Abattoir is a wrap... well... principal photography anyway...

Yep, we wrapped principal last Saturday. Thanks to our new Associate Producer, Mike Scarfo, we got to shoot in the Smiling Moose on the South Side. We had four scenes to get through, two of which we had brought down Zoe Hunter to finish out her role as "Jess". We figured that we'd be there all day and even arranged to hold our wrap party in the newly-modeled upstairs bar around 8pm. We began production at 9:00 am...

Around noon, we had one sequence left to go.

Even stretching things out and getting more coverage than usual, we were still going to finish up around 3pm. Even breaking for lunch and taking LOOONNNG breaks in between. We'd never been that ahead-of-schedule before. We shot some of our best-looking stuff; everything was cool.

Which wasn't how the weekend started off... our hectic Friday culminated in my getting stuck in a gay pride parade in Oakland while trying to pick up Zoe at her hotel. I was gay for about three blocks until I managed to turn left and go straight again. We arrived at my parents' place to shoot a poor-man's-process car scene only to realize that I'd left my XLR cable 50 miles away at Waynesburg. Fortunately, I had our GL-1 and it's crappy external mike (that managed to fuck up High Stakes the last time we used it...), so we actually had to do old-school double-system! (Using the GL and the external mike in the car; shooting the visual with the XL2, synching up with one of the actors clapping their hands as a visual slate... *sigh* Hardcore filmmaking!)

But Saturday went without much of a hitch. We went back and hung out at Zoe's air conditioned hotel for a while then returned to the bar to get rip-roaring... celebratory.

So save for two pick-up days, we're done. Done, done, done. We have a 75 minute assembly right now, figure two minutes of gore to insert, another five minutes to shoot with our "special guest" and three minutes of a title crawl - we'll have an 85 minute movie. Hell yeah!

Now, I'll leave you with these links: Fangoria running our new press release. Complete with new and exclusive pictures!

The Deadpit reviewed our Severe Injuries on their radio show (about 1:40 minutes into the show).

And JimmyO gave a shout-out to our upcoming Genghis Con II: The Wrath of Con. 'Cause he's awesome.