Updates!

A lot of stuff has happened since last week.

We had a really great meeting with our makeup department. There's going to be lots of cuts, bruises, rashes (eeewww) and blood! We've got another meeting scheduled for early next week to do some camera tests with the various types of blood we will be using.

We've had 5 more practices with Danny and I'm happy to report that we've got the fight down to a science now. Most of the sequences are blazing fast and look really cool. The three man fight sequence looks like it's going to chew up between 2 to 3 minutes of screen time, which trust me is more than enough. The fight is so rigorous that we need to take breaks after 4 full run throughs. However I might be short changing our stamina because this is based off of doing the run throughs after 2 hours of practicing.

Had some more camera tests at the actual warehouse location. To get slightly technical for a minute, we were worried that the florescent lights were going to give a strobe effect and that we were going to have to drop a lot (I mean a lot) of money on Keno's. Turns out after some tinkering with the camera we can avoid all that flickering. This is good news on several fronts, mainly it means I can save $$$ on those particular lights and put it towards some other toys.

We also shot some test plates for Nils, our visual effects guy. This will help give him some footage to practice with so we have a better idea of how to shoot this stuff on the day. I must say, adding visual effects shots to a film is very challenging process and I can see why old school directors want to avoid it at all costs!

Nils is also doing up some pre-viz animatics of the warehouse explosion sequence. Which is going to be a great help figuring out if the shots we've come up with will work out properly, or if they need some tweaking.

Props department is building a really cool bathroom sink for an elaborate shot that we came up with. It involves water, blood and face dunking. I'm really excited to bang this shot out (on the schedule, it's the very last thing we do) We're testing out the rig sometime at the end of the week.

We also did a photo shoot with Rebecca which was slightly awkward (on my part) and fun! We need couples photos so we can put them throughout the house, so Bjorn, Davin, Rebecca and I went to Kits beach. I was stupid and brought white (I'm super pasty compared to pretty much everyone else on the planet) and was pinging off of everything. I'm a bit rusty (putting it lightly) doing non-Gradual Upgrade interacting with other actors and felt slightly intimidated when we started. There's some really awkward shots in the bunch, however for every billion shots that Bjorn took, there's a fairly good one where my face hasn't ruined the shot (I'm a terrible picture smiler, which is why you see the grm/serious face on most of my photos)

Jim is pretty much cast. Had a great audition with a guy who can bring the intensity up to a trillion if he wanted to. Can't wait to get him in the same room with Rebecca!

Overall, things are coming together quite nicely.

Will update again when I find some time.

Travis