Patterns and Processes

Greetings, one and all! Well, this week has been a smattering of different projects. For starters, a rather difficult scene in the script got tightened up a bit. We may revisit it at some point, but for now it’s locked. Next up, we made a supply run for assorted model and prop making materials. While the lockdowns and closures have made the shelves somewhat sparsely populated, we did manage to find most of what we needed. If we have to sit in our houses for an undisclosed amount of time, at least we can make some headway in the process…

Thirdly, we started making patterns for stunt weapons, based on the kindjal’s we’d used in previous project, and a brand new design for a custom axe head.

Last, but not least, we’ve also been working on cleaning out the shop, specifically tearing down the ship set, as well as the green screen frame, and then moving everything that had accumulated within it over the last couple years. So lots of dust, mouse… sign, and bats, but we’re making headway.

Well, that’s about all for this week. Until next time!

Big Schedules and Tiny Houses

Greetings, one and all! Well, here we are, fast approaching the four week mark of this wonderful social distancing mandate. We’ve thankfully managed to keep ourselves busy with a variety of production tasks. For starters, we worked a bit on the ribbing for the previously mentioned denizen’s armor.

But that process is slow, so, to feel slightly more productive, I took a break and started working on miniature structures for the cityscapes. This is a slow and tedious process, especially when you’re trying to economize, (what with having no budget, and all that,) and not make unnecessary trips out into the world…

Still, we made some decent progress, building and texturing a shack and a tower. Last, but not least, we took all the data from the spreadsheet we teased last week, and converted it to scene cards, this time color coded for the top nine actors, and whether they are day or night scenes.

The reason for this is so that we can group scenes with the same people and locations, to work out our shoot schedule and maximize the efficiency of the process. This is even more important as we largely work with volunteers, and need to schedule around everyone’s lives. It’s a technique that goes all the way back to our very first project in 2006.

Well, that’s about all for this week. Until next time!

Scenes and Structures

Greetings, one and all! Well, thus begins another week of pre-production for a movie we don’t have the cast or budget for. The strange things that pandemics make us do…
In the midst of script revisions and refinements, I realized that the scene breakdown chart had several glaring inaccuracies in it. So I spent a few hours going through the script scene by scene, line by line, and rectifying said errors. In the end, we have, well… maybe we can give a spoiler-free glimpse into the process…

No, nothing is wrong with your screen, though many people have thought something was wrong with mine in these last few weeks. This bizarre rainbow shows which characters (listed at the top) are in which scenes, (listed on the left,) with the locations or sets being color-coded so we can group the shoots and scenes, as you can see here. There are additional color-coded tabs for time of day, and whether they are interior or exterior. Overkill on a lower budget production? Maybe, but probably not, given how complex this shoot could be.

In other news, the production design efforts have continued apace, with a central location and piece of jewelry getting a lot of thought and attention.

Also axes. There were seriously a lot of axes…

Last, but not least, we’ve begun the process of taking the materials we have, and figuring out how to use them to fit the design aesthetic for one of the more critical non-character entities. Sadly, as that is running concurrent to the writing of this blog, we won’t have any pictures for you until next time, at the earliest.

Well, that’s about all for this week. Until next time!