Post-filming recovery

It's after midnight and I'm still capturing footage. I spent a good deal of the day, on and off, sifting through hours of video shot this weekend. Our first production weekend on Splatter Movie went very well, if I do say so myself. We had at least three cameras rolling at any given time so there's a lot to go through. Too early to tell what's gold and what's garbage, so I'm allowing myself to be generous with the longer takes here. Of course, my hard drive space is going to be eaten rapidly at this rate, so I will likely be judicious later.

Saturday was a "getting to know you" day. There were a couple of folks - like our brand new PA Jordan and Nic Pesante's paramour, Catherine, not to mention effects artist du jour Eric Molinaris and make-up artist Lorena - with whom we'd never worked before, and at least one - 2nd Camera Jon Wamsley - who only Amy and I had worked with (on I Spit On Eli Roth - as detailed in Sirens of Cinema #8, on sale now!). So it was a good day for everyone to get acquainted and re-acquainted and especially to check out the space.

The Hundred Acres Manor is growing. Production Designer Ethan Turon is putting together new rooms for the upcoming season, so he and his crew were working while we were scouting locations and just running amok and exploring.

Sunday, Debbie Rochon came down to shoot a couple of pretty intense scenes for Tesseract, the movie-within-the-movie that Amy's character, "Amy Lee Parker", is directing. That's the stuff capturing now in the next room (it's always best if I go do something else when I capture so I don't sit on top of the Mac as its working) and it just looks gorgeous. Jeff Waltrowski, our man-about-town from Hero Headquarters, lit both her scenes nearly single-handedly and the colors are just amazing. Amy decided that the Tesseract footage should be very Argento-esque, with the frames filled with color while the actors themselves would be lit with white light. So the reds and blues and greens in these scenes just pop throughout.

Amy and Debbie have a scene together that will actually be Tesseract's climax - very bloody and very stylistic. I'm really happy with what has been captured, even though I'm only about halfway through the tapes that have been shot (like I said, at least three cameras at some point. Five was actually the record). If I don't get this stuff logged before the next shooting date, however, I'll start to backlog and that just won't be good. However, at this rate, we'll be sifting through at least five hours of video for every weekend we shoot.

If you want to see a very brief tease, we posted Amy Lee Parker's first video blog over on the Tesseract myspace page. You'll have to join as a friend, of course, to see it. Trust me, there will be more coming.