House, and Sand, and Fog

The above image was one of the first ever pieces of concept art done for the film. Sean did a Photoshop composite using seven different images in an attempt to convey to me his idea for the opening shot of the film. Inspired in equal parts by real world Dust Bowl photography and the film The Searchers, the image is our attempt to instantly set our film apart from what has come before by grounding it firmly in the era in which the book was written.

Almost three years ago now we filmed the interior and partial exterior of the Gale farmhouse itself, but we never had the resources to locate or build a full-scale 1800's farm. In the past six years various CGI and matte painting approximations have appeared in clips and trailers, none of which we were completely happy with. We wanted our Kansas to feel real and tangible, like the John Wayne and Clint Eastwood Westerns we drew our inspiration from. So Sean built us a farm.

And then seasoned it to perfection.

A miniature farm, that is. In the last entry here I showed off the farmhouse model he'd spent countless hours perfecting. Since then, he's built a barn, a windmill, an outhouse (you will probably never see), a fence, and placed them all on an arid terrain, perched atop a large wooden table he, Scarecrow performer Steven Lowry, and myself built. Yesterday, with all the pieces finally in place, we filmed the last elements needed for the beginning of our movie.

Steve's always been our biggest cheerleader! Wait, I'm being informed "biggest fan" is funnier in this context.

It took three guys, one finicky fog machine, two industrial fans, three studio lights, four bags of play sand, and about a half of a tub of coffee. We shot several stationary establishing shots of the model, and then had a lot of fun simulating the tornado's onslaught. After the better part of a day, our epic Western was complete.

To the surprise of no-one, things didn't go exactly as planned, but it wouldn't be our movie if they did. Turns out it takes a lot more wind to blow sand around than you'd expect. There will be many hours spent cleaning up the not insubstantial mess, but it's not nearly as bad as we were expecting. A lot of precautions had been taken to contain the airborne sand, precautions which proved to be almost entirely unnecessary because we were lucky to get the sand to even blow across the table top.

We got it all working in the end, and shot a ton of footage I'm very excited about. It's leaps and bounds better than anything you've seen of Kansas so far, and it's going to give the film exactly the kind of intro we've always intended.

"When Dorothy stood in the doorway and looked around, she could see nothing but the great grey prairie on every side."

Knocking the Dust Off

Wow. So uh, it's been over two years since I wrote anything on this blog. In my defense, the IRS had to believe I was dead if I was going to avoid the tax evasion charges. I come to you now from Cell-block B of the Haynesville Correctional Center, and with plenty of time on my hands I figured I'd sit down and write another one of these things.

A lot of you have probably written this film off as dead. At least two of those of you are probably my parents. The truth of the matter is we took on a really ambitious project that we probably would have rightfully deemed insane had we been older and more not stupid. But we're here now, and we have no intention of abandoning what we started. We HAVE been derelict in keeping informed those few of you who have been following this project over the past few years, and I'm going to attempt to rectify that now.

There's so much I feel I have to explain to you...

By now, anybody who's interested has seen the throne room scene we put online in May for L. Frank Baum's birthday (observed, due to technical difficulties). While still imperfect, that clip was something of a triumph for Sean and myself: a successful attempt to implement miniature background plates into the production in a more realistic way than we've managed in the past. We've learned a lot in the heinously long six years we've spent working on this movie (and finishing another one), and this was a very solid proof-of-concept for us finding a way forward.

We've discovered daring new ways to cause each other physical and emotional discomfort!

Some of you may know, though we've never said it here on the blog, that we wrapped principal photography in May of 2014 and had a full edit of the film put together not long thereafter. The biggest hurdle for us was, is, and will continue to be visual effects. Volunteer visual effects assistance has proven notoriously difficult for us to come by, and I can only do so much on my own. My time is limited and there are certain skill-sets I just don't have. Sean himself has no background in visual effects and hasn't been able to assist me in any way, until now.

The miniature throne room and Oz head were successful enough that Sean and I have decided to work on more miniature environments. He's recently put a lot of work into building a pretty exacting miniature replica of the Kansas farmhouse. This will be used to capture plates for our tornado sequence, replacing the CG house seen in a couple of the trailers. It will also make its way into a full farmhouse model, once Sean has finished the barn and surrounding environment.

It's actually more structurally sound than the real building.

Our goal is to whittle down our list of 650 required VFX shots as much as possible on our own. There will be some we just don't have the capability for, but we can chew through at least a solid 2/3rds of this list by ourselves. Our distributor/executive producer is still hard at work trying to find a visual effects studio to assist with the film, which becomes a more achievable goal the shorter we can get the list of required shots.

To that end we've even mounted minimal reshoots of new live-action material when possible. For example, due to lack of time and resources, our original cornfield sequence was shot with Mariellen Kemp and Chester the puppet on a green screen. Last weekend we knocked the dust off Chester and took him out to an actual cornfield to film him being rescued by a Dorothy stand-in named Gabby. And to prove how much more professional we are now, unlike our misadventures in Kansas, we actually got permission to film on this location.

Because there's no explaining this to the police.

Completing this sequence for real allowed us to cut about ten visual effects shots from the film. And that's how we're going to finish this movie, by trudging forward and gathering what we need piece-by-piece. Sean and I both have full-time jobs and average incomes, so time and resources don't allow for a more satisfying solution than that at present. We appreciate everybody who ever was or still is interested in seeing this film, and we promise you it will get finished.

Raising the Barr

Gosh, I let it die here again. As is often the case when that happens, it's not because nothing was happening, it's because nothing EXCITING was happening. I've got a rough cut in place for that new trailer I mentioned previously. And that's all I'll say about that for now. Much of my time for the past few weeks has been spent working on a VFX shot list for Fred, to aid in his search for a studio to help us out with this beast. There's a reason I haven't posted any progress reports on THAT.

This is not exciting for anybody but boring people. You're welcome, Ben Stein.

With principal photography done, there's not a lot of excitement left to cover. It's going to be largely administrative stuff straight through to the end. But we do have a few odd pieces of filming still remaining, certain minor characters as yet uncaptured. Saturday we rolled... digital once again to cross one more piece off the list.

Scurvy. Check.

As we all know, when Dorothy arrives in Oz she's greeted by the Good Witch of the North as well as three Munchkins. While we filmed the Witch herself two years ago (and Dorothy two years before that, Jesus...), the Munchkins have been conspicuously absent. Until now, that is.

We returned to the storage unit green screen with our old friend Wesley Edge, as his Munchkin mayor Boq is the head of the welcome committee, apparently. Flanking him was... one guy, actually. Richard Barr, a jovial fellow and filmmaker in his own right.

I suppose jovial is a relative term.

In the book, Denslow drew two of the Munchkins looking almost identical. This made me think it would be fun if we had a set of twins in the greeting party, though no mention of this is made in the book. Or the script. It's not a point that's ever addressed, it's just another strange detail in an already bizarre scene.

We filmed the twins the traditional Hayley Mills way; Richard in one outfit, film, lock camera, change outfits, reposition, film. This took us a little longer than it would have to just go with two separate actors, but I think it was worth it. Richard gave two fun, very distinct performances, and I wonder if some viewers might not even notice the gag.

They might just gag, even.

I think we've officially done everything you CAN do in movie, now? We've filmed with men, women, children, babies, animals, puppets, prosthetic make-up, on sets, locations, and green screen... Now we've done splitscreen twins... What are we missing? This could be our only chance to ever make a movie, we want to make sure we nab the whole set.

Once we finished the welcome committee, we sent the Richards on his merry way, and Wesley hung around to film one more minor scene Boq has with Dorothy. With that done, he's now officially wrapped. The exciting thing about what we captured Saturday was that they were the last pieces we truly NEED. The other remaining minor characters are fun and exciting and add a certain amount of texture, but they're not crucial to the plot. We have actors cast, and we fully intend to film them, we just need to sort out costumes and a few other details.

More on that as it develops.

I'll Be In My Trailer

Hello friends. And also hello enemies. And all those varying levels in between. In case you missed it, though I don't know how you could and still be here, we put out a new teaser trailer last week. Yes, a teaser trailer again, I know, you thought we already did that. Well, with Fantastic Films coming on board as distributor we went back to square one in the promotional department. So a theatrical trailer will be coming, but we had to tease you first. Again.

And like all the best teases, we start by removing the least revealing article of clothing.

This time it's a bit less of a tease than last time, at least. You actually get to see Oz in this one. And Kansas is real. Anyway, I thought I'd take this opportunity to talk a little bit about the making of the trailer, because that's the kind of thing this blog is all about. I won't talk about the filming, because that process has been well documented on the blog, and you can actually watch some of it happen in our Creating Kansas web-series.

Let me preface this by saying; I did not make this alone. Drew picked up his share of shots and gave me helpful criticism on my own, Lux Angel did the fantastic score, and Michael Musson made mince meat of the sound work. But as this is my blog, as ever the focus will be on what I did, just because... I know how it got done. I did it. I was there for all of that.

We actually started on this trailer back in October of last year. I crafted an edit that was much more teasery than the final iteration, with some input from Sean and Drew. The structure was more or less the same as what's there now, except a different scene was used for the Witch at the end, something even less revealing from the character's first scene in the movie. We also hadn't filmed Kansas at that point, so it picked up right after the house was dropped by the tornado.

That teaser was close to being ready to go online when we were approached by Roxane Barbat of Fantastic Films International, LLC. Once conversations with them began, we put the brakes on the project, holding off until we knew exactly where that was going. When we reached a deal, shortly after Kansas was filmed, we started talking with executive producer Fred deWysocki about the creation of a new trailer, one he could bring with him to the Cannes Film Festival to show his potential buyers.

"We have storyboards... Can you sell them with storyboards?"

I contacted Lux about an adjustment of the score, but he was sadly unavailable for it, which made it necessary on our timetable to maintain as much of the original teaser's structure as possible. This is why the Kansas sequence, which we tagged onto the beginning, has no music over it. You may also notice if you listen for it, after the Yellow Brick Road shot the teaser score fades into a slowed down version of the score from the Wicked Witch scene we put online last summer (it's since been removed, per Fred's request). The teaser score then kicks back in after the Wicked Witch of the West says, "I have a better idea."

"I should probably take a break from terrorizing children and renovate my castle or something."

But we hashed out a cut that Fred was more or less happy with, and that preserved most of the original structure. Michael did some strong sound work that helps carry the Kansas portion, to make up for the lack of music. My job on the sound was to record the ADR with anybody we hadn't already gotten, which meant everybody who wasn't Dorothy, Boq, and the Wicked Witch of the West. Steve Lowry stopped by to record his Gart the Winkie one afternoon. I single him out solely so I can mention that getting that audio, as well as the one other line of his that ended up getting cut, took him about a half hour.

Plus he apparently almost broke the recording equipment when I left the room. This is his punishment.

Time was incredibly tight on this thing. Fred needed the trailer by May 7th at the latest in order to get it to Cannes with him on the 15th. We didn't sign contracts with them until the 8th of April, so we had just under a month to do this work. That's not just VFX, that's pitching the reworked edit to Fred with some storyboards, making those changes happen, getting the sound sorted out, AND getting all the VFX in. And the modified structure cut out nearly all the VFX shots we'd already finished for the original edit, replacing them instead with more complex, attention-grabbing shots.

You're telling me the promise of my corpse wouldn't have put asses in seats?

It all seemed very doable at the beginning. We had actual volunteer help from multiple other talented artists, it wasn't going to be just myself and Drew. That quickly fell through, as with no money to promise these other people any paying gigs that came up took precedence for them, as they should. But that meant I had to take on many more shots than I had initially assigned myself. Drew was still able to cover his five, but I had to complete mine and everybody else's, for a total of twenty. Which didn't help the time crunch on a per-shot basis.

So when you see a ropy composite in the trailer... believe me, I know. That close up of Dorothy in Kansas is barely passable, and I'm completely aware. But spending the time to get that up to the level it could be would mean another shot would pay the price. The goal quickly became to make everything look good enough, and polish the lesser ones as time allowed. Time didn't allow for much. We ended up delivering the final trailer at 10:00 PM on May 7th. In by the skin of our teeth.

"That's stupid, teeth don't even HAVE skin."

What does this mean for you? It means that with more time and assistance, the movie's going to look better than the trailer, or at least parts of it will. Some of it is probably as good as it gets on our budget level, and some of it has room to finesse. You can probably tell which is which. And if you can't... I guess all this is moot anyway, right?

I'll leave you with one final anecdote. Our frequent readers and watchers will know that we recently filmed quite a bit of Dorothy material with Carrie Minter standing in for Mariellen Kemp. The other day while Sean and I were out and about... well, that makes it sound more glamorous than it was... we were in McDonald's. I know, I'm not proud. Anyway, we ran into Carrie's mother, who said hello and told us she'd watched the trailer. And then she told us she thought it was cool, but she wasn't sure if Carrie was in it or not. So there you have it, folks, not even her own mother can tell.

My New Favorite Thing

So it's after midnight and we only just got back from our first ever night-shoot! And also our LAST ever night-shoot, at least on this project. Totally understand why everybody complains about them now. A pain in the ass to set up, cold, hard to light and photograph... A whole slew of new problems.

I'm going to eschew my traditional format in favor of just letting some pictures do the talking. I will give you a little back-story first, though. We have a scene in the Nick Chopper flashback where we see the old woman making her deal with the Wicked Witch of the East. Since the flashbacks are all location we knew this would have to be too, but we struggled with the where.

One day a couple weeks ago I was driving out to an appointment I had down here, and not being a local I had my GPS guiding me. It took me a weird route and along the way I saw this amazing cemetery on a hill, with a bunch of great dead oak trees in a circle at the top. I thought, "man, that would be an excellent place to shoot a movie," but I never thought it would be ours until we were spitballing places to film this sequence.

Sean and I met Marie, our resident witch actress and make-up survivor, at Norm's around five o'clock. She got into costume and then he got her all made-up, and we headed out to the location. Which we DID secure permission to film in, by the way. We weren't about to guerrilla a graveyard. We also brought with us a few extra goodies Norm had prepared earlier.

Top o' the Hat To Ya!

Today saw some additional green-screen photography, though of material less necessary than the Dorothy/Toto interaction. Indeed, this was for footage we already had in the can, as we reshot Oscar Diggs' final scene.

A few weeks prior to filming with Curt Rose in November we had ordered a fancy top-hat online, for use as part of his costuming. What we neglected to take notice of was that the company was located in the UK and shipping times were vaguely horrifying. Which meant the hat failed to arrive in time for our Oz shoot. Not sure about a reshoot situation with Curt, we went ahead and shot the scene without this element. We were never satisfied about the scene's lacking in top-hat, however, so it always lingered at the back of our minds. Fortunately, Curt was agreeable to a reshoot. Which is kind of a big deal, because he had to shave his face and head all over again.

Not that the look doesn't suit him.

Guy came through, and today we managed to capture a little extra bit of texture for the film. It's a small, seemingly unimportant detail, but it adds a great deal to the movie for us. For one, it breaks up the monotony of Oz's wardrobe and adds to his general facade in his farewell of the Emerald City. For two, it's an additional piece of Denslow that we were missing.

For three, it's damn classy.

After we finished with the reshoot of his farewell, we also captured a few safety elements of Curt to grease the edit if necessary, like we've done with all other characters. As we were doing a time-sensitive location shoot outside after we finished with Curt the first time, we were never able to capture those previously. Once that was finished we shot one other little non-Oscar piece on the green-screen, since we were there and had the time.

And the gingivitis.

More on that as it develops...

Interactivity

And today we were back in the green. Screen. Room. Which was... okay. Turns out sets are way more fun. Locations not as much, with the weather and the noise. But I digress. Once more we have a unit rented at Storage 2000 with our green-screen set up within, and today we captured some small pieces that the film had been sorely lacking.

When we filmed with Mare in 2009, we couldn't get ourselves a Toto. We tried to track one down before we finished filming Dorothy, but to no avail. We were only able to locate one Cairn, and its owners didn't understand the extremely low budget nature of the film and requested that a ridiculous contract be drawn up. We politely declined and instead gave Mare a green stand-in to handle, keeping physical interactions between Dorothy and Toto to an absolute minimum.

Because you can't get this out of a styrofoam ball.

Our regular readers (if such a thing can exist here) will know that last year we found and filmed the perfect Toto; Wiley. We spent a day getting all his green-screen shots, and his owner Glenda has brought him out for two of our location shoots so we could have Toto present with minimal hassle. Today we brought him, and our Dorothy stand-in Carrie Minter, over to the green-screen for one last round of photography.

Carrie's an 18-year-old Marine, but she's tiny, actually probably a little smaller than Mare was in 2009. She's been our stand-in for certain pieces of our Kansas shoots, as you can see in this video and will see more of later. This was the first time we've had her on the green-screen, to get some shots that we've needed for four years.

Only one of these two has multiple close-ups in the movie. Hint: It's the one with the chauffer.

Mostly the day consisted of Carrie holding Wiley under her arm from various angles. There were a few specific actions that we needed to get from him though, like him struggling and then jumping out of her arms. You know what that was for. Wiley was a trooper and we got everything we needed to fill in our little gaps. Then we stepped outside and grabbed a couple more pieces.

Literally?

First we got some foot shots of Dorothy that also featured Toto, then Wiley took off and we snagged a few more with just Carrie. I had six shots from early in Dorothy's adventures of Oz that were close-ups of her feet in the grass, and the prospect of handling them in CGI was making Drew feel like crying. Exact quote. So we reshot all those in the grass outside the storage unit. So. Magical.

It's like something out of a fairytale.

And that's all she wrote. Or he, all he wrote. Stop mixing your genders up, Clayton. It was a short day, but we accomplished everything we needed to and are officially finished with Carrie and Wiley. And actually Dorothy and Toto, by extension.

Baum Idea: Resurrect Dead in the Land of Oz

So apparently I only post on religious holidays now or something. Whew, been a while I know. Please don't mistake the silence for a lack of activity on our part. There's actually been quite a bit going on, but some of it's not exciting to write about, some of it I can't write about, and some of it's being covered in our behind the scenes web-series Creating Kansas. In case you didn't know about that one. Latest episode is here, you can find all the previous ones on our Youtube channel.

We're rounding the bend into post-production, and with that comes some tasks that I'll be perfectly happy to blog about, so we'll be back to updating regularly here. The past couple of weeks have been occupied mostly by Kansas, which I'll save for the videos, but there was a bit in there that I can get into. So without further ado let's dive in.

You saw us filming in the field on the 26th in that recent video, but what that DOESN'T show is that before we all went out into the mud, Doug and I got up to a little ADR session. I edited the farmhouse scene that we shot on the 24th so I would have it in time for his final shoot, so we could go through and rerecord all his audio. It was his first experience with the process, and I think he had a good time retooling his performance after the fact.

And without hair glued to his face.

But that wasn't my only voice recording for the day. Some days I get stuck cleaning junk out of a rickety old schoolhouse, but some days I get to spend an hour discussing the script with a beautiful model. No points for guessing which days are preferred. Elizabeth Saint came down from DC for an hour to provide the voice of the Lady Oz. She had prepared by devising multiple voice options, which we went through, mashed together, and pulled a performance out of.

And without hair glued to her face.

Always in the background we've got visual effects work going on. Whether it's modeling, developing simulations, compositing, or even certain administrative tasks. Here's an in-progress collaboration between Drew and myself. Book fans can probably figure out where this one's headed.

Obviously a rap battle.

We've got a bunch of shoots and recordings lined up for next week, so expect to see updates here semi-regularly. Norman Rowe's been getting himself prepared for a shoot that will take place at the end of the week.

Getting prepared as only he can.

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?

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.

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...

Nice Diggs

So today was super-productive. Heavy on the great, light on the terrible. Despite the subject matter. You may remember that in my second weekly update I mentioned auditioning Curt Rose. I didn't tell you what part he'd be getting, though some of you probably guessed. But if it wasn't clear then, his reappearance with a shaved head should be a dead giveaway now.

"Is it Lex Luthor? I think you guys might not be doing this right..."

That's right, today we finally knocked out our biggest missing chunk; Oscar Diggs, the great and terrible Oz himself. We got an early start at 7:30 this morning, which was actually a half hour later than it was supposed to be. We had more packing to do than we had time-budgeted for. But it didn't phase Curt, who met us at the storage facility and was very enthusiastic about getting started as quickly as possible.

And also vaguely threatening.

We spent the first half of our five hour block working on a single scene. This was the moment when our heroes discover Oz for what he is. It's a massive dialogue sequence with five characters, and between Dorothy, Scarecrow, and Oz it's now been my least favorite scene to shoot three times in a row. Curt was a trooper during its filming, though, having to spend the entire time huddled on the floor.

In contrast, my favorite stuff was by far the three scenes in which he gives the Oz trio the things that they think they want. Curt logged a lot of prop mileage in that one. My favorite prop didn't even completely exist until last night. That being a creation of Sean's, which he dubbed "Mega-Chester." What is it, you ask? Our frequent readers may well guess. It's an unholy monstrosity, a plus-sized version of the original Scarecrow puppet.

Here's a taste. That is entirely too much head.

Why do we need this behemoth when we already have the existing puppet? Well, Dorothy is being scaled up in the movie, to give the appearance of an Oz populated by little people. Since Dorothy interacts with the puppet, that means she's the only human he's to scale with. But not the only human he needs to interact with. In order to ensure that the grown-ass men who need to deal with Scarecrow look to scale, we were gonna need a bigger puppet.

We didn't just use it with Curt, either. Once we finished with him at 12:30, we went over to Lloyd Adams' property. He's the man who's allowing us to use his one-room schoolhouse for Kansas photography. But he also has a barn that was perfect for our needs today. We used it to knock out part one of the Scarecrow flashback, featuring our dashing day-players; writer Sean Gates and poster artist Jeremy Bertz.

"That sure is a purty mouth... That you painted..."

This shooting flowed smoothly, especially considering that it's one take that lasts about a minute, and has a lot to choreograph. Once that was wrapped, we did one of the silliest things we've ever done. We pulled off the highway and guerrilla-filmed Sean and Jeremy in their ridiculous costumes in the middle of an empty field. We don't actually need it for the movie, I just wanted to publicly shame them.

All-American Chopper

Today the time came for me to pay for my sins. For so long I have teased Sean and Steve about looking ridiculous, and now my own time has come. Today we filmed my little cameo, a non-speaking role as one Nick Chopper, the original human form of the Tin Woodman. And it was a pretty awesome day. Maybe one of my favorites.

For reasons that may become apparent later.

Yes, that is location imagery you're seeing. I knew I wanted to do something stylistically different with Scarecrow and Woodman's flashbacks, but I was never really sure what. Grading them a heavy sepia wasn't going to cut the mustard. After discovering the Yaglas and their multi-home property, an idea began to form. Like the Kansas scenes, the flashbacks would all be location. That way the fantastical, stylized Oz we have is only present when we're experiencing scenes through Dorothy's eyes. To the people who live there, it's just as mundane as Kansas is to Dorothy.

But with more whimsicality and less soul-crushing depression.

The Yaglas kindly agreed to let us use their property again, and we were allowed access to another lovely period house they have. That takes care of one crucial element of the shoot, but Woodman's tragic backstory is nothing without a Nimmie Amee to woo. Which meant we got to spend part of the afternoon with a newcomer to our production; the effervescent Tina Cody. She graciously drove down from DC to spend a couple of hours performing the small role of Nimmie.

And at least half that time working around my screw-ups.

After we filmed her two short scenes, we bade Tina farewell, and Sean and I took to the woods for an equally important, but far less satisfying, round of footage. That being the montage in which Nick Chopper dismembers himself, limb by limb. There was an initial awkwardness inherent to the fact that I was framing shots with and directing myself, which I learned today isn't a super-terrific process, even with the help of a friend. There was also the whole limb-loss thing...

When in doubt, go method.

I had to don the chromakey green suit under my Nick Chopper wardrobe, and reveal it bit by bit as we slowly worked our way through my body parts. Each time a new limb presented itself, we had to break so Sean could cut tape markers for me to apply to the suit for tracking purposes. To facilitate the placement of CGI Woodman limbs. It's also difficult to figure out physically workable ways with which to dismember yourself with an axe.

It was slow work, and these short bits ended up taking more time to shoot than the earlier scenes featuring minor dialogue and three characters, (Nick, Nimmie, and her mean old boss). But both shoots went quite well and we got a lot of footage I'm pretty excited by. Most of which is more or less done right off the bat. Which is just oh-so nice.

Tomorrow's going to be another busy day, so I'll be giving you another in-depth report, skipping the weekly update.

The Gart's Filthy Lesson

As I mentioned on Saturday, we were filming Gart today, back when today was still Sunday. Today's technically Monday now, but it's still Sunday to me. We left for Fredericksburg at 2:30 and didn't make it back until nearly 11:30. Hence the lateness of this posting. That's a fairly lengthy shoot period for us, but it wasn't too bad considering we knocked out all six of Gart's scenes.

And also a quick music video for 90's MTV.

I keep saying Gart like everybody should know who that is, but you don't. I should explain. A lot of the Witch's motivations are conveyed through her thoughts in the book, and that doesn't really work for a movie. So Sean gave her a Winkie Captain sidekick to bounce dialogue off of, allowing us to actually know what's up with her. As the film progresses, we learn that he's quite a reluctant sidekick, and he ultimately ends up serving as an ally to Dorothy.

Because who wouldn't trust THIS face?

As mentioned previously, Gart is played by the performer behind Scarecrow (literally), Steven Lowry. It was fun to get the chance to work with him in a scenario where he could actually make eye contact with me and operate at regular human speeds. And it was good to have him for our first storage unit victim, as it allowed us to work out all the first-time kinks with somebody more understanding than a relative stranger.

"So Clayton, just a little note for the next time... Maybe keep the pants on, yeah?"

Filming was mostly quite simple and uneventful, primarily a lot of dialogue. There were some fun bits, though. For one, we shot his last three scenes first, and his first three last. The eagle-eyed among you may be able to pick out the picture in which Steve is not sporting the stubble he grew for the part. After we shot the last three scenes, he went and shaved his face for the first three. This allowed us to show the passage of time after the Witch's death, without actually having to wait for... time.

We also shot a few specific actions, such as the Cap of Quelala presentation. You saw half of it in this raw frame, with Sean standing in for Gart and handing the cap off to Mare. This time Sean got to step into Dorothy's silver shoes and receive the cap from our actual Gart. A little bit of morphing or whatever trickery Drew prescribes will grant us a hopefully seamless hand-off.

I don't have a joke for this one, I just want to point out how HARD they appear to be concentrating...

And that's really about it. Gart's now in the can, which is nice. He represented one of the more sizable parts we had left to film. But not the MOST sizable. That one's in the late planning stages, so look for some juicy deets on that bad boy sometime in the near future.