What’s so big you might ask?

Well, later today if the weather stays nice I plan to get my head and shoulders life-cast. I have never had it done before but it is something that I am very much looking forward to, even if I am a little nervous about it. I am a firm believer in the idea that if you want to do this (for a living) you have to have had it done yourself… how can you know what it is like if you haven’t experienced it yourself?

I think that we have everything in place… it’s almost 7:30 in the a.m. I have about 3 or 4 hours until my friend Will gets here and we will be sitting down and going over everything and then around lunchtime we’ll do it and by this time tonight I should have an Ultracal bust of my head!

From there it might take a few weeks but we will make a negative mother mold of it into which I can pour some latex and make a dummy head for finishing the FX shots of Roadkill.

Speaking of that here is an update on our progress with the DVD… I have a mostly finished Cover laid out, I just need to tinker with it a little bit I think… I may do a different design so that I have a couple to choose from and Richard Cabrera who acted in the film and is a film maker and graphic artist in his own right has offered to take a crack at it too. So we shall see how that goes.

I ended up capturing about 60gig of footage for the behind the scenes videos and bloopers ect. I am going to be trying to put as many extras on the disc as I can, but I think I will wait to reveal exactly what until a little closer to the time.

Let’s see, what else? I have started putting together the blooper/gag reel, it should end up somewhere in the 8 to 10 minute range which is good. I was worried that I wouldn’t have enough footage because everyone was very professional and remembered their lines pretty well and even when they did flub a line they didn’t break character… luckily there where a few times when we had to let the camera roll and people goofed off a bit. I think that that is a drawback of making movies the way I do on such a small scale in such short time frames, on “normal” sets there are a lot more people standing around and they shoot for months so they have a lot longer time to get to know each other and joke around.

Sigh. ok I have wasted enough time here, I’ll be back, probably in February at this point and I will hopefully have pictures… which reminds me I need to put up pictures of the fangs I have made too.

as always… wish me luck!

… how are things going?

I think that things are going ok, I may not have gotten as much done as I would like but I have made bounds in my preparation work and today I hope to officially make the first step forward on the Roadkill DVD. I have started prepping my desk, tidying up paperwork and such, making room and I later today I am going to start collecting footage for some behind the scenes stuff and bloopers.

As well as cleaning and tidying I have been trying to spend some quality time with Alice, ok she still sleeps a lot but we’ve been cuddling and we had a long talk this morning about the alphabet and some words that each letter stood for.

What else…? Well I have gathered together everything I need to do my head cast, I just need to pluck up the courage and get some friends over to actually do it. If I were just looking at doing one for the Roadkill shots that I need then I could just do one on someone else - rather then having it done to me but because I also want to try some other things, and because I firmly believe that if you are going to do it on other people you should have experienced it yourself - I am going to get it done on me. Soon. If the weather hadn’t turned so bad the last few days I would have done it this weekend, but it is cold and wet and I want to do it outside just in case.

Sigh. Anyway Alice is awake and demanding my attention… so, I shall return in a few days when I have some real news.

Well that was 2009…

An interesting year with ups and downs. We welcomed a new addition to our family, released our first DVD and I finally got to start exploring my dream of making practical special effects. Along the way I had to quit my day job, nothing happened with my immigration application… one of our cars broke but I was able to fix it on my own. I wrote the first draft of a novel.

What will this next year bring? Who is to say? I won’t repeat myself a whole bunch just in case anyone does actually read this but 6 or 7 months from now I want to have Roadkill finished on DVD, the novel finished and at least a proof copy in my hands… if the editing and re-drafting goes well enough we may submit it to publishers and they may have a problem with it being available already somewhere else… so we’ll see. The special edition of Babysitter would be cool but not a must, that is more for my own piece of mind at this point.

I may or may not go back to school too… I couldn’t get into ANY classes this coming semester we left it too late, but perhaps next time.

No matter what happens with those and other things we have planned this next year will be a year of growth. That is my resolution, we will strive to make good choices about money - keep things paid and perhaps get things paid off. Strengthening our financial footing will allow us to expand the business and take on the larger projects we want to tackle.

Whatever the future brings I stake a claim now that 2010 will be our year. And I hope that it will be a good year too for anyone ready this.

Peace people, until next time.