Boxers or Brief?

Keepin' it short tonight, my lovely lads and lovelier lasses. Between the weekend and the holiday (or... Monday, to all you non-Americans) there's not a lot going on 'round these parts. Remember the Wicked Witch of the West make-up tests we did on Saturday? You should, I did a whole long, boring entry about them. You can find it in the archives, even. Anyway, that was a learning experience, and we're beginning to use what we learned to help us move forward.

One thing we tested with the Witch mask was the amount of articulation Marie could get out of it, when speaking and expressing herself. Y'know, facially. And the results were pretty good. It moved with her real face in pretty convincing fashion. But Norm thinks it could be better if we were to slice up the mask a little bit and more precisely apply the bits and pieces to the appropriate areas of her face, and then hide the seams.

And since Norm is the friggin' man, that's exactly what we'll be doing. However, since I'm a fan of sort of old school film monsters, the kind that you never get a good look at, we're going to be building up to a Witch reveal in the film. Which means a lot of darkly lit shots, a lot of behind the back shots. And for those kind of things, the mask is just perfect as-is. We really only need the cut-up one for dialogue and close-ups.

So Norm also suggested that we film any non-dialogue material with the mask as a pull-over affair, and then afterwards slice and dice and do the dialogue. A sensible suggestion. But one that requires a bit more planning on my part. So my task yesterday was to storyboard all the Witch scenes (save the Dorothy two-handers I'd already edited) so that I could come up with an exacting, shot by shot schedule.

Since they're for me, and I know what's inside my head, they're hastily scribbled, vague outlines of shots. What was important for the scheduling was knowing how many shots a scene had, and what type of witch mask would suit which shot. For example, in the following sequence, shots two, three, and eight would be handled with the pre-slice mask, and shots four, five, and six with the post-slice.

The Wicked Witch of the West summons a murder of murderous crows.

If you can figure out what these drawings are, more power to you. And anybody who can read my hand-writing... even MORE power to YOU... I have trouble with it myself sometimes. But anyway, all nine or so Witch scenes planned out in detail, I was able to create a two-day Witch schedule, one day for each iteration of the mask. It's now just a matter of getting schedules coordinated across the board, and getting this thing filmed.