1201 Day 6 (part I)

The Queen of Mars in her incoherently hostile T-shirt is gaffing, art directing, and booming. Here she is with Kate Britton and James Edward Becton.

Andrew Langton and Rebecca Kush decant the two sleepers from hypersleep.

Kate Britton, Andrew Langton, Rebecca Kush, and James Edward Becton.

I can't tell you how pleased I am with this gag. Kate's character is supposed to pull on pants and a jacket in this scene, but her going outside the room and doing the same thing in silhouette is just so much more awesome.  

The grooviness of this shot made it so that EVERYBODY had to get a still of themselves behind the plastic. 

Pizza is Better

Ramsey Scott is a better person than we deserve.
Thanks to Ramsey we got a nice Italian lunch. It went like this: finally, Ramsey Scott complained about us always eating Chinese food (after all, we did five days of shooting on Chinese food). So Ramsey insisted on pizza. This meant that today was Italian day. Actually, the pasta and salads were pretty good.
Ramsey is simply saving us from ourselves. And for that we thank him.
Ramsey also took these pictures.

James Becton

James tried as hard as he could to wear these socks. Note that although he's wearing David Ian Lee's hat from Android Insurrection, he doesn't actually wear a hat in this movie.

Andrew Bellware

But then once we had lunch I suppose everyone collapsed. Well, at least the photographic evidence indicates that I collapsed. You might think I was setting up a shot here. Nonsense. I'm just napping on the comfy grating.

Life in the Indy World

After a day of shooting I come home and peel off my clothes to go into the washer. Inevitably I'll have found myself on my back with a camera, lying on a filthy shop floor.
So really, although you see me in exactly the same shirt the next day, it's freshly washed.
I don't like getting my hands dirty. I'm a bit prissy that way. But I'll do whatever I need to in order to shoot the picture. The problem with me getting my hands dirty on set is that I don't want to touch the camera with dirty hands. I certainly don't want to change lenses.

Rebecca Kush

And when we do get latex gloves on set they end up disappearing. We can go through a LOT of latex gloves on a movie. I think I actually prefer the ones with powder although every dentist I've ever met hates the ones with powder.

Sarah-Doe Osborne

 I don't think it's possible we could be happier with our brilliant gaffer, the Queen of Mars. Note that we don't even have a light kit. These are some construction lights and a couple 300W (or 300W equivalent) lamps inside clip lights attached to C-stands. There's actually a florescent on the ground. You can see it in the next shot.

Michael Shattner and Sarah-Doe Osborne.

 The color palate of the costumes really helps too. For various reasons Ramsey Scott's costume design is very easy to light. I dig how one character can be very cool and another very warm. This is partly due to makeup but mostly due to lighting.

Michael Shattner and Sarah-Doe Osborne.

Smash or Trash has an advice column for indy filmmakers. I haveta agree with most all his advice. Although I run into the opposite kinds of filmmakers more often — the ones with an art-house sensibility who want to think they're making something brilliant and by extension never get the movie finished.
There's an interview with Kevin Kangas!
This is my favorite quote:
Your first couple of scripts are going to suck, but you won’t realize it. You’re going to think they’re very good but you’ll be wrong. Write more.

Day 5 on the Prometheus

Sarah-Doe Osborne as Artemis, the android aboard the Prometheus.

 The Le Maitre hazer failed on us today. I can't figure out what's wrong with it. It may have to go in for repairs.

Andrew Langton, Michael Shattner, and Rebecca Kush.

 But we shot the observation deck anyway. These sets are primarily built from pieces of Joe Chapman's sets for Earthkiller (don't tell anybody). We used some high-wattage incandescent and florescent lights slashing in on the sides.

Androids need love too. Michael Shattner with Sarah-Doe Osborne.

 The Queen of Mars was the gaffer and, unfortunately for her, the sound mixer on set too.

We wrapped Sarah-Doe Osborne today. I think that's her eyeliner on the bottom right.

CG

The door to the Prometheus.

Today is the day I'm doing a buncha visual effects stuff. And waiting on multi-hour AfterEffects renders.
This is a working CG door in Blender.

The Hercules

I always figure that I'll need about three times the number of visual effects as I plan. So you'd figure that I'd just plan for three times the number of effects. I don't. But you'd think I would.

Today's excitement is brought to you by Nicolò Zubbini and Sky_D. This is the Hercules weapon. Eventually it gets sucked out that door...

Experiments in UV Mapping

So I'm experimenting with UV mapping. This groovy model came from Blend Swap. The artist is KHUNO362. I applied what we might think of as my default spaceship texture map to the whole thing. The process is somewhat complicated. Honestly, I don't understand it. But I did it anyway.

Could this be the Venom? It could be.

Day 4

We only did 76 takes today. Compared to last Sunday when we did 137 takes that means we're really slacking off. I think we did about 50 takes with sound. Joe Watson was with us today doing sound. We have a... unique way of slating takes which he picked up on right away.

Sarah-Doe Osborne as Artemis in The Prometheus Trap.

Today was very dialog heavy. Call was noon on set and we got everyone on the 7:09 train.

Michael Shattner as Finn in The Prometheus Trap.

Ramsey Scott did a super bang-up job on the costumes on this picture. All these tiny lights and a whole bunch of little gags (like androids having lit-up data ports and such) — it's a whole lotta work. And it's just beautiful. It makes shooting very easy.

Rebecca Kush as Captain Haskin.

 Did I mention how perfect the dog tags are in this movie? It's like Ramsey came up with the single costume piece which represented the visual aesthetic of the entire movie in one palm-sized thing.

James Edward Becton as Cornell.

Today we shot on Jason Birdsall's brilliant cockpit set. I just love this thing. Dig the groovy blue LED panel lights — those are Christmas lights we got off of Amazon.

James Becton.

My favorite moment today was when I was carrying a couple lights from one set to another and the Queen of Mars yelled at me "What are you doing gaffing!"
That amused me ever so.

Rebecca Kush.

I make a joke that I'm really just shooting everyone's Facebook photos but ya gotta admit there are some pretty sweet Facebook pictures in these shots.

Michael Shattner.

We're letting the flares get out of hand. I'm grooving to it. That pattern on Michael's jowl is actually flare from the LED's in the shot — it's not a pattern reflecting up onto him (although that would be awesome.)

Sarah-Doe Osborne.

To see how the day ended click here.

David Frey on Day 3

I'm only now looking at stills from David Frey's camera. He has the Canon T2i which is arguably a better camera than the GH1. Especially now that I'm manually focusing.

Andrew Langton, Michael Shattner, and Rebecca Kush.

The Queen of Mars on sound.

Andrew Bellware directing Michael Shattner in The Prometheus Trap.

Day 3

Today we shot day 3 of The Prometheus Trap. The day was slightly wack in that we had to have people back on the train by 7:09pm when we had a call of noon on set (which turns into 12:30 because we have to make three trips to pick everyone up in the little Honda.)

Andrew Langton as Rhodes, Michael Shattner as Finn, and Rebecca Kush as Haskin, entering the Prometheus.

So we're both a little bit behind and a little bit ahead. It's hard to say exactly. But I'm blaming my producers for the fact that they had to get back to the city early today.

David Frey plays a dead man. 

David Frey came in and shot second camera for us. It'll be fun to color match! Woo. I amuse me.

We also had to shoot some bluescreen.

I have to send stills to our distributor.

I have to sit down with the schedule. Our sets are... different than we thought they'd be up until two days ago.

Michael Shattner contemplates the end of the world.

We shot many pages. I think that starting tomorrow we'll be exactly at the half-way mark of the movie.

Will people thing that Kate Britton (Trent) is an android because of this shot? 

Light, Fog, Crew, Bodybag

I just bought 40 of these tiny LED's. I ordered them on Sunday night and they arrived today (Wednesday).
We're clearly using them everywhere. Costumes, weapons, helmets. It is, apparently, the look of this movie.

We need some anti-fog spray. For space helmets. Apparently baby shampoo is usable too. Nobody is going to spit in the helmets.

Chuck Hartsell of Crewless has a new sci-fi short called "Transfers". Check it out.


TRANSFERS - Teaser from Chuck Hartsell on Vimeo.

We're flopping back-and-forth about cryo chambers or clear body bags. Right now the clear body bags are winning.

North American Deals

The movies Earthkiller by Montserrat Mendez and Android Insurrection by David Ian Lee and Nat Cassidy — even though David and Cassidy used absurd pseudonyms for their screen credits — have North American Distribution.
Yes. They'll be coming out on DVD and VOD in the US and Canada. And relatively soon, too.
I know that for many of our people the most important part of this news is that means these movies will get IMDB credits. ;-)

Prometheus Day 2 (part 4)

Maduka Steady came today to fight direct for us. I always feel safer with him around. The Queen of Mars bloodied up some noses.

Rebecca Kush has been in a lot of bar fights.

Maduka designed a couple nice, simple, safe, and photogenic fights.

The lovely and talented Kate Britton collapses to the floor.

My parents made me take a chocolate cake to set. It was a cake someone had given them. So it was a chocolate cake that was unfortunately very good which was being passed around and around to avoid caloric intake. Luckily our crew is appallingly thin, so they needed the cake.

The delightfully photogenic Rebecca Kush does not always win her bar fights however.

We were handheld 100% of the day. My arms ache like crazy.

Kate Britton peers around a corner.

Today we used various pieces of sets we had around. We also used a couple parts of Tale of Two Cities. Yes, the Broadway show. The sets are being stored at the warehouse. And yes, they did actually tell us we could use them a couple years ago but we could never figure out how. Until today.

Kate Britton (Trent) with absurdly photogenic Fight Director Maduka Steady.

Right this minute I'm not feeling like we want much color-correction in post-production. I don't know what anybody else will say but that's where I am right now.

Rebecca Kush is about to whump you.

The rest of our sets were really hard to put together. And structurally they would have been a lot more sound if only we'd found some clamps to hold them together. Luckily with the length of the lens, the shallowness of the focus, and the number of flares, we didn't really notice that on-camera.

Kate Britton having been whumped.

Prometheus Day 2 (part 3)

So far we're shooting this movie on the GH1 with a Canon 50mm lens at f1.4. That's about the equivalent of a 35mm motion-picture camera with an 85mm lens as far as the field of view goes. I set up a color temperature for the movie but I don't know how to write it down. It's stored as "user 1". I should figure out how to write it down.

Andrew Langton.

The Canons take flares in an interesting way. And we're shooting at 1600 ISO with that camera so wide open so we can get the pretty kick in everybody's eyes. This means that any sort of traditional lighting we might do has to be very subdued unless we just want it to blow right out (which we frequently do).

The Queen of Mars in her own lighting but without LEDs on her.

Michael Shattner. Yeah, we're all JJ Abrams with the flare in this picture, but we kind of like it.

Michael Shattner.

Andrew Langton.

Kate Britton with LED's on her collar. I think she's about to shoot an android here.