Yes, believe it or not, I have finally returned to blog land! So sorry it’s been so long since my last visit. Things have been super busy lately, and, well, I’m also not very disciplined about blogging on a regular basis.
For those of you who have been reading Ed’s blog, you already know that we’ve started shooting. Last night we finished day #11. 20 something more to go. So far, everything is going well (knock on wood). We’ve been making our days, and Ed seems happy with what he’s getting, so really no complains there. I haven’t been watching the footage every day, but what I have seen looks good. Can’t wait until all of you are able to see it.
I’ve uploaded some new pictures to my Flickr account, so head on over there if you want to see them. I have some pictures from day #1, as well as a picture of the Tiny Village set.
I haven’t been on set all that much, so I don’t have many pictures. I have stayed on a day schedule, to deal with business stuff that needs to be handled during the day. I can’t say I’m 100% disappointed to not be working all night! :) I do go to set 2-3 days a week, and stay out there until around 10 or 11 PM. Things are going well for the most part, so not a lot for me to do out there.
We have had a little trouble communicating to some of the crew, as not everyone speaks English, and some who do don’t speak it real well. But, two nights ago we hired a bilingual assistant for Ed, so hopefully that issue will be behind us.
I’ll try to write more, and catch you up on what’s been happening the past month. Until then…
Saturday, October 20, 2007
Thursday, September 13, 2007
Seventh Moon is on IMDb
Hi all. I wanted to let you know that Seventh Moon is on IMDb. Check it out by clicking here.
Sunday, September 9, 2007
You can call me Hung Lo
I now have a Chinese name! Our Production Manager gave Gregg, Ed and I names in Cantonese. I’m Hung Lo (Red Man), Ed is Go Lo (Tall Man) and Gregg is Bak Sing Sing (White Ape).
We had another good week here in ol’ Hong Kong. A big thing that has been concerning Gregg and I is the casting and makeup for the Pale Figures. However, both seem to be going very well so far. We have 10 people cast, and need a total of 17. Hopefully by the end of this week, we’ll have the final 7.
The makeup is also going well. Larry Odien, who was one of the three makeup artists with us on Altered, is now with us in Hong Kong, and is heading up getting the special effects makeup department all set up. He won’t be with us for the shoot, unfortunately, but I think by the time he leaves (October 12 is his last day), we’ll be in good shape. Before he leaves, he's going to make sure all of the local makeup artists on the crew know how to do the makeup as well as he does.
As we cast the Pale Figures, the first thing that Larry has been doing is taking molds of their teeth so he can make dentures for them. The Pale Figures are going to have some nasty teeth. Here’s a few pictures of Larry making the molds of one guys’ teeth.
Larry has to take a dental impression of each actors teeth, just like a dentist would do before giving someone braces.
After a few minutes, it’s time to take it out.
Here’s what the impressions look like after they’ve been taken.
After taking them, he has to actually create the mold. To do this, he has to put some green gooey stuff in them.
Alexa, Larry’s assistant, then attaches the green mold to a base, to give it extra support.
And here’s two completed sets of molds. From these, Larry can create a set of fake teeth that will fit exactly into each actor’s mouth.
So that’s your crash course in making molds of teeth. Any questions?
In other news: the search for locations continues to go well. I think we have at least one good choice for just about every location in the film. I think there may be some road locations that we need to find, but we’ve seen some good ones so far. Ed just needs to decide which ones he wants to do for each scene.
The sketches that our Production Designer has made so far are pretty damn cool. I wish I could show them to you. She did a sketch of the entrance to the temple, and the tunnel connected to the entrance. From what I’ve seen, I think the sets are going to be pretty sweet.
Tomorrow we meet with a Stunt Coordinator that we’re basically ready to offer the job to. He comes recommended by Four, our 1st AD, and last week we watched some scenes he did in another movie. There’s no question that he’s qualified. The big question is if he can choreograph fight scenes to look very realistic, rather than like typical action movie fight scenes. We have a good feeling about him, and meeting with him tomorrow will hopefully solidify those feelings.
I think we’re also supposed to meet with some possible stunt doubles tomorrow. We’re a little concerned about the stunt double for our lead actress, because (obviously) we don't want the audience to be able to tell she's asian. Hopefully we can find someone with similar skin tones to her, and then just hide her face in any shot she’s in. There aren’t too many stunts for the lead female character, thankfully. There is a fight scene, so that might be a bit tricky. Maybe she'll be up for doing her own stunts!
That’s it for this edition, kids. Take care until next time!
We had another good week here in ol’ Hong Kong. A big thing that has been concerning Gregg and I is the casting and makeup for the Pale Figures. However, both seem to be going very well so far. We have 10 people cast, and need a total of 17. Hopefully by the end of this week, we’ll have the final 7.
The makeup is also going well. Larry Odien, who was one of the three makeup artists with us on Altered, is now with us in Hong Kong, and is heading up getting the special effects makeup department all set up. He won’t be with us for the shoot, unfortunately, but I think by the time he leaves (October 12 is his last day), we’ll be in good shape. Before he leaves, he's going to make sure all of the local makeup artists on the crew know how to do the makeup as well as he does.
As we cast the Pale Figures, the first thing that Larry has been doing is taking molds of their teeth so he can make dentures for them. The Pale Figures are going to have some nasty teeth. Here’s a few pictures of Larry making the molds of one guys’ teeth.
Larry has to take a dental impression of each actors teeth, just like a dentist would do before giving someone braces.
After a few minutes, it’s time to take it out.
Here’s what the impressions look like after they’ve been taken.
After taking them, he has to actually create the mold. To do this, he has to put some green gooey stuff in them.
Alexa, Larry’s assistant, then attaches the green mold to a base, to give it extra support.
And here’s two completed sets of molds. From these, Larry can create a set of fake teeth that will fit exactly into each actor’s mouth.
So that’s your crash course in making molds of teeth. Any questions?
In other news: the search for locations continues to go well. I think we have at least one good choice for just about every location in the film. I think there may be some road locations that we need to find, but we’ve seen some good ones so far. Ed just needs to decide which ones he wants to do for each scene.
The sketches that our Production Designer has made so far are pretty damn cool. I wish I could show them to you. She did a sketch of the entrance to the temple, and the tunnel connected to the entrance. From what I’ve seen, I think the sets are going to be pretty sweet.
Tomorrow we meet with a Stunt Coordinator that we’re basically ready to offer the job to. He comes recommended by Four, our 1st AD, and last week we watched some scenes he did in another movie. There’s no question that he’s qualified. The big question is if he can choreograph fight scenes to look very realistic, rather than like typical action movie fight scenes. We have a good feeling about him, and meeting with him tomorrow will hopefully solidify those feelings.
I think we’re also supposed to meet with some possible stunt doubles tomorrow. We’re a little concerned about the stunt double for our lead actress, because (obviously) we don't want the audience to be able to tell she's asian. Hopefully we can find someone with similar skin tones to her, and then just hide her face in any shot she’s in. There aren’t too many stunts for the lead female character, thankfully. There is a fight scene, so that might be a bit tricky. Maybe she'll be up for doing her own stunts!
That’s it for this edition, kids. Take care until next time!
Tuesday, September 4, 2007
Ghosts are amoung us!
Right now in Hong Kong (and other parts of Asia) it is Ghost Month. All month, ghosts roam throughout the "living" world. To celebrate the beginning of Ghost Month, the Chinese do a festival called Ghost Festival, also sometimes referred to as the Hungry Ghost Festival. Wikipedia has a pretty good article that explains it, here.
The movie opens with our two main characters at Hungry Ghost, so we shot some footage of the actual festival. Check out some pictures.
This last one is our DP (Lam) shooting. We got some very cool footage.
This actually happened last Tuesday, but things have been so nuts that I haven't had a chance to write until now.
I finally have my PC back. It turned out my hard drive had indeed crashed, and wasn't salvageable. So the tech guy who was checking it out put in a new hard drive, and I spent all day on Sunday reloading my software. Fun fun fun. But, everything is back on it, and it's working well (knock on wood). It even boots up faster than it used to! :) Luckily I didn't lose much of my important data, because I had everything backed up on my computer at home. My good friend Ben Rock was kind enough to go to my place, copy everything to an external drive, and ship it to me. (Thanks again, Ben!) So I'm back in business and able to blog once again!
Since shooting the parade (and one other day of Hungry Ghost Festival) last week, we've been doing basic pre-production stuff. Ed has met with the Director of Photography and Production Designer, and talked at length about what he wants in terms of the look of the film. We had a good locations meeting on Friday, and are progressing well on figuring out where we're going to shoot everything. Casting has started for the Pale Figures (which is what Ed calls the ghosts in the film) and we've seen some rather interesting and freaky-looking dudes thus far. We've got 4 cast, with 16 more to go. Larry, from Spectral Motion (the makeup effects house who designed the Pale Figures) arrived this weekend, and he's started working with the local makeup artists, doing all the stuff that needs doing so we can transform the actors into Pale Figures. So, all in all, things are going well. We really like all the people we have on our crew, and everyone seems happy to be working on the film.
That's about all I've got for now, kids. See ya again soon in blog land!
The movie opens with our two main characters at Hungry Ghost, so we shot some footage of the actual festival. Check out some pictures.
This last one is our DP (Lam) shooting. We got some very cool footage.
This actually happened last Tuesday, but things have been so nuts that I haven't had a chance to write until now.
I finally have my PC back. It turned out my hard drive had indeed crashed, and wasn't salvageable. So the tech guy who was checking it out put in a new hard drive, and I spent all day on Sunday reloading my software. Fun fun fun. But, everything is back on it, and it's working well (knock on wood). It even boots up faster than it used to! :) Luckily I didn't lose much of my important data, because I had everything backed up on my computer at home. My good friend Ben Rock was kind enough to go to my place, copy everything to an external drive, and ship it to me. (Thanks again, Ben!) So I'm back in business and able to blog once again!
Since shooting the parade (and one other day of Hungry Ghost Festival) last week, we've been doing basic pre-production stuff. Ed has met with the Director of Photography and Production Designer, and talked at length about what he wants in terms of the look of the film. We had a good locations meeting on Friday, and are progressing well on figuring out where we're going to shoot everything. Casting has started for the Pale Figures (which is what Ed calls the ghosts in the film) and we've seen some rather interesting and freaky-looking dudes thus far. We've got 4 cast, with 16 more to go. Larry, from Spectral Motion (the makeup effects house who designed the Pale Figures) arrived this weekend, and he's started working with the local makeup artists, doing all the stuff that needs doing so we can transform the actors into Pale Figures. So, all in all, things are going well. We really like all the people we have on our crew, and everyone seems happy to be working on the film.
That's about all I've got for now, kids. See ya again soon in blog land!
Monday, September 3, 2007
Enjoy some fine photos
No time to write at the moment, but I wanted to share some fine, fine photos of Hong Kong with all you lovely people.
Some are of the city, some are of me and gang goofin' around at a wax museum, and some are... well, just take a look!
http://www.flickr.com/photos/mcomp72/sets/72157601832185404/
Some are of the city, some are of me and gang goofin' around at a wax museum, and some are... well, just take a look!
http://www.flickr.com/photos/mcomp72/sets/72157601832185404/
Sunday, August 26, 2007
Starting with a crash...
I arrived in Hong Kong on Friday night, and by the time I got into my apartment, it was about 2 AM local time. Completely exhausted from 17 hours of traveling, I immediately went to sleep. Got up the next morning, and plugged in the ol' computer to check email and do a little work. After a couple hours, I stepped away for lunch, leaving the computer on. When I came back, my computer had restarted itself... or, more precisely, it had attempted to restart itself. However, it didn't finish. Instead, there was some weird error message on the screen. It was one that I hadn't seen before, and I've seen quite a few error messages in my day. I attempted a hard reboot a couple of times, but each time I got the error, which appeared to be saying that it was unable to access the hard drive.
I called the IT guy that works for our Hong Kong Line Producer. He told me it sounded like the hard drive had crashed. He's going to look at it for me in a few hours, but says there's only a 50% chance that he'd be able to get it started. He says if not, in all likelyhood, all the data is lost and I'll have to reformat the drive and start over.
Let me tell you, that is going to suck. I had ALL of my files related to the movie on there, including budget, schedule, to do list, etc. Not being able to access them now is quite inconvenient, to say the least. Luckily, not all is lost. I have all of the files on my desktop computer, and my good friend Ben is going to my condo to burn me a DVD, and then ship to me via Fed Ex. (Gotta love Fed Ex for shipping to Hong Kong.) The real pain is going to be reinstalling all the program files -- and that's if I even have all of them.
While I'm can't be 100% sure, I think the problem happened because of a power issue. Hong Kong's power is 220 volts, like the UK. (In the US, we use 110 volts.) When I was here in June, I was able to plug my computer into a wall outlet directly, just using a plug adapter. However, I didn't use a transformer to actually change the voltage. I didn't have any problems then (neither did Ed and Gregg), but perhaps we just got lucky then. My guess is, some kind of power surge happened, and because of the extra voltage, the hard drive got screwed up. But I'm not a tech guy, and certainly not an expert on electricity, so I may be completely wrong.
So, this isn't quite the start to this journey I was hoping for. But, I'm not letting it get me down. If this is the biggest adversity that we'll face on this film, I'll gladly take it.
Other than that, so far so good.
There is a giant store connected to our apartment building, called Jusco. It's like a Target and a grocery store rolled into one, and we don't even have to step foot outside to get there. To top that, just down the street from our building is the largest mall in Hong Kong. So going shopping won't be a problem!
As for getting on a regular sleep schedule... that hasn't been so easy just yet. Last night I went to bed at 8:30 PM, and woke up this morning at 3 AM. It's 8:45 PM right now, and I'm fighting to stay awake. Trying to make it to at least 9:00 PM. If I can push it a half-hour each night, I'll be at an 11:00 PM bedtime soon enough.
That's all for now, kids. I'll try to write again in a day or two. We officially start prep tomorrow, so hopefully I'll have some good production news to report soon.
I called the IT guy that works for our Hong Kong Line Producer. He told me it sounded like the hard drive had crashed. He's going to look at it for me in a few hours, but says there's only a 50% chance that he'd be able to get it started. He says if not, in all likelyhood, all the data is lost and I'll have to reformat the drive and start over.
Let me tell you, that is going to suck. I had ALL of my files related to the movie on there, including budget, schedule, to do list, etc. Not being able to access them now is quite inconvenient, to say the least. Luckily, not all is lost. I have all of the files on my desktop computer, and my good friend Ben is going to my condo to burn me a DVD, and then ship to me via Fed Ex. (Gotta love Fed Ex for shipping to Hong Kong.) The real pain is going to be reinstalling all the program files -- and that's if I even have all of them.
While I'm can't be 100% sure, I think the problem happened because of a power issue. Hong Kong's power is 220 volts, like the UK. (In the US, we use 110 volts.) When I was here in June, I was able to plug my computer into a wall outlet directly, just using a plug adapter. However, I didn't use a transformer to actually change the voltage. I didn't have any problems then (neither did Ed and Gregg), but perhaps we just got lucky then. My guess is, some kind of power surge happened, and because of the extra voltage, the hard drive got screwed up. But I'm not a tech guy, and certainly not an expert on electricity, so I may be completely wrong.
So, this isn't quite the start to this journey I was hoping for. But, I'm not letting it get me down. If this is the biggest adversity that we'll face on this film, I'll gladly take it.
Other than that, so far so good.
There is a giant store connected to our apartment building, called Jusco. It's like a Target and a grocery store rolled into one, and we don't even have to step foot outside to get there. To top that, just down the street from our building is the largest mall in Hong Kong. So going shopping won't be a problem!
As for getting on a regular sleep schedule... that hasn't been so easy just yet. Last night I went to bed at 8:30 PM, and woke up this morning at 3 AM. It's 8:45 PM right now, and I'm fighting to stay awake. Trying to make it to at least 9:00 PM. If I can push it a half-hour each night, I'll be at an 11:00 PM bedtime soon enough.
That's all for now, kids. I'll try to write again in a day or two. We officially start prep tomorrow, so hopefully I'll have some good production news to report soon.
Sunday, August 19, 2007
Welcome to my blog!
Hi everyone! Thanks for checking out my blog.
I'm going to try to write at least once a week about the adventures of making "Seventh Moon." As some of you already know, it's a feature I'm producing, along with longtime friends Gregg Hale and Robin Cowie. Another longtime friend, Ed Sanchez, is writing and directing. It's a pretty damn good script, and all of us are very excited to be making it.
Here's a one-line synopsis: A newlywed couple experiences a night of terror, while on their honeymoon in rural China. I won't say anymore than that, for those of you who want to remain as "spoiler free" as possible.
We're shooting the film in Hong Kong, and we leave in 4 days. The shoot is 35 days, but we'll be over in Hong Kong for a total of about 3 1/2 months. It's going to be great. We were there in late June scouting locations, and it was a lot of fun.
Stay tuned for more...
I'm going to try to write at least once a week about the adventures of making "Seventh Moon." As some of you already know, it's a feature I'm producing, along with longtime friends Gregg Hale and Robin Cowie. Another longtime friend, Ed Sanchez, is writing and directing. It's a pretty damn good script, and all of us are very excited to be making it.
Here's a one-line synopsis: A newlywed couple experiences a night of terror, while on their honeymoon in rural China. I won't say anymore than that, for those of you who want to remain as "spoiler free" as possible.
We're shooting the film in Hong Kong, and we leave in 4 days. The shoot is 35 days, but we'll be over in Hong Kong for a total of about 3 1/2 months. It's going to be great. We were there in late June scouting locations, and it was a lot of fun.
Stay tuned for more...
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