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Post by Eric T. Jones on Oct 14, 2006 1:38:34 GMT -5
Talk about getting smashed by 16 tons of irony:
"Eric, Make sure you email brian and tell him to ask drama club for actors. You won't find any for your film from our club as of yet. We need to make oursleves known better and recruit some tallented actors. How many actors do you allready have? Do you need extra cameras, tripods, dolleys or camera men. If you do, we can bring the dolley and stuff to help you shoot it if it doesn't conflict with our filming of Decagon. Decoagon will probably supercede any other projects at the time, since it is a club wide project. But please, if you need any help, feel free to give the specifics, ass long as it doesn't involve acting. Also, I have a green screen if that can be handy to you. Ashwin Singhania Vice President Mv Film Club"
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Post by Eric T. Jones on Oct 14, 2006 19:57:35 GMT -5
Stanford had plenty of good locations, but distance was an issue.
McClellan Park has good foresty areas (and in the interest of not stepping into the creek, I will have to veto my original decision to NOT use wide-angle lenses), but also has outside dead, tall grass areas which just might work.
5 minutes of location footage was shot of Stanford, while I shot 8 minutes of McClellan Park, which we might end up using for the sake of convenience. Plus, due to the close proximity, if we run out of locations, there's one good one in Linda Vista Park.
Location hunting was so delightful, I almost forgot that we're still short on extras.
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Post by kenny on Oct 15, 2006 0:20:59 GMT -5
Perhaps Mike would want in on this picture. If you want I could ask.
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Post by Eric T. Jones on Oct 15, 2006 0:29:10 GMT -5
Oh yes, please do- if you can gather up people, gather them all. To sum up the details:
Saturday, October 21st McClellan Ranch (with possible B-rolls at Linda Vista Park) 11:00AM-4:00PM (subject to change)
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Post by Skywalker on Oct 15, 2006 0:32:49 GMT -5
problem, i'm probably going to be tutoring judy on the 21st... so she and i probably won't be available.. (subject to change)
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Post by Hanna(h) on Oct 15, 2006 0:57:16 GMT -5
I'm not available on the 21st for either tutoring or Zombis. But I haven't been told I'm needed for this...
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Post by bluesabre1 on Oct 15, 2006 15:43:09 GMT -5
So,what's the progress on acquiring fake blood? If it requires shipping time then it's better to know now than Wednesday.
And do you think you could send out some of the location footage?
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Post by kenny on Oct 15, 2006 20:36:55 GMT -5
May I ask why the title has become censored all of the sudden? Oh good, the word isn't filtered. *whew*
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Post by Eric T. Jones on Oct 15, 2006 21:38:10 GMT -5
It's funnier in symbols (and look carefully at them, too). That title is only going to be for promotional purposes- the onscreen title itself is simply going to say "ZOMBIS!!!".
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Post by Eric T. Jones on Oct 21, 2006 19:11:46 GMT -5
I have a larger summary on my xanga, which will soon enough be revised in a less-emo version on my Production Journal. For here, my summary because I'm tired:
That... sucked.
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Post by Eric T. Jones on Oct 25, 2006 22:54:15 GMT -5
My lengthy production journal entry from a couple days ago ( inakamichi-movie.tripod.com/id1.html): "Shooting commenced on Saturday for "ZOMBIS!!!", which might be promoted as "The Film that Didn't Want to Get Made". I didn't think I was making "Don Quixote" here, but apparently, I was- almost anything that could have gone wrong did. -Our location, McClellan Ranch, was occupied all around. Not just the parking lot, but the entire place was occupied by wildlife preservationalists and their little festival. -It takes 70 minutes for our minimum of people to show up. Finally, I just give up and leave with our current winnings, and relocate. -At the relocated area, we find the Department of Corrections has prisoners sweeping the parking lot! Fortunately, the officer was very kind to us (and even supportive of our filmmaking ambitions)- his only condition was to not start filming until they leave. 30 minutes more of preparation time. -It takes an hour to get a very simple scene done... mainly because I'm being nagged about other scenes. If you have something to tell me about locations for scenes other than the one I'm shooting, guess what? I don't care. Tell me when we get there. I don't have a good short-term memory, and get really impatient when I can't just shoot what I've already got set up... or what I'm trying to set up! -The actors are very active (this isn't the bad part). I end up using a lot more handheld shots than planned, but that day, my hand chose to vibrate like crazy. The shots suffer for it, and I'm sure the camera did, too. -Finally, the final big blow: my camera, the Canon Optura 60, died. That's right. D-I-E-D. Before you suggest it, yes, I tried switching batteries, and I tried the AC Adaptor. The camera will not turn on, and is dead. Fortunately, the camera is still under warranty. The remainder of the day's scenes were shot with Richie's Optura 20... whose quality is hazier than the Optura 60. But since the footage in the Optura 60, which won't let me remove the tape I was using, might be as good as destroyed, we'll be reshooting some parts anyway. Quality differences in a single scene will be therefore fixed by reshoots; otherwise, color correction is the best that can happen. At least I was able to use my shotgun mic on this camera... and never mind the fact that most of this will be redubbed in post-production anyway. You can forget about "ZOMBIS!!!" being released on Halloween. Since we blew it with our one-day opportunity, this time, we're going to set certain scenes for certain weekends. This forthcoming Saturday, thanks to the exhaustion all of us had from the hellish shoot that was October the 21st, we're going to be shooting the far simpler indoor scenes. In the field of acting, the scenes I was shooting most of the time, with Nikolay and Joseph (of JP Films: home.earthlink.net/~biapayne/), carried an unexpected occurrence. The exact opposite problem I had with other actors, who couldn't go more than four words in a line without cutting- they were reciting an entire scene when I only had part of it planned for a particular setup. Due to their movement, the tripod was far too restricting. My beaver-friendly hand tells me that I need to build a steadycam setup of my own. The shot lists were helpful, but mostly because of the "study by writing it down" experience. I really didn't have to refer to them, as I knew what I wanted for the setups and length of takes. Cinematographically speaking, I felt I didn't get what I wanted- I vastly overestimated the cramped area that was used, thinking I would need wide-angle lenses. Being how close I had to be to the actors, it was a shock at how wide the shots were. ...well, yeah, wide, DUH, but they weren't so "friendly" in previous shoots, where I had to back to a wall to get angles of similar width! These scenes are in the middle of the movie, though- there's still time later, chronologically speaking, for it to get more and more cramped. The footage being deliberately composed in 4:3 to be cropped into 1.66:1 will probably add more to that effect, but we'll see. I do not have a MiniDV camera on me right now, so I cannot upload the footage and test it out- color correction and cropping."
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Post by Skywalker on Oct 26, 2006 0:13:55 GMT -5
so, how long do you expect for your camera to be fixed?
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Post by Eric T. Jones on Oct 26, 2006 10:29:44 GMT -5
I don't know- maybe 2 weeks. The camera just arrived at the repair place, where they will hopefully fix it and salvage the tape... for which they'll disassemble the camera if they have to. It's almost definite that some of the footage will be wrecked, unless they can somehow electronically reactivate it and have it removed like normal, instead of by hand (where tape is still spooled inside the camera).
This weekend, I still need to think about what scenes to shoot, but now that I'm not shootin' 'em all at once, this should just be reliant on our actor availability. Richie is not available for clubhouse shoots, so this narrows the list down to scenes he isn't in.
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Post by panama on Oct 26, 2006 18:08:42 GMT -5
Eric. Do you need me to show up for a shoot this saturday? I need to be sure.
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Post by Eric T. Jones on Oct 26, 2006 20:01:41 GMT -5
I'm going to reschedule the shoot, be it Sunday or the following weekend. Things are too jam-packed with projects right now, and abrupt notices.
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