Once more unto the lift gate...

We had the wrap party for Killing Ariel on Friday. The director's sister handed out pictures she'd taken of everyone during the shoot, and I thought mine looked particularly heroic. This is me standing on the lift gate of our grip/electric/camera truck when we were filming at a gas station in cajon pass, on the road up to Silverwood Lake.

It was an okay party. Like most "Hollywood" parties I've been to, not nearly as chic or exciting as you'd expect. Mostly just a bunch of people standing around and talking about movies. A lot of fun though, and definately nice to see everyone again in a social setting rather than in the frenzied chaos of production. I even handed a few of my cards out, so if anyone from the party is checking this out, hi there!!

Anyway, at present it looks like the plan is to head back to Albuquerque on Monday. I have a wedding to go to in Angel Fire on August 6 that's going to take up that whole weekend, but other than that I've got a lot of work to get done on LoE. I have to film a number of inserts, establishing shots, etc.. In fact, since I need to make a list anyway, I'll just write them down here:

• Pizza Guy Scene - we never filmed this, but it turns out it's desperately needed. Hopefully I can recruit a few of the old crew to help with this. Need two actors, a pizza guy and a gang-banger. Need pizza boy outfit, pizza bag, a gun, and a house.
• Establishing shot of Anodyne, and some shots of the interior if we can get them.
• Desert shots, including a shot of a "welcome to Albuqerque" sign or something similar.
• Shots of the coffee table in the movie house piled with trash and stuff, to use as filler in the Clint/Davis scenes.
• Shots of the Sandias at sunset.
• Other random shots around Albuquerque.

That's all I can think of at the moment... it's quite a lot, actually, so I'm going to have to get working on it as soon as I get into town.

The other major thing to do is get a meeting together of guys who are going to work on music. I want to get the "sound group" together one of the nights i'm in town to go over the movie, talk about what music we need, and get things rolling on that end.

It's starting to look like my mid-septemberish release date was way too optimistic, especially considering how busy I got working on Killing Ariel. We might be able to squeeze out a rough cut by September, but I doubt we'll get the whole thing done. And I know we won't be able to get the DVD all done by then, at least not the one I want to make with all the special features and whatnot. That reminds me, something else to talk about is doing some commentaries...

When... does the hurting... stop?

So, yeah. Electricians and grips work hard. By the end of the Killing Ariel shoot, I was moving slower and slower each day. I think my body was starting to give out on me. I know for a fact that my immune system shut down, because I've been sick with a damn cold for a week now. After a few days of rest, I'm starting to recover, and it's time to start thinking about the future!

First, I wanna share a few more pics from Killing Ariel, just to show you, my faithful and beloved readers, what I've been up to. Shortly after my last blog post, we packed up and moved out to the San Bernadino mountains, in the vacinity of Silverwood Lake, to shoot some car scenes. To do this, we rented a professional car trailer rig, as can be seen in the following shots.

This is the car, a Porsche 912, sitting on the trailer. You can see our camera pointing through the driver side window, and two of our 1200 watt lights aimed to fill in the driver's face a bit. In the background on the left you can just barely see Silverwood Lake:

A different angle on the whole rig. The damn thing musta been 60 feet long all told; it was huge. You can't see the truck that's pulling it too clearly, but that's what the next shot is for:

This is the truck that pulls the whole thing, with our most essential crew members on board:

So yeah, the professionals have just a slightly more sophisticated way of doing these shots than we used on LoE, but I remain proud of our innovative solution nonetheless:

Later we were shooting a scene that occurs on the side of the road at night. We had the road blocked off by the police, so we just occupied the whole thing, which was nice. In order to light up such a big area, though, we had to break out the big gun: a 6,000 watt HMI PAR we rented just for the occasion. That sucker is DAMN BRIGHT, lemme tell ya. We bounced it off an 8 x 8 sheet of giffolyn, which is a nylon-reinforced plastic tarp. We suspended it on two of our tallest stands, called Mombo Combos. It worked remarkably well.

If it doesn't look very safe to you, well, it isn't. I don't have any pictures of this, but the next day we set up a very similar configuration, but this time the wind kicked up. A gust of wind caught that griffolyn like a sail and it pulled the two Mombo Combos down, right onto the 6k light. It was like one of those disasters you see on RealTV, where you just suddenly see this huge thing collapsing and people running around and shouting. The crash ended up breaking the globe in the 6k light, but we were able to cut power to it quickly. We had replacement globes, but the gaffer decided not to replace it because some of the internal components had been knocked around inside the light housing. So that ended up being our biggest semi-disaster of the whole shoot. Nobody was hurt or anything, by the way, but the sound mixer's car happened to be under the griffolyn when it came down, and he lost his radio antenna in the ensuing crash. Can't win 'em all, I guess.

Last Sunday, we set up for a bluescreen shot with the same car. I'd never done any bluescreen stuff before, so it was pretty educational. We had a huge 30' by 50' bluescreen that we had to hoist on three huge stands behind the car. We lit the screen itself with a bunch of KinoFlo lights, then lit the car itself normally:

The setup might look kinda messy, but it came out looking good on the monitor. At least, the background behind the actors seemed to be a solid, uninterrupted blue. I'm definately going to be interested in seeing how this looks when it's all composited together:

One last pic I wanna share, although it's not strictly movie-related. As I was heading home at 4 a.m. from our desert shoot in the mountains, I got onto highway 18, the Rim of the World highway, which heads down the face of the San Bernadino mountains into San Bernadino itself. As I got onto the road, I looked over and gasped in astonishment - the smog layer had vanished, and I was presented with an astonishing view of the city below! I had to take some pictures, if only to prove to myself that I wasn't crazy, and because it's such a rare event:

Anyway, we wrapped up production on Wednesday, so I'm officially out of a job again. The work schedule was so demanding that I haven't even cashed most of my paychecks yet, because I literally had no free time. We'd work 12 or 13 or 14 hours, I'd drive home at 4 or 5 in the morning, pass out, sleep 8-9 hours, wake up, drive back, and start working again. But now that I'm free (and slowly recovering) it's time to get on with some other things.

As far as Land of Entrapment goes, there's still a bit of editing I have to do before I turn it over to the sound guys. I'm thinking I can get most of that done in the next couple weeks, if I really put my mind to it. There's just a couple things I need to return to Abq to film, like a good establishing shot of Anodyne and the "pizza guy getting shot" bit, and then I'll be pretty close to calling the video side of things complete. Then we still gotta do sound, which is prolly gonna take awhile... I'm starting to doubt that we'll be done for Sept. like I was hoping. Might be more like a Christmas release, or something. Bleh. Anyway, we'll get it done sooner or later. Keep checking back here for updates!

Happy Fireworks Day!

Well, sorry I haven't been updating lately. As you may already know, I got a job working as an electrician/grip on a horror movie called Killing Ariel. I refrain from calling it low-budget, because its budget is something in the vicinity of 50 times greater than what we had for Land of Entrapment; "independent" would be a better term, since it is being financed privately rather than through a studio.

I genuinely like the script, which is very convoluted and complex and Stephen King-ish. I have some hope that the final product will turn out the way the writer intended, mainly because we have an excellent editor lined up- Joel Negron, who just recently edited House of Wax. As you can see from his IMDb page, he has some other impressive credits under his belt as well.

Killing Ariel itself doesn't have an IMDb entry yet, which is kind of odd, but I guess without the studio connections maybe you can't get an "in production" movie on there. For that matter, I haven't gotten LOE on IMDb yet either, because I need to get it listed on a third-party website like a film festival website first. As soon as i get that lined up, by the way, I'll let y'all know.

The experience has been very enlightening for me, and I've learned oodles about the grunt work that goes into lighting and rigging. Most of our setups aren't too complex, but they're way ahead of what we were doing on LOE, which involved $17 tungsten-balanced bulbs from Kurt's Camera Corral mounted in $5 sockets-with-tin-reflectors from Home Depot and diffusion silks made out of white bedsheets and pvc pipe (also acquired at Home Depot). Working on Killing Ariel has acquainted me with professional lights and grip equipment, terminology, and use.

This is a picture the gaffer took of me and one of our sophisticated lighting effects. The printout got smeared a little, probably when people with sweaty hands were passing it around, so I need to get a digital copy from him, but hopefully you can make out most of the image. What we're doing here is shining a 1200 watt HMI PAR into a plastic tub full of water to create a "watery reflection" effect for a bathroom scene. Mirrors and pieces from broken mirrors line the bottom of the tub to increase reflectiveness, and my job was to constantly stir the water to keep the reflection lively. Note Tracer the cat investigating the situation (look just below my hand).

This is a lighting setup we did for an outdoor '70s party scene. It's a little hard to see the details, but basically a lot of what we did was shine lights into bounce boards in order to create soft, omnidirectional "moonlight" on the actors. A few smaller lights highlighted specific details of the background or action.

This is the "haunted mansion" location where most of our shooting is taking place. This place is a total trip - built as a mansion in 1908, the place has been owned by a Japanese-American family for the last fifty years or so. It's located on several acres of land, which are used for growing flowers (the family business). The house itself is pretty run-down and has actually been condemned, and is scheduled to be torn down in the near future. Kind of a shame, because it seems to me like the structure itself is okay, it's just a mess inside. The whole place smells like cat piss and cobwebs drape every corner. It's difficult to convey the atmosphere of the place through pictures, because pictures always seem to make it look nicer than it really is. Suffice it to say, though, it feels like a haunted house if ever there was one:

As an example of the kind of lighting effects I've been working on, we set up a fairly simple dolly setup for a scene where the she-demon glides into the room, scaring the crap out of our hero. The director wanted to use the dolly to give her movement the feeling of "gliding" rather than walking, and wanted it to be very backlit and atmospheric. Here's what the setup looked like:

And here's what it looked like with all of our lights on and the actress in place:

The view from the camera itself was truly awesome, I'm told. I didn't get to see it because I was sitting at this angle working a variac dimmer on a fill light as the dolly slid into position. Still, you can get a sense of what we were doing; strong backlights to shine through the plastic shower curtain smeared with blood, giving the actress a spectral and menacing appearance. We've done a lot of "lighting effects" shots for this flick, including fire effects, lighting effects, candlelight, etc... it's really a tour de force for me, exposing me to tons of different lighting situations and tricks. Next time I set out to make a no-budget flick (or help friends on theirs), I'm gonna have a whole new perspective on how to use light.

After I'm done with this gig, I'm going to head back to Abq (among other trips) and get some things going with regards to postproduction and sound. I have a few small shots to get filmed, and then I'll have the movie pretty well cut together. After that it's just a matter of getting the sound handled, getting some music, foley, and (possibly) dialogue ADR'd, and we'll be good to go. I'm still (very optimistically) shooting for a September release date, but we'll see...