Seven years, no itch

Today, Monday, Amy and I will have been married for seven years and together for a total of fourteen. The realization of just how lucky I am – how lucky we are – keeps hitting me with odd regularity. It’s pretty amazing, actually, these days, that anyone can stay together as long as we have. We have our problems—everyone does—but we’re still very much a team in all respects. I know that I love her more now than I did when we first got together.

With everything that’s been going on lately—between filming Abattoir and preparing for Genghis Con II—we almost forgot that our anniversary was coming around again. We actually had to consciously schedule some time to just celebrate!

While I waiting to pick her up, I’m sitting in the little house in Mount Oliver—Sheridan’s safe house/High Stakes house—capturing the footage we’ve shot so far. I’m only going to get through 4 of the seven hours, however, as I’m teaching myself Final Cut as I go along. So far, I’d say 95% of the footage is gorgeous and usable as it is. There will be some necessary color-correction down the line, of course, and I’m still deciding if I should throw a Magic Bullet filter on it to give it a more saturated feel, but aside from that, everything is coming together very well. Once I get all this into the computer, I can start editing and seeing how it’s all going to come together.

We shot all weekend again, starting with Sheridan’s fight with Pris on the stairs of the Bathory house. Pris is being played by Alyssa Herron (Severe Injuries) and she’s all tall and graceful in the role. And by “tall”, I mean a full foot taller than me. So when Amy instructed her to attack me all out, she did, and I had a difficult time staying upright and finding the necessary leverage to keep her from knocking me over. So that fight will look cool, anyway.

Rachelle Williams (The Take-Away Spirit) ended up being able to come down at the last minute—we weren’t completely expecting her due to schedule conflicts, but she turned out to be a hell of a trooper and faced the PA Turnpike with aplomb to arrive and shed her clothes for us as “Carlotta”. She and Pris end up seducing and killing “Mr. Price” played by Nic Pesante (who provided a bit of nudity himself, actually, so no one can call us sexist as far as this movie goes!). And you have to truly admire a pair of actresses who can just start making out with each other on film after only having just met about an hour before. (That goes for Stacy and Zoe from last week as well!) Fortunately, I’ve known Rachelle longer than I had Zoe, so I was a little more comfortable with the directing this time out, i.e. ‘Put your hand there, kiss that, lick there…’

Don Bumgarner provided some truly gruesome effects for this scene, including an eye-rip and a leg that had been made to look like the girls had gnawed it to the bone. This will be the first vampire movie (that I can recall) where the vampires actually play with their food! It’s actually pretty gross, to tell the truth.

Saturday was a bear, though, in terms of scheduling and getting everything done before people started to pass out from exhaustion—particularly Amy and me. But by the end of the day, we’d shot a good dozen pages and four sequences (including pick-ups from the previous week).

Sunday was fairly easy, truth be told. It was more a pick-up day than anything else. The longest stretch involved a three-page dialogue scene between Bill Homan and Steve Foland and that was hammered out in about an hour. All in all, we did more hanging outside and just talking than we did working. For a change. Not surprisingly, the first weekend Tim and Charlie were available to pitch in, we didn’t have anything for them to do. Tim did bring us a big box of Gross Movie Reviews books. And a pair of gold sticks to get rid of our flies. He’s good that way.

So with this weekend behind us, we have a grand total of four days left on the schedule—okay, six with pickups. Of course, these next four will be nearly impossible to finish with everyone’s busy schedules… But at least Abattoir will be finished in the same year it was begun… unless I just jinxed myself by writing that out loud.