Things That Make You Go Boom!

So the locations are sorted and the days are scheduled, I still had a whole lot of other stuff to sort out and it wasn’t nicely compartmentalised like these blog posts. All of pre-production happened in an incoherent blobs of panic, enthusiasm, genius and happenstance but something’s worked out nicely. I got introduced to the friend of a friend who did make-up. Not only was she really good, but after only 5 minutes of me frothing at her in a pub she came on board. Mark’s already posted photos of Sarah’s work on this blog so I don’t get the honour, but go and check them out, they rock!

With make-up effects sorted I had one less thing to worry about, the next pressing matter was CGI. Peeps over at Beacon were still muttering about the fireball. I could talk the talk, but could John walk the walk? We had a brief chat about the fireball, John’s first question ‘…But what if I can’t do it?’ I had no doubt he could, but we needed a test. Digging around in his archives John found some crappy old video footage from an LRP event a number of years previous. A simple shot of some people running down a corridor with guns, it was perfect. A couple of days later I received an ecstatic email from John full of smillies and a small video attachment. I played it and my jaw dropped. He’d done it! A beautifully blossoming fireball raising up from behind the runners and overtaking some of them! I played it again, then again, pausing it, trying to catch John out. It was perfect. I posted it to the Beacon Yahoo group and the muttering stopped. I posted a couple more things, then I got a telling off for spamming the group. Mental note, musn’t post stuff to the group in future unless I’m trying to sell a sofa. You wanna see the test footage? Ok but only if you promise not to tell me off for spamming!



On the plus side Beacon have now set up a specific writters room yahoo group, which is set aside for discussion relating to the show's production. It's very useful and I've posted numerous times and not been told off. Only people who want to be bothered by regular posts about the shows production join, so I'm not annoying any of the more casual members. Which is good.

CG sorted and on to costume, which was the easiest thing of all to sort. A dig round in the walk in cupboard, and a little chat with a nice chap called Ed and voila costume for zombies. Nicely divided in to 3 sub-sets, flecktarn camo and SAV’s for security zombies. Boiler suits and hi-vis jackets for mining zombies. Shirts, ties, lab coats and ID holders for admin/scientist zombies. The principle cast who weren’t regulars got Tac gear and shooters. Dickey even went above and beyond the call of duty by acquiring a truly horrific Hawaiian shirt to complement his body armour. Kind of makes me regret killing his character first. The final piece of costume was a plaster. A bog standard garden variety plaster. With the exception of 1 scene this plaster would be a principle characters costume for the entire shoot. How much trouble can one little plaster cause? Well I’m labouring the point - that should be some indication.

As for the props; mostly shooters, well we just have those lying around the house. John built a fantastic little glowy thing to use as the ‘Bloodhound’ A little tracking gizmo with some relevance to the script. A large bag of cash was also required as that had significant relevance to the plot. Finally a baseball bat, every zombie show needs one of those (or the stalwart English equivalent the cricket bat) and it just so happened that a friend had a rather beautiful LRP safe one kicking around. Picking it up a couple of days before the shoot I found that it had deteriorated quite badly. At the last minute I almost pulled it for a real bat, luckily I didn’t, but that’s a production story!

Of course while things were going well in some departments, other things weren’t shifting along as sweetly as they should have…

History Matters

So Today is Tuesday the 17th of October 2006. An absolutly bog standard, boring, nothing happening today day. For that reason the National Trust has chosen it to be the day recorded for their 'one day in history' scheme. The idea is simply, a couple of weeks back they started a campaign, mostly aimed at bloggers, to get them to create a diary of day to day happenings in the uk. Once compiled the completed book of diary entries will be bunged in the British Libary for future generations to marvel at. So I figured what the hell, I'll give it a go.

Now It can't have escaped the attention of anybody who actual reads this blog, but as a matter of course I generally only post about stuff that happened some months previous. So I won't be posting that blog entry right now. On the bright side I've got a blinding post for some time in April 2007 already sorted!

Is this a post? Only if this is a question?

OMG another post and it’s only been 6 days since the last! It couldn’t possible be on topic could it?

OMG IT IS!

Ironically pre-production wasn’t as fraught as I thought it was going to be, that’s not to say it wasn’t fraught. I just imagined it’d be worse.

The one thing which kept coming back to haunt me was locations. These days Beacon has a purpose built studio in Steve’s garage. It’s warm, it’s dry, it’s sound proofed. It has fixings for lights, power and it's conveniently close to steves house and supply of nice warm tea, but it’s small. Now I wanted to start off spooky and atmospheric then devolve into B movie action. In principle action is easy to do. A person sprinting down a corridor with a gun is action (in principle, obviously there is a bit more to it than that). Now put a director, camera man, sound man, and a couple of actors in the studio and you have just enough room to open the door. If the crew get real friendly the actors have enough room to take a couple of steps. No one’s going to be sprinting, for that you need to head out on location.

As an aside, Beacon’s current mission is to improve the studio. Actually having a dedicated studio in the first place was a huge leap forward on the old days of filming in Steve’s front room (read about it here) Storage space for some of the equipment currently stored in there has been found elsewhere (should increase space by around 20–25%) A wide angle lens has been purchased for one of the cameras, meaning the actors don’t have to all stand shoulder to shoulder to be in shot. Finally a grant is being sought to replace the carpet and generally tart the place up a bit, all of which goes a long way to further improving the studio’s functionality.

But I digress. A distinct lack of sprinting action! Luckily I had a lead on a pretty darn good location. Then due to the pure serendipity of being shifted to first show in the shooting order, I got a shoot at a mind blowingly AWSOME location! The change of schedule caused the Lazarus shoot to clash with a game of ‘Contact’ (a military style LRP game played with airsoft guns) that myself and a couple of my co-conspirators attend every so often. I was gutted I was going to miss a game of Contact, but hang on. The contact games are run in an actual ex-government nuclear bunker. I fire off an email to Dean the organiser to see if he is receptive to the idea of piggy backing a shooting ‘day’ off of his event. He is, I still need to talk to the site owner, but Dean’s going to put in a good word for me. I take the idea to producers. They’re not really keen. While they agree that it is indeed an arse kicking location they’re worried about the distance, and they don’t particularly like my crazy plan of spending the night. But they green light the idea. I approach the Owner and he strikes a deal with me. It’s the most amazing deal in the whole world. I will never get offered so much for so little ever again, as long as I live!

One location in the bag, on to the next, which proves to be a lot trickier! You’d think a sit run by a local councillor would be pretty receptive to a local not-for-profit group, and to be honest I suppose he was. He offered me a good deal on the site hire, but compared to the one I’d just got he was after a monstrous amount of money. Scheduling this site would give me no end of headaches before principle photography began. Eventually I managed to arrange hire on a day actually in the five week schedule, unfortunately it wasn’t a Sunday. Now this caused some issues as it clashed with some peoples work, but that’s an entirely different story. So say hello to Fort Widley a Napoleonic fort built to keep people out of Portsmouth. It has been suggested that it was really built to keep people in Portsmouth, but that’s never been proved.

All that was left to get now was to get some woods and arrange a set or two to be built in the studio. Easy! Of course there’s a whole lot more too pre-production than that, but my generation X attention span is kicking in, and I need to go and eat some sugar based products dripping in E numbers!

Pre-production coming soon... Maybe!

My I haven’t updated this for ages, despite much badgering from Mark (posting some photos is his idea of a subtle hint) So what have I been doing when I should have been slaving over a hot keyboard? Well first off I was slaving over a hot keyboard, just not writing stuff to go here. Some brainiac had the idea a few months back to create a brand new unit for Renewal, one of the largest LRP games in the world. What seemed like a good idea for a handful of people to do snow balled beyond our wildest expectations. We turned up at the event with the largest unit in our faction. What can I see everybody loves tri-corn hats and long coats. Anyway since allegedly it was muggings here idea, I ended up writing nearly all of the unit background and fluff, which Pete is deligently posting to the web (along with pretty pictures) whenever he gets spare time. Check it out here.

Admittedly after that I spent a month being totally slack but the next post is on the way. Admittedly it’s on draft 6 and I’m still not happy with it but post it soon I shall… Promise!