Tuesday, December 25, 2012

Don't Boq At That

It's Christmas, and Christmas is a time for giving. Unless you're a child in a cartoon who hasn't yet completed your character arc or also Tom Cruise. In which case Christmas is probably a time for cleaning your E-meter or something. Anyway, to honor the spirit of the holiday for our few faithful readers, I'm giving a behind the scenes quickie. One of the things we're currently working on that I CAN admit to is visual effects for the film, because we ARE working on finishing the damned thing. That's no secret. So here's something of a breakdown on a shot the incomparable Drew More is working on with some minor assistance from myself.

First, we have the raw shot of Wesley Edge looking grim on the green-screen stage. As far as raw stills go this is messy, even for us.


Then we have the Boqmeister standing in front of some simple temp geometry Drew has created in order to test the fidelity of his camera tracking. That tripod uglying the raw still is the result of Drew slowly helping me to understand how to keep VFX guys like him relatively happy later on down the line.


And finally, we have another frame from the shot, which now looks like something a movie might have in it! Hooray for progress.


Boy, those Munchkins barely build doors big enough to accommodate their hats, ay?

Monday, December 17, 2012

These Shoes, They Fit Perfectly

I did something today that I can talk about without spoiling any of the upcoming whatevers that may or may not be coming up.


That's right, I shot my audition video for Mummenschanz.

Tuesday, December 4, 2012

It Smells Like Death In Here

Which is weird, because I haven't actually died. I know there'd been all this talk of weekly updates, and they were there for a while, and then they... just stopped. You may be wondering why. Whether you are or not, I'm about to TELL you why.

Perhaps because I was trapped within the vast, hungry abyss where Mega Chester's face should be.
I've been back in Maine for about three weeks now. We finished shooting what we were shooting, which was almost everything we wanted to. We did not, however, get to shoot our Kansas stuff. We just couldn't cast our Aunt Em and Uncle Henry in time, and I had to return to my state of origin before the process could continue. To date, we've only had one actor audition for each part. The Uncle Henry guy we couldn't make work out due to SAG regulations (oh my God, I actually had to call SAG!), and our one Aunt Em person only sent in her video audition yesterday. They're hard parts to get interest in, for some reason.

But as I said, we filmed the majority of what we wanted to film this fall, and we'll come back and tackle Aunt Em and Uncle Henry in the spring. We still have permission to film in the schoolhouse, we've purchased all the props and we have money left for the costuming, all we need are the people to fill those world-weary shoes. In the mean-time, myself and the rest of our small post-production team are having fun with all this new footage.

And by "having fun with" I of course mean "contemplating suicide because of." Potato, Russian Roulette...
Unfortunately for blog fans (Hi Sam!), this means the iron curtain of secrecy is back up. Or down? Whichever way is the view-blocker. We're working on some cool stuff for you guys, and I'm really excited with how it's all coming together, but I don't want to spoil any surprises. You won't have too long to wait now, and there will be updates when there can be, but I'm trying to keep it as fresh as I can. And not in a street sense.

Oh, and in other news, we're splitting this into three films, so we can include all the backstory from the other books. No wait, that would be a shameless money-grab, resulting in three bloated films composed primarily of filler...