June 2nd, 2006: Day 13

 How they look at the beginning of a day's shoot...

June 2

The 76b pickup is on the menu again, after the scenes we have to shoot. I get the early snafu report: Johnny Alonso had a death in the family. He has to go to a memorial service so he’ll have to leave early. We won’t finish his scenes, because some of them are night scenes.

So we hustle up and go to the phone booth between the Pizza Hut and the Wendy’s. It’s hot as balls, but we get the shots, then head off to find a secluded road. (yeah, I didn't pre-scout this...I mean, we're on the eastern shore, so I figured it would be easy to find. Not as easy as I thought)

We shoot a quick scene between Alonso and Lassise, and head back. Luke and Noah go to grab some pizzas.We eat and prepare to shoot 76b.

A storm hits—pouring the rain down on us and muddying the ground. Fuuuuuuuck. Will not work for the scene, as it doesn't rain anywhere in the span of the film, and the film doesn't take place in the tropics.

I do a quick look at the schedule. We have no covered set to go to. We can shoot the Lynn’s basement scene that we’d be shooting tomorrow morning—it will let us start a little later.

We grab all the equipment and go to Frank’s. His wife is there but he gets her to leave before we arrive. Perhaps I didn't mention that Frank is actually now in the middle of a divorce. Try being the star of a movie while producing it as you simultaneously move out of your house, and oh yeah, getting divorced from your wife while you keep your day job.

This no-budget moviemaking thing is EASY, right?

We shoot the scene in Frank’s basement without a hitch—Mun says it’s the first scene he’s really liked. Very comforting, since we've shot a TON of scenes and THIS is the first one he's really liked?

We finish at about midnight. Everyone’s excited to finish early, but I know it’s a false comfort—we owe 76b STILL and I don’t know when they’re gonna kick us out of Tuckahoe. The rest of the cast says they're gonna go find a bar, which sounds great to me but I can't be hungover tomorrow(or any day I'm shooting).

How they look toward the end...

I head back to the hotel and pop Psycho 2 into the dvd player. Man, still such an under-rated movie. Nobody has been able to follow Hitchcock but Holland. Even if that guy had nothing to do with Child's Play and Fright Night, he'd always have that.

Can’t sleep. I surf the internet some more. Finally around 5:30am I fall asleep.

Random Pics from the set

Random Pics, compliments of a disc that Rob Long sent me a long time ago(and I just re-found!). Check out his cool site at: http://smashortrashindiefilmmaking.com/

Zig, Jamie, Jacky and Mun--probably waiting for me to tell them what to do.

Breasty McGee(that's the name she does porn under)

Frank being Action Hero Guy

Clarence McNatt and Lars Stevens

Tom probably telling me to go fuck myself. 

And when Tom tells you something, you do it.

Frank, striking a pose

June 1st, 2006: Day 12

June 1

Late day again. Got a few hours sleep, then got to Tuckahoe early to back up my pics and try to organize the pickup for 76b—the final scene of the film that features Peters versus Shivers.  We shot a wide master the night before, but my shooting script is all fucked up so I tried to clean it up.

Plus, we don't have the bigger lights that we shot the master with--had to return them today. 

We decided to push back the motel scene to another night to finish the 76b—we’re not sure how much longer we’ll be able to shoot at Tuckahoe. The owners are giving us shit.

So first Stull got a trailer to tow the car around in so we could shoot the Jacky/Frank chat in the car. Mun rigged it up, and then I got bad news. A storm was coming—the wind was picking up and a dark cloud was coming. We double timed it, but we couldn’t shoot until night fell since that's when the scene takes place.

We started filming, with Mun riding the front of the car, the camera suction cup mounted to the front. I was inside the car in the back seat making sure the line readings were okay. With the windows up(for good audio) it was hot as shit in there. Turns out that they didn’t even hit record on the first take(which ran about ten minutes)—I was pretty pissed about that.

It started raining during that scene. So much for 76b pickup.

We finished what we could there, but the next scene was at a public payphone. Not in the rain. So I figure we’ll go shoot the motel scene while we can, then go to try to pickup the payphone scene if it stops raining.

We take a skeleton crew to my hotel room and set up. We get the scene and it should look decent—hopefully. Took a while. The other crew get drunk at Tuckahoe, which makes things dicey when it turns out we forgot some equipment and wanted one of them to run it up.

 Only 1 picture for this post, but it's a good one.

I’m sure anyone walking by the room, seeing six guys with a camera, and one woman in a towel—well, you figure out what we looked like we were doing. (rhymes with TORN)

It was still raining, but not too bad so we headed out to a payphone. Set up  one very unmotivated light source(we had no power, so we had to use the inverter) We forgot we needed Peters car—Frank had to go get it. Meanwhile it started pouring.

Frank got back and we shot it real fast. Just said fuck it to my shooting script and shot what we had. Sound is horseshit, so it's gonna need to be looped.

Then we went out to get some other shots that take place in the next scene so the rain shots would match. Peters’ car driving down the deserted road. Set up the camera, wait until no other cars are on the road, and have Frank haul ass toward us.

Then over to Denny’s. An early finish—5:15am. Time to go to sleep.

A little video treat

Here's a brief clip from the "Making Of" FOC2. Enjoy.

May 31st, 2006: Day 11

You know, it's funny to read what I wrote back then.  When you're exhausted and the only thing you want to do is go to bed, it makes for surprisingly candid writing.

The eyes, and then the paint...

May 31

Another day of night shoots. Train shots.

Lot of lighting. Lot of compromise due to the fact that the train is so close to the camp—we had to cheat it all like it’s out in the middle of nowhere. The crew has been slacking the past couple of days. Jaimie doesn’t do much; Mike’s decent if you keep on him. Jared’s the only clear winner—he knows what he’s doing and is assertive.

Luke and Jamie almost get in a fistfight. Jamie says Luke threw a rock at him. Honestly, I wouldn’t mind seeing them both punch each other for a while.

Jared Noe, almost worth a shit

The train stuff runs late because we have to mount the crane on the back of Rob Stull’s pickup truck to get it high enough that it can go in the train’s window. Then a lot of lighting and coordinating.

Then the woods stuff runs late. Getting power out to all these woods locations takes a ton of time, then we have to run through the blocking. It’s the scene where Jacky runs full speed and falls. We used a large sofa cushion for her to fall into, and it looked great. I just have to digitally take the cushion out later.

We get to the final Peters scene late and barely get 10 shots before it’s light.

We go to Bob Evans for breakfast—back at the hotel at 8am.

Slackers...

May 30th, 2006: Day 10

Clarence McNatt as Sunglasses The Clown

May 30

Caught up on some stuff—did Johnny alonso scenes at Frank’s, but the scene takes place in the van—hot as balls out. First real day scene, so we had to have the actors run inside in between takes—the clowns would sweat their makeup off.

Said by to Adam and Tom. Adam’s coming back for the wrap party.

We high tailed it to the field to do the cornfield shots—it’s a totally different location that Frank and I scouted a month earlier.

When we scouted the place it was deserted. A back road with no traffic. Today, it's busy. Figures. We have Rob Stull put on his reflective-striping County jacket and help block traffic. I'm hoping no cops stop by, because it's the wrong county.

Things are going smoother, then Mark reaches for his axe and cuts his index finger. Bad. He bends his finger and the whole slash widens like a mouth. We have no first aid gear. To top things off, some guy pulls up and asks if we have permission to shoot there. I say no. He says he knows the guy who owns the field and he’s called him; the guy’s on his way.

Meanwhile, we’re in his field trying to get a crane shot.

The guy does arrive and I go talk to him. He asks what we’re doing. I say just shooting some video. I say most of it’s from the road—looks very scenic. I tell him we just had one shot from in the field and he asks, “You’re not messing with my corn stalks?” I said no.

Even though Mark walked over about 10 on the crane shot.

Didja notice how Mun always looked bored/tired when I'm talking to him?

The guy leaves. Light is falling. Disaster strikes. Stephanie didn’t bring the rope heads. We have Frank race them up to us. But Stephanie also didn’t bring blood. The stumps of the heads should be bloody. She puts vaseline on them to make them look wet, and we just have to go with it.

We finish just in time. Johnny’s happy to have made a day of shooting.

I take the crew to Burger King as a treat(I know, big spender, right?), then we head back to Tuckahoe to finish last night’s scene where Frank gets hit with the axe.


It came out okay, but the blood effect didn’t quite work. It didn’t spurt so much as leak out onto his shirt.
We wrapped at 4:30am, so I made the trip home. It was fast, no traffic, and I went to sleep for 6 hours.

When I got up I made a dvd of dailies, backed up the files, and came back...

Make-Up Artist and FX assistant Stephanie Petagno and

Production Manager/BTS videographer Robert Ziegler.

May 29th, 2006: Day 9

Shivers does to Luke what many people wanted to do to Luke

May 29

Memorial day. Had a cookout, and it was supposed to be a day off but it turned out we had 2 pickups to do.

My wife and Luke’s wife came by and cooked burgers and dogs, while the rest of us shot the shit and threw a football around.

After the food we sat around and just chatted. Something we just haven’t had time for lately.

We can’t stop laughing about the Johnny firebar thing. We showed the videotape to everyone and they just laugh and laugh.

We hustled over to the fire area to finish the Shivers/Ogre fight. It went okay, but Doug took some of the fx we needed for the Clarence head decapitation. Still, it wasn’t too bad and only took an hour longer than I thought.

We packed up and moved to the small house for the ogre gunfight. Took a little while to set up but we rocked it out pretty quick. Clarence had a good time firing the gun, and then we did the reverse and shot zircs and dust hits at Frank, Tom and Adam.

I shot the ones at Frank and Tom, and Tom kept telling me to shoot right at him. He even got pissed when I said I wouldn’t, so finally I said I would. I even did.

Looked cool.

Adam Ciesielski, Johnny Alonso and Tom Proctor

This is the three amigos’ last night. Said bye to Tom and Adam, they said they’d stop by and say hey before they left to catch their plane.

They’re good guys. Lars took off early, but he’ll be back for tomorrow’s pickup.

I booked myself into a hotel room with my wife. Yee-haw.