The Lux Capacitor

The time has come once again for me to ramble into your eyes by way of computerized text. This is what you've done, twenty-first century technology. Look at it. LOOK AT IT!!!

Consider this something of a "state of the union" address, but for something far less important than the union. Unless you're one of our non-American readers, then maybe it's more important than the union. I don't know, does every other country still hate us? Sound off in the comments below and our drones will be by shortly to... take your... information.

As I alluded to earlier, Sean and I are gearing up for the summer. On the 18th of this month I'll be once more making the treacherous journey south to the grand state of Virginia. Dorothy thought hammerheads and jerky trees were bad? She should try the Jersey turnpike sometime... And you have to pay through the nose to drive on that thing... I'll take sarcastic knickknacks any day.

The primary purpose of the summer is a little photography, hopefully our last. You all remember when we recently announced Wiley would be playing that Toto character, and he represents one of our main concerns for the summer. Second only to Scarecrow, in fact. That's right friends, the lovable Steven T. Lowry will be suiting up once again for some zany Scarecrow antics. Only this time we'll have an upgraded puppet rig and an actual chromakey suit. He'll still look like a jackass, but... a SVELTE one.

Though the old look did a lot for his credibility with the "creepy sex cult" demographic.

But it's not all dogs and hay. This isn't my childhood we're talking about, here. We'll also be filling in the odd little gap here and there, picking up some characters and locales we haven't gotten just yet. The most exciting of these bits, for me at least, is the Kansas farmhouse and its inhabitants.

Ever since we decided that we wanted to go this stylized route with our visuals, Sean and I have been adamant that we wanted to do Kansas as real as possible, for the contrast. Consider it our sepia to color transition, I guess. We want to establish our film firmly in the real world so that things don't start to get crazy until after the tornado, as it should be. And my buddy Sean's managed to track down for us a very lovely little one-room building of the period.

It's our responsibility to inform Randy Quaid that he'll have to find someplace else to live.

I say lovely, but y'know... it's supposed to look beaten and run-down. These aren't wealthy folks, and they live in a tough area. As you can see, the place needs to be spruced up a touch regardless. In exchange for cleaning it out we get to do pretty much whatever we want to the thing. It's perfect for our purposes, and I'm quite excited that I get to do the Western sequence I always wanted. There are some other cool things coming up for the summer too, and expect Sean to do a site update when some bios and pictures come in.

But that's all in the future! Let's talk PRESENT, baby. Or at least the quite recent past. Remember that concept scene stuff we showed you on the 200th post? We're a bunch of perfectionists over here, and we're still polishing it up. The release rapidly approaches though, and hopefully it's worth the wait. Towards the pursuit of that perfection, this week I got to work with a delightful fellow named Lux Angel.

Some of you may remember that at one time there was a composer on our crew page. And you may have noticed that he's been absent for some time. I won't name names, but we had a fellow on board, and he did the music for our teaser trailer, and also did a pass at the concept scene. We were generally happy with parts of it, but there was a breakdown of communications that occurred and we were forced to let the guy go before any revisions could take place.

Pictured: A dramatic reenactment.

The music you heard in that 200th post snippet was the first draft I refer to, and we were never really happy with it. Sean and I had resigned ourselves to releasing the sequence with that score, in hopes of replacing it with something better on the final film. But I recently decided that I wanted new music over the material, to give it the best possible chance of success.

Enter the aforementioned Angel. Lux Angel, I mean. He had actually sent us an e-mail expressing his interest way back in 2009, shortly after we had decided to go with that other pretty reckless fellow. I'm an e-mail hoarder, and I remembered liking the samples he sent, so he was the first person I went for. Luckily for me, he was available, and agreeable, and he just... did it.

He started with a twenty second "audition" to make sure we were a good fit. Seemed to be, so we moved forward. He and I had a grand 90 minute instant message session discussing what we wanted the sound to be, and he went off and did it in record time. I actually just got the music yesterday, and talked to him earlier today about a few minor changes, and I already have those new files in my possession. He's an extremely talented guy, and also courteous, intuitive, and timely. It was an absolute pleasure to work with him on this.

That's the exact same snippet you saw before (which is still rough, by the way), but with the new music in place. It's slightly out of sync, because that version is a bit trimmed down from the final, but you get the idea. Sean and I are totally in love with the way the whole score came out, and what it adds to the sequence. We didn't push Lux for a commitment to do the whole film, but the working relationship seemed positive, and he's at least open to talking about it when the time comes.

And that's about it, as far as what's going on at the moment. Drew continues to improve those concept scene effects in ways I couldn't have imagined, and I'm finishing up those damned storyboards you keep seeing, so we'll know what the hell we're shooting this summer. Oh, and I'm also working on something I'm not ready to tell you about just yet. Because I don't have friends or hobbies.

Who needs friends or hobbies when you have a Dutch termite farm?