...

And everything is fantastic.

I don't think I've ever experienced two days on the trot of looking at that days' rushes and being delighted with every scene prior to this shoot, but dammit if that's not what's happened since Monday. My cast is bloody brilliant and my crew rock the house.

We shot a scene yesterday which we'll call 'The Octopus Scene' despite the fact that it hasn't got an octopus in it. It's always been one of my favourite scenes in the script, but I knew that it was likely to be a tricky one for the actors involved and was probably going to take a lot of time. Rebecca Herod and James Fisher absolutely knocked it out of the park, and it's exactly as I wanted it. It was designed to be shot outside on a gloriously sunny day, and a gloriously sunny day appeared. And we were finished on the scene by lunchtime. I'm a very happy bunny.

Largely romantic stuff so far. Tomorrow's all blood and needles, though.

I love my job.

Over the top...

Here we go, folks.

Game on.

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...