Gory Goings-On…
Here’s another bunch of behind-the-scenes set photos from our shoot this past weekend on Long Island. We had a bunch of slayings that the crew had to do makeup for. You can kind of get an idea from the pictures below. Of course we’re not showing them all to you, we don’t want to give away all the goodies we have in store for our viewers!
Gary with a fork in his head–’nuff said!
Gary realizing he has a fork in his head and that he’s laying in a body bag.
Ryan looking a little more demonic than usual–but only slightly more…
Broni with a knife in her chest. Yes cutlery can kill, folks!
There’s a lot more stuff to be shot, including shots where we have to bring in the…blood tubing! That’s all we can say at the moment. I’m looking forward to some arterial spray. (Wow, watch three seasons of Ash vs. Evil Dead and you get so jaded about all this stuff.)
Meet My New Body…
Okay, so it’s not really “new,” and it’s not my body, though as an aside, it would be cool if we could have alternate bodies/”sleeves” to port into like on Altered Carbon. (Who would you port into? Me, anyone awesome like Nikola Tesla, Albert Einstein, Florence Welch, Freddy Mercury.) But the body in question–the one shown below–is new to the blog and to the film it’s being used in: Demon Nun, our new horror film!
Gory George at home…
I call him Gory George, though if it was a girl I’d call it Greta Gangrene or something. I don’t know what they called him in his previous life. Maybe I should get his dental records checked out?
Really gross hands, needs some hand lotion.,,
No stomach.,..,
He’s got a few friends moldering around in the apartment somewhere. Also, my familiar, um, cat Tabitha likes him, as you can see from the pictures. They hit it off right away.
His toenails are sharp! I keep gouging my feet on them every night!
I can’t believe all the crap I fit into this place and neither can my wife. I dunno how she can sleep at night with George and his friends in here. Sometimes you can hear them whispering (or playing cards).
The crowded life of a filmmaker/toy nut/animal lover…
Anyway, he will make his second film premiere in Demon Nun this weekend! Can’t wait to shoot the bastard. I had to open the lens way up just to get a detailed shot of him. He tends to soak up the light. (Also souls, but I digress!)
Shooting with the Saints
On March 24th, we had the pleasure of shooting in a lovely little church in Dyker Heights, Brooklyn. If you ever need a church location for a photo or video shoot, this is definitely a place you will want to check out. Call Andrew Samaha for more info at 917-796-0574.
You can see more pictures of St. Philips here.
CHEAPO DOLLY TRACK
Strangewerks Films’ new high tech dolly track–ain’t she a beaut?
So I have a dolly for my camera. It’s one of those “Glide Gear” systems they sell on ebay. It’s pretty nice for the relatively inexpensive price. The only problem is, I don’t have any track to go with it.
They have a track system on ebay as well, but I didn’t feel like dropping the $150+ for it. So I went down to the Home Depo and bought a 2 X 4 and some plastic pipe (one inch in diameter). Oh, some screws too. Cost me about $18 bucks. I went with one inch because it lifts the glide wheels off the ground a little more, in case you’re shooting somewhere outside and there’s gravel around that could obstruct the wheels.
Unfortunately, I had to do the construction in my tiny NYC apartment, not much room to maneuver around, esp. with curious cats like Madame Sylvia here…,
I had to cut down the pipe to around five feet because I don’t think it would fit in the company SUV if it was much longer. I would’ve liked it longer to provide for more tracking shot time, but at least we got this muich. Maybe I can devise some kind of interlocking pipe system to make it longer…! Mwahahaha! Oh and I only stripped one screw!
It’s crucial to get as much camera movement into your project as you can and not just the handheld stuff. (I’ve had distributors tell me that overseas audiences don’t like the handheld stuff that much.) Getting smooth camera motion into your film is key to making it look professional. Also, it’ll set your film apart from all the other low-budget crap a distributor has to weed through. That and using a boom mic instead of a camera mic! Ditch the camera mic you guys/gals/gender fluid types/whomever is reading this. (Ol’ Max is open to everyone!)
Now, the only thing is, if I want to use this thing for a scene where two people are talking as they walk down the street, I’m gonna have to move it like twenty times to cover the whole scene.
So, if you see some strange guy moving his homemade dolly track down the sidewalk, again and again, don’t make fun of him, he’s just trying to save a few bucks!
Giving Life to Lifeform…
We’re in the midst of creating 3D animations for our film Lifeform. The software we chose was Blender–a free and open-source 3D computer graphics software product used for creating visual effects. Here at our studio we’re doing the animation, lighting and compositing. Modeling and rigging were handled by talented Blender vets Kevin Hayes and Nathan Taylor, respectively. At last count there were forty–odd (and we do mean odd) 3D fx shots in the film, which, while it doesn’t sound like a lot, is a HUGE amount of work, not to mention render time. Currently we’re averaging a day-and-a-half to two days of render time per shot, so you can imagine how long it’s taking to wade through the list. Still, it’s worth it when you see the results… One of the more interesting facts is that you actually output the animation as a series of still images, .pngs, which you then import into Aftereffects, in order to create an entire animation, who’d have figured that? When we designed the actual creature, I was looking to invest attributes from actual creatures in nature, in order to give it a more authentic feel. Some dinosaur plating here, some praying mantis there, a scorpion tail over here… Now we’re trying to emulate some of the physical movements these creatures make in the real world to bring the illusion home.
One tip I would give to any fledgling animators: don’t forget to use the animation curves to smooth out the model’s movements. You can use the bezier tools to make them less “roller-coaster” like–some of mine were looking like the Cyclone at Coney Island before I smoothed them out!
The goal is to finish all the 3D shots in the next few months and then on to color correcting and sound mix! Ugh…
Cyber Brain Machine Props…
Recently I got a call from Drew Bellware at Pandora Machine. For his latest film–starrring one of my favorite actresses–Kate Britton— he wanted some type of consciousness transference device, that would enable a person to download themselves into an android body. Not having one on hand, I was forced to construct said device from scratch–with no time or no real budget–as usual! Fortunately, I had a bunch of vacuum tubes laying around that I’d bought on ebay years ago and never had the chance to use. I love vacuum tubes, they add an arcane tech feel, especially when used in conjunction with new sci fi tech. Just feels French for some reason–there’s a certain “je ne se quois” about it, which means “I would like my croissant toasted and dipped in curdled goat’s milk.” So after a trip to the Depo for parts, I came up with this. Hope you like it:
I had to make two of them, one for the user and another for the android to wear….
We also had to have some kind of control base–which I had no idea for. No clue. As I was wracking my brain and walking down Third Ave, I looked down and saw a big, disgustingly dirty fan someone had unceremoniously dumped in the street–lighting struck. That was what I’d build the thing around! I carted it home, threw it in a plastic bag for fear of BEDBUGS and eventually got around to taking it apart. Threw some parts on it including popsicle molds, a spark plug cleaner, a base from a Babylon 5 doll, some volume control knobs, etc., along with some lights I rigged on the inside and –voila! A conscious transferral device. Looks great in moody lighting, don’t you think?
Tentacle action
Hazzah! Here’s a first-ever attempt at Blender animation on my part. It’s a tentacle that’s going to be used in our feature film Lifeform. (Still in Post!) It’s not perfect, you can see a light panel in back and the thing goes out of sight at the end, but I think it looks pretty cool. I have to thank a number of people for helping me get to this point, including Nathan Taylor, who rigged it, Kevin Hays, who was the modeler and Drew Bellware, who actually told me I had to skin the darn thing with the texture files and showed me how to do it. Couldn’t do it without them and their impressive talents!
Various animations of the tentacle will the composited into scenes with Virginia Logan as she “monsters out” and attacks people with tentacles coming out of her…back–just her back, I swear. What do you think this is? Species?
I wish we had their budget, or Natasha Henstridge. Heck, I’d settle for a 8 1/2 by 11 glossy of H.R. Giger at this point. Probably give me nightmares though.
One neat tutorial I looked at, regarding working with the Cycles render engine is located at Blender Guru. Andrew’s site has many great tutorials wherein he takes his time to actually show you how to do things and he’s a really nice guy as well. One of the neat things about Cycles is that you can use a mesh plane as a light. He says it works better than a regular lamp object, as a light source. So, I used a few planes to light it.
Nate is rigging a few more models for us and I can’t wait to see how great these things animate! Thanks guys!
Here’s my test animation:
Playing With Monster Models…
Below, you can see a 3D Blender model that was created for our new film by Kevin Hays, of the Colorado Hays. Kevin took a few concept sketches that I threw at him and came up with this great design. We really appreciate all the hard work and effort that went into its creation. We’ll be adding the creature to the film shortly, after we have it rigged, then animated, lit and composited…whew! Can’t wait to see this thing wrecking havoc onscreen.
Here are some other views of the creature. We decided to go with Blender after Andrew Bellware convinced us about it. It’s free to download!
Additionally, here are some of the sketches I gave to Kevin…
Kevin’s model will really accentuate all the practical effects we did in the film and take it up a few hundred notches or so. Many thanks Kev!
Tentacles
We’re well into post on Lifeform, halfway through the second edit and just beginning the CG effects work. The first step of course, is getting the actual models. (We’ve decided to work in Blender because it’s a free, open-sourced 3-D animation program.) Below you can see a picture of the silicone stunt tentacle that we actually used on set when strangling any and all recalcitrant actors, God love ’em!
However, we still need shots of the tentacle doing things we couldn’t get an actual physical prop to do, like emerge from a mutant woman’s back, flail about in midair, pour a cocktail, do transwarp drive computations, all kinds of stuff like that, so that’s where a computerized version comes in. Below is a picture of our brand new CG tentacle model, which was created by Kevin Hays, a very talented young blender modeler, who hails from Colorado. Don’t know how he had the time to do this between all the wildfires and shootings, but he did and he did a magnificent job! Once it’s rigged, animated and lit, it will be composited into footage so it can properly terrorize our ensemble.
Babes And Blood on Long Island…!
Not. Safe. For Work–I warned you.
Okay, so in-between actually editing our film “Lifeform,” we’ve been putting together two shoots, for additional scenes. Now, the reason for this, I could say, is to add an additional layer of narrative in order to make the film more complex and add more dramatic depth, but the truth is, I just wanted to add more crazy, blood-curdling monster-lovin’ mayhem! Also more beautiful women. Hey, Shakespeare wrote for the groundlings folks, don’t kid yourselves. There’s more stabbings in his work than the average episode of CSI. You know you love it…I just deliver the goods, okay? So, no mea culpas coming from this part of the neighborhood. But I digress…
Yes, in order to add a denser layer of narrative complexity, we went ahead and sculpted a scalping wound for our aforementioned beautiful actresses’ to wear. You can see a few shots of the piece after it was created and we were in the process of adding hair to the gelatin piece–oh yeah, I cast it out of gelatin, the same stuff Bill Cosby used to sell on TV. The great thing about this stuff is that it’s cheap, it looks good on camera and you can re-melt it in your microwave to use it again. We all had Jello Puddin’ Pops after the shoot!
Here’s the effect on the very talented Tatyana Kot–she’s the new screen queen on the block. Our shadowy beast tracks her down and for some reason feels the need to rip her dress off and then pull her scalp off. Hey, it happened in Macbeth didn’t it? Or was it The Merchant of Venice, I can’t remember… All kidding aside, the scene worked like a charm. Tatyana was a consummate professional and Miranda Kahn, who played the creature did a great job. Both are wonderful actresses! The end effect is absolutely chilli
ng.
The next weekend, we shot more mayhem, this time with Tatyana and Jacklyn Sokol in an earlier portion of the scene, as drunken debutantes on their way home, before the assault. Both women were great and…Jackie got to wear a similar headpiece as well–the beast apparently hates blondes. Who can blame it? Thanks to makeup artist Meraly Lopez and Christine Russo for painting and applying the pieces. Also, thanks to Josh Barbour, for helping me crew the shoot!
We also shot scream queen Christina Wood and Tom Rowen’s sequence. They play a pair of lovers caught in the beast’s crosshairs–just like in Hamlet when…aw forget it…
It’s Alive!
Recently we had the opportunity to create a monster suit for our newest production, Lifeform. The actual application was the culmination of many months of work. First, we started out with some pre-production drawings like the one attached here.
You can see in the illustration that the creature’s head is actually pretty beastial and less humanoid than the final product–due to the fact that we had to fit it to the actresses’ actual face–oh well…!
After deciding on a general look, we broke the design down in our brains–how were we going to end up building this thing and getting it on the actress? We decided to go with a multi-appliance approach–crafting numerous pieces out of silicone or latex and gluing them right on her. There were gloves with claws cast from resin, there were arm pieces that would attach to the top of her arms, there would be a chest piece, a head piece and finally, upper and lower face pieces.
First, I sculpted each and every piece from plasticene, using body casts we had taken of an actress, as the base on which to sculpt them. This took a little while, since there were numerous pieces that were going to be required, but it turned out to be worth it when we saw the final product.
After the pieces were sculpted, we cast them, sometimes in Rebound, in the case of pieces we were going to create in silicone, such as the arms, hands and face, or in plaster, for pieces we were going to create in latex, as a cost-cutting measure. These were the chest and head pieces, which were huge.
We had Anthony Jones, a very experienced mold maker, cast them in Ultracal plaster.(I still don’t know where I’m gonna put these monster molds. They’re doubling as a coffee table and a futon in my tiny apartment!)
Then he slip molded the pieces, creating a top layer of latex by pouring mask making latex #80 in the molds, gradually building up several layers. Once that was done, he created an inner layer of foam to give the pieces shape and definition. He did a great job as you can see below.
After that, Christine painted them, doing a boffo job as usual! She used PAX paint on the latex pieces and FuseFX and Psycho paint, Sil-Pig brand pigments on the silicone pieces. She really brought them to life by painted on a dark base and lighter-colored highlights, as you can see in these pictures.
Finally, the day of truth–shoot day. If anyone really believes making movies is a glamorous past-time, let me shatter your misconception for you. We had to bring the actress in SIX HOURS early, so that Christine and Ciara Rose Griffin, another talented makeup artist, could put it all together and turn the very talented Virginia Logan into a hideous creature.
They painstakingly glued everything to her with Skin-tite and Prosaide, skillfully blending all the pieces together as they went along. It was a torturous process for Virginia to undergo, but she held up like the complete trooper she is!
Finally, here she is, along with FX contacts and monster teeth, wrecking mayhem on the set!
We’ll probably add some CG enhancements to make her even more horrible, twitching tentacles, that sort of thing.
See the gallery below for more pictures of the whole process…
Medical MisAdventures
So Sunday we had a crazy day shooting in Voorhees, NJ at a plastic surgeon’s office. We braved a two hour drive through the pouring rain, Burger King breakfast food and hospital booties (the ones you pull on your feet,okay?) in order to shoot some complicated hospital scenes. 
Also, there was a life signs monitor that Virginia Logan was attached to that keep beeping and telling us she was no longer respiring. I think it was a malfunction because as of today she was still walking around and making lascivious comments! 
Anyway, we made most of our day and then we nearly hydroplaned on a sharp turn into two other cars that had already spun off the road. 
Somehow I was able to channel my mad driving skills and turned into two skids, all the while holding one cup of coffee, thereby avoiding the upset-looking Hindu woman we were skidding towards. 
The gods of filmmaking were with us on the that day, I can tell you! All in all, adventures like this are the thing I like least about filmmaking. Still, it does build nerves of steel, if one survives the ordeal. Indie filmmaking is rarely pretty, rarely glamorous and always an adventure….
Monster Makeup Madness
This past Sunday we pulled a crazy twelve hour shoot wherein we tortured cast and crew not only with numerous takes, but also mucho monster makeup. 
You can see some pics here of the great work that a team of people pulled off the other night. The scenes all involve our heroine struggling to come to grips with her shapechanging, her identity and also why the heck she was on-set until 5 am. I sculpted the face and spikes, along with Christine who also painted them. The very talented Meraly Lopez applied them. Virginia Logan brought the makeup to life! It was a fantastic time and the makeup looked great.
We want to bring as much high-level prosthetic work to the film as possible. More pictures of our great cast, including Peter Alexandrou and Kate Britton, to follow!
She’s Got Legs…?
When we began planning the effects for our new film, Lifeform, we decided we’d try to do as many practical effects as possible–meaning makeup effects, as opposed to computer graphics. There are two reasons for this. First, CG is prohibitively expensive if you can’t do it yourself. Second, computer effects don’t always look as convincing as actually having a creature on set. The problem is, where do you find a creature? Short of journeying to Oz, Ringworld, Narnia, or your nearest recombinant geneticist’s lab, you have to make it. And, because low budget filmmaking means by definition you only have enough money to make your film with a Fisher Price camera and some stick figures, you have to figure out how to make said creature….you guessed it…yourself.
Well, we pretty much knew from the start that we couldn’t afford a full creature suit and quite frankly, such suits can sometimes look pretty “Octaman”-like (look it up, though Rick Baker doesn’t want you to). So the decision was made to show parts of the creature instead. We’d show the legs, some claws, maybe the eyes, but not the whole thing in one shot if we could avoid it. Hey it’s Hitchcockian, keep the mystery, keep people guessing. I think one of the problems with films today is that because they can show anything–say fifty thousand glowing, multi-headed pygmies performing a synchronized swimming routine–they should show it. This is probably why we have the bad films we have today.
When we went to design our creature’s legs, we started out with a few sketches. Here’s one of them. Now, we already knew we couldn’t afford to animate these legs on one of the Victoria Secret’s model, but we could make prop creature legs, ala the ol’ fake Bigfoot footprints gag, have a PA walk them across the screen and walla, instant creature.
From there, we began the build. First, we created a wire armature that we fastened to a board by means of screws and an upright PVC pole and began to sculpt on the armature in wet clay. This is the stuff that you always have to keep moist or it cracks and falls apart. But if it’s too moist, the clay won’t hold the details. 
Also, your rags start smelling like mold after awhile and you begin to hallucinate. I remember visiting the Temple of Mu with Bob Marley and JFK, but that’s another story….
After we’d sculpted the leg, we had Anthony Jones, an excellent moldmaker and makeup guy, cast the sucker. Anthony has a lot of experience in this kind of mold-making so we knew he’d be the guy to tackle the leg. He did an excellent job. It’s a huge two piece mold made of Ultracal and it’s taking up half of the bedroom at the moment, serving as an obstacle to both human and cat traffic alike. (Cat inserted for scale.)
Following that, Anthony cast two legs himself. The final creation has a latex skin and foam interior and also takes up a heck of a lotta room in your typical square footage-challenged NYC apartment. (But hey, what about all the museums and shows one can take in anytime one wants? That makes it all worth it! Oh wait, we’re making a movie, those $200 tickets for Spiderman will have to wait!)
We ran into a major problem because we only cast one leg, I think it was the right one. There’s an inner toe, like a dinosaur’s, in the design, which meant we ended up with two right legs. I wanted a left leg, so I had to sculpt, cast and pour an opposing left toe. Then I had to cut off the right toe and patch that, as well as graft the left toe to the proper spot. It actually turned out very well. You really can’t tell it’s a patch job. (Note to self: next time design a leg with no inner toe.)
Following this, we painted both legs with PAX paint, which is acrylic paint mixed with prosaide. They look great and should prove to be very spooky in the right light. When we go to use them in the film, we’ll stick PVC pipes in the offscreen ends and have a PA walk them past the lens.
Great, we’re done, instant monster!
If only. Things got much more complicated later….
Making Movies 35,994 feet below sea level.
Hi, welcome to a new blog which will deal specifically with a couple of things–micro budget indie film making and monster makeup special effects. I’m going to show the process by which a low budget film is created, in every agonizing detail. You’ll be there as I gripe…I mean “blog” about putting it all together from scratch, with the help of some very talented people…from creating and designing makeup, pre-production of the actual film, post-production, selling the finished product, dealing with distributors, sales reps, etc. It’s film making boot camp and they’re not using blanks, people!
We’ve been in this murky, labyrinth before and sometimes it can seem deeper than the Mariana Trench, which by the way is 35, 994 feet deep, so that’s saying something. Our first film, The Shriven, made it all the way from idea, to script, to finished film, to a DVD that got released in a few territories (some legally, some bootlegged, but that’s another story) and we lived to tell the tale! Attached are the Japanese and the US covers for the film. I don’t remember making the film in the Japanese version, but it looks kinda cool, like an acid trip/Jenna Jameson porno film.
Also, we’ll blog about all the great people we work with on this stuff, because out here in the Bermuda Triangle, we only got each other, don’t ya know!
strangewerksfilms
IN THE WERKS 