Success!

After two weeks of long hours on the road, and many test readings, it is with great joy that I make the following announcement. We have finally found a new actress to play Erin! Ladies and gentlemen, may I introduce Rebecca Reardon!

Yesterday we did a reading opposite Zoe to establish whether the two "best friends" had the right connection, and this comes from that reading. A more conventional profile picture is coming. Welcome aboard, Becca!

In other news, a new batch of shipments arrived, bringing with it two swords, one for Savara, and another... with history. (When will it be revealed? Only time will tell.)

Costuming has resumed, and our armorers have made significant progress, though that will be fodder for next week's update, as there are no pictures yet. Until then!

Seismic Shift

Hello again everyone. There was no blog post last week because, frankly, I was still in shock. After several weeks of persistent bad news, this week (on a Wednesday to Wednesday basis,) had actually started fairly well. We had a practice session that was really quite good, arrows were getting fletched, etc. 

Abruptly, on Friday, I get an ominously vague message. To make a long story short, by Tuesday, Annie had officially backed out of the project. Her life had taken some unexpected turns for the better, but that required her to make some tough decisions. One of those was deciding between the series and her future career. It took several days to decide, and a full five minutes for her to finally say it. It was obvious that she really hated to do it, she loved the project and the people. The connection she and Zoe had was, in Zoe's own words, "magic." It has been a joy to work with her over the past year. She will be missed.

Now we are four weeks away from the shoot, without one of our leads. The team has pulled together, using our contacts to find someone to fill the role. That's been the number one assignment for this week, stacked on top of the general work of the production. We've already tried out a couple, with a few more in the near future. We also have a party interested in the role of Gref, so I'm happy about that.

So, to recap, in the next four weeks we must find and train a new Erin to the standard we'd developed in the rest of the team over the last 9 months, (along with a couple other major characters.) Some people would throw in the towel at this point, but we've already established that I'm crazy, so... moving on. :-)

Sunday we developed the first half of the camp raid fight, a far more technically challenging mass skirmish than anything we've done thus far. 

 

It's moments like these where I appreciate the steady hands and minds of my veterans all the more.

Well, time to cue up "I'll Make A Man Out Of You," strap on my faithful sword, and once more into the breach. I'm off to war. See you next week.

Much Ado About Everything

 So... what happened this week? A better question would be, what didn't? For the sake of time and brevity I shall only touch on the highlights. We finally have Gwynmareth's ears cast correctly, and Paris got to try them on. To say she was massively pleased would be an equally large understatement.

 

We also experimented with goblin prosthetics and makeup. While this is by no means the final version, I think it'll give you a good idea where we're going.

On Thursday we ran through a few scenes at a hastily assembled practice session. It was a beautiful and quite warm day, allowing us to work on the scenes out under the trees. However, the wind made holding the scripts open a bit... problematic. 

Sunday we brought our actors (sans one) out to work on the first fight scene in the series. The performances got to be quite good, as evidenced when Zoe's (Kate) performance convinced me that she'd actually been hurt!

 

It's good to see the training paying off. We all look forward to showing you the end product.

Well, there's the highlights for the week. Until next time!

Yielding Fruit

After weeks and months of basic training, the stunt team is finally moving into the place where the rubber meets the road, the final payoff for all their work. This week we began choreographing the fight scenes in earnest. Our actors are only available on certain training days, so when they're not there the stunt guys step in and fill the roles themselves. This week the team developed the first fight scene in the series, a goblin ambush.

Monday Elijah came for training and we developed the framework of his one on one duel scenes.

All but one of the current batch of shipments have arrived, and we will be running makeup and prosthetic tests this week, along with arranging tent designs. There have been some hiccups in costuming, but we press ever on. That's about it for now. Until next time!