Tuesday, June 06, 2006

Nature and the unnatural

Yesterday, I'm in the kitchen, making dinner (steak, coincidentally enough) and I see a large grey animal with a long swishing tail amble past the window. I'm used to seeing deer use our land as expressway, but this was bigger than a deer. So I go outside to investigate and discover a small herd of at least ten cows hanging out in my yard. Yes, we live in cow country. And sheep country. But I own neither and am not used to random stray herds wandering around. One looked at me.

Then the dogs discovered them and moved in, barking their heads off, and the cows took off into the woods. They didn't come back.

Somewhere around here is a very angry dairy farmer.

***

Abattoir news: This weekend, we wrapped shooting the Bathory House set, much to the relief of the house's owner, Ron and Stacy. We finished up numerous random battle sequences and a great deal of "spackling" (shots meant just to fill holes in the film - some people call these "pick-ups"). Very little blood, but a terrific gore-gag involving Ron's head and a thrown knife. We may go back later in July to shoot Debbie Rochon's extended cameo, if Stacy can bear us for one more day (fewer people this time around, Stac'... and Debbie will probablyn not be throwing herself around in mock battle).

It was a big Sheridan day as well, as there were numerous holes to fill with my character during the battle. I wrote one sequence where someone comes out of nowhere and punches me off my feet. Our good friend, Lee Wildermuth (who you may remember from Were-Grrl) came down for the day, with her partner, Ingrid, to take care of some effects and lend moral support. Lee towers over me (and everyone else), so I thought it would be cool if she were my assailant for the scene. We didn't even need to rehearse. She threw a wild punch and I reacted - by sailing across the room. (Ron and Stacy have amazingly smooth hardwood floors... I zipped right past the camera at one point!) It made for an impressive sequence in the assembly.

So now, with this weekend out of the way, we only have four days left. I realize I've been saying that for a while. It seems like we always have four days left. Things kept coming up - Thursday is our last spackling day for Aaron Bernard, Stacy and Alyssa Heron. Then we have a day at a local bar (the Smiling Moose, owned and run by Reggie Bannister's band-mate, Mike Scarfo), a day of gore pick-ups in front of a green screen (as we didn't want to just spray blood all over Stacy's house), and the Debbie day.

Then we can concentrate on editing, scoring and color-correction. (Still looking for a copy of After Effects for Mac... if anyone knows a guy...) I'm still shooting for a completion date of early August here.

***
In all the chaos and despair of last week, I forgot to mention the one cool thing that happened: I got to interview Jon Voight. (Fucking Jon Voight!) He was in New York, in a limo, driving to the premiere of his new movie, The Legend of Simon Conjurer .

At one point, we were discussing his career as a whole, and how he rarely repeated characters. I came up with one similarity and it was a cool one. His title character in the goofy, 1967 superhero spoof, Fearless Frank, was a precursor to his iconic turn as "Joe Buck" in Midnight Cowboy. Voight seemed amazed that I'd heard of Fearless Frank. "Thats funny, isnt it? It IS funny that the silly character, Fearless Frank, would be prophetic and that Id go on to play that guy in earnest later. I was just doing a silly thing and then all of a sudden we go and do it seriously. Wow. That proves that you really do know my career and that you're a dangerous man. Any man who knows Fearless Frank is a dangerous man!

So that made me happy. Read the rest of the review here.

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