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!