Yet Another 24 Hours.

Hey everyone. Here's the rundown of what happened last weekend, during my latest 24 hour Film Race shoot. I'll spare you the suspense and tell you we did get our submission in on time (with time to spare no less!) I apologize for the lack of pictures below. I was wearing many different hats this time, so I wasn't able to snap any. You'll just have to use your imagination, until I can post the vid. Okay, here we go.

9:45pm - I get to Darrin & Harmonie's place, which will serve as our home base. Schwartz and Terence show up shortly after. We boot up the computer to get ready for the email that will give us the parameters for our short. Harmonie got a location release to use her office building, so whatever we do, we'll try and incorporate that.

10:00pm - Our assignment arrives. The theme is 'Happily Ever After' and the surprise element is 'Chocolate'. We start throwing ideas out, though it's a little tough as Schwartz & I have minds that aren't really wired for Happily Ever After. We also have to remember that we only have two actors; Harmonie & myself.

10:15pm - Schwartz comes up with a very Henenlotter-ish idea, centered around this fake leg prop that he's brought with him, so now everyone is fixated on the fake leg. It kind of reminds me of last year when Schwartz reaalllly wanted to use his dog, Boo. No psychics involved this time though, he just wants the use the leg. Considering Harmonie & I are the ones that have to be in front of the camera, we're not sold on it.

11:00pm - We've got the 'leg' idea as a backup, but we're still trying to come up with something else - anything else.

12:00am - So, we're going with the 'leg' idea? This is what's happening?

I've heard the term 'break a leg', but this is ridiculous!

1:30am - Before I start to write, Harmonie & I kind of veto the leg idea. I don't think she's real comfortable with the subject matter and I'm ansy about pulling off the inevitable special effects needed. Harmonie comes up with a 'nugget' and I run with it. Schwartz vows that he will one day film a short starring his severed limb! Everyone retires, while I stay up to write the script.

3:00am - The script is done! It's four pages, which is a perfect size. It's funny though, no matter what the length - Snip was two-and-a-half pages, and The Mountebank was six - they always seem to end up coming in at just under four minutes of screen time. Now I just hope my pages aren't shite. With nobody awake to show it to, there's no turning back.

3:45am - I finish up a quick shot list and then hit the hay. Usually my job is done now, but this year I have to act, so I should really get as much sleep as possible. I don't want to look like a zombie on camera, not this time anyway.

8:00am - I get up, do a prop list and get copies of the script printed off for everyone.

9:00am - Oh yeah, possible snag. The short requires a third person that we don't actually have. Darrin gets on the phone to a friend of his and somehow manages to find Samantha, who is miraculously free on a Saturday afternoon. Crisis averted!

10:00am - We are all ready to head to the location, which is about twenty minutes away.

10:30am - The location is gorgeous, a nice open-concept office layout, with three desks placed perfectly for the scene. Adrian, our last crew member shows up and we get to work. We don't have to do much dressing, just set up the lights and camera.

12:00pm - One of the company's bigwigs shows up with his kids. We all hold our breath. He's just there to grab something and wishes us luck before leaving. Aaannnnd... exhale.

12:15pm - The first shot is complete. Yeaaaah, probably should have started earlier. I think we've got about fifty shots to do, so I see a lot of them being combined as the afternoon progresses. The humming from the computer servers in the next room is killing our sound, so we're going to have to put a lot of music in to mask it. I think Darrin is already intending to cut in some of NIN's Ghosts. Good thing it's public domain. Thanks Trent!

1:00pm - We are moving at a good clip. Even though the script is four pages, it is only three tiny scenes. There's no minimum length requirement, so whatever.

2:00pm - Lunch time! Rule #1; always feed your actors!

3:15pm - We're still plugging along, over halfway at this point. I'm a bit worried about the two f/x shots at the end of the shoot, as we really won't have time to do many takes.

4:15pm - The first f/x shot is locked. We're reaaaallllly behind.

5:00pm - The second f/x shot goes okay. We power through a few takes, making as little a mess as possible.

5:15pm - We decide to do our last shot in the alleyway beside our location. Passersby look confused, as all they see are two people walking with bloodied hands. Filmmaking is fun!

5:40pm - Picture is wrapped. Darrin has taken all the footage to start editing. We are behind the pace of last year, but at least we were capturing throughout the day. I'm still not panicking because I know what Darrin is capable of. The rest of us clean up and put everything back as it was.

6:30pm - Harmonie & I get back to home base. Darrin is hard at work. We track down a copy of Ghosts for him to use. Schwartz and Terence are coming back in a few hours, where hopefully there will be a rough cut to look at.

8:15pm - The guys arrive and we wait patiently as Darrin needs another twenty to finish up. Things are getting tight. What would a film race be, without taking it right to the wire?

8:45pm - Darrin shows us what he's come up with. What a guy. It looks great and cuts together way better than I would have ever expected. Schwartz & I point out some missed shots and Darrin goes about inserting them, while we scramble to get all the necessary paperwork together.

9:15pm - Now, this is the part that blew me away. Probably the most stressful time in a Film Race shoot is when you are transferring your film onto a disc. Many a team have been brought down (including ours in 2008) by glitches and the time it takes to do this. At this point, I thought we were fucked because in previous years, this process has taken twenty minutes, if not longer. However, with Darrin's souped-up rig, he had two copies of 'J Plus K' burned almost instantaneously!

9:30pm - Harmonie drives me to the drop-off point, which is fortunately only fifteen minutes away.

Ye Olde Finish Line!

9:40pm - Darrin calls us while en route to let me know there's a piece of info missing on our disc case - the running time, which is three minutes and fifty-three seconds. You see? Same length everytime! I take care of it.

9:45pm - I drop off our submission. I mention that our team did Snip last year and get tons of positive feedback from the organizers. It looks like Boo made quite an impression. Let's hope J Plus K is to their liking, as well.

10:15pm - I grab some dinner at home base before heading home. Darrin, Harmonie & I watch J Plus K one more time. Of course all of its imperfections are glaring now that it's been submitted, but it is what it is.

11:00pm - I head home, stopping on the way to drop off the camera equipment we borrowed for the day.

12:00am - I arrive back at my place. Exhausted. I spoil myself by turning on the air conditioning. Time for bed.

Hopefully, the audience gets a kick out of J Plus K on Thursday. Even though we were knee-capped by the whole 'happily ever after' thing, we still managed to make it violent as all hell. I will say that the idea of seeing myself on the big screen at The Bloor is a little surreal though. There's no question that it looks great and the music adds a lot, as well. I'll be sure to update you on how the screening goes.

Don't Kill The Messenger 66

This week at E3, the three pillars Sony, Microsoft and Nintendo, as well as hundreds of game developers from all over the world trotted out their upcoming product. As usual, my next twelve months filled up pretty quickly. In addition to Black Ops, Medal Of Honor, Rock Band 3, Infamous 2, Killzone 3, Portal 2 and many others, there are some great horror titles on the horizon, as well. For instance;

F.E.A.R 3 is set nine months after the second games icky conclusion and you take control - via two player co-op - of duelling brothers from the previous installments, Point Man & Paxton. Here's some demo footage.



Rage is a new property that I only first heard about this week. It looks really fun and much like Fallout 3 and Borderlands without all the RPG elements that don't interest me. It appears racing around like Mad Max is also a large component to the game, as well. Here's a look.



When I first saw the working title of Silent Hill 8, my first thought was 'holy crap, there's been SEVEN of these things already'. I know it's been a while since I've visited this series, but wow. This one's got an interesting setup, that might just get me back in. Check out the trailer below.



Okay, now that they're actually releasing a Dead Rising game for the PS3, I can finally get my zombie killing on! Can't wait to try out that double chainsaw motorcycle! Here below is some demo footage from Dead Rising 2.



Those above titles are all great, but there's no game I'm looking forward to more than Dead Space 2. I had so much fun playing the first one, that I can't wait to get into Isaac's suit again, and try out his new abilities and weapons. It looks like there is a special edition pack available that comes with a PS3 port of Extraction, as well. Awesome! Here's some Dead Space 2 gameplay.

Like I said, even BUSIER times ahead.

24: Mark 3

Well, it's that time again for the Toronto Film Race. It will no doubt be a late night this eve as me and my crew try to put something together that resembles coherence in time for the Saturday 10pm deadline. For newer readers, the Film Race is a yearly competition that challenges entrants to write, shoot & edit a four-minute short in twenty-four hours. I feel pretty good about this year, as I've got both Schwartz and Darrin with me this time around. Darrin was the Mac Pro mage who managed to cut together my first year short "The Mountebank" in a few hours, and Schwartz & I made such a solid team last year on "Snip" that we ended up almost winning the damn thing. Most importantly, we've all got experience now, which helps avoid the pitfalls that can bring down novice teams.

I think the only stumbling block this year is our lack of actors. It looks like I might have to pull double duty and step in front of the camera this time. I haven't done that for quite a while, but hey, it's for a good cause, right?

Anyway, that's going to keep me occupied all weekend, but hopefully I'll have the full story of what went down for you on Monday. Until then, wish us luck. Below, are both of our first two Film Race shorts.

Keeping The Faith

With VHS becoming more and more rare these days, I'm always looking for places that still display it on their shelves proudly. Here's the first of what I hope to be a series of posts chronicling the dying breed of the VHS vendor.

I took a trip into Cambridge on Monday to meet up with Schwartz and check out a new video store that opened up around the corner from where he's living right now. What kind of video store could make me drive an hour, past fields of cows and rusted out school buses, you ask? Well, one called The Vault.


It is a specialty store catering specifically to genre cinema and carries not only DVD, but also a startling amount of VHS.

As you can see, this place is pretty wicked. It's like stepping into a horror movie museum. It amazes me that a specialty business could survive in such a location, but Zack, the owner, assured us that it's been going well since he opened about six months ago. He, as I'm sure you can relate, was frustrated that there were no places to get old genre movies, so took it upon himself to make it happen.

The pictures speak for themselves, so if you are at all interested in genre cinema it is certainly worth the drive. Zack receives new stock on a weekly basis that often includes obscure donations from people trying to unload their 'junk'. All I know is, any place where I can acquire goodies such as these;

is tops in my book. For more info on The Vault, click here.

The next stop on my video shop tour is Pickering, as Zack told us that it is still a largely untapped resource when it comes to vintage VHS. Here's hoping that is the case.

At Long Last.

Sometimes running this blog involves some juggling. I had intended to use this week for my next It Came From The Archives segment and regale you with my collection of Topps Dinosaurs Attack! cards. However, a search of the 'Net quickly revealed that a dude by the name of Bob Heffner had already displayed them in all their bloody glory. Click the image below to go to his site, as they are definitely worth a look.

So, here I was, left with a slot to fill. Then I realized I should really get around to documenting the posters I spent so much time sorting and mounting over the last year. While I technically began posting them during last month's ICFTA (my Full Moon posters) this will be the first official installment of The Poster Archive Project.

Where to begin! Well, I'd say my Weekend Of Horrors stash would be a good start. I've talked before about the one & only time Fangoria brought their roadshow to the Big Smoke in 1991. I've also probably mentioned that by the end of that weekend, I was on a first-name basis with all the poster vendors there. My WOH haul is easy to spot these days because I had them all mounted (at great cost) shortly after the show. I look back now and laugh at just how much money I had to burn then. Even if I was only making four-sixty-five an hour, I was a sixteen-year-old with a job and the money piled up fast.

Anyway, here they are.

I still have the standee for this too, but it's in pretty rough shape.

Don't Kill The Messenger 65

I'm up waaaaay too early on a Sunday... here's what I've got for you today.

The Interview Series.

Here below, is a new vid from Toronto-based videographer Rob Mitchell. This time he sits down with Ken Gord, a man with dozens of production credits to his name, including one of my faves, the giant rat invasion flick Deadly Eyes! I've met him a few times at different events and man, has he got a story or two. Anyway, here it is.




For more of Rob & Sheleigh's videos, click here.

Audio Awesomeness!

Fangoria reported a few days ago that Glass Eye Pics, the New York based film company headed by Larry Fessenden, has a new project in the works. It's called Tales From Beyond The Pale, a series of half-hour radio chillers in the vein of the ones produced by Orson Welles and others in the thirties and fourties.

If that isn't enough to get you excited, Fessenden and his partner Glenn McQuaid - who worked together on 2008's I Sell The Dead - have gotten an impressive list of contributors, including Ti West (House Of The Devil), Don Coscarelli (Bubba Ho-tep), J.T. Petty (The Burrowers), Doug Buck (Cutting Moments) and Paul Solet (Grace). How cool is this? Click here for the full info.

Another List of Goodies.

Sara over at starcostumes.com emailed me a cool link the other day. It's The 10 Greatest (and Campiest) B Horror Movies Ever. While it has the old standbys like The Evil Dead and C.H.U.D. - though Peter Jackson's Braindead is conpsicuously absent - it also had a few titles from the path less travelled. Hell, I'd never even heard of The Chooper and Freez'er, until last week. Check it out here.

Trailer Overflow

A lot of stuff surfaced this week, so I'm putting some of it up today.

First up, is the trailer for the slasher Spirit Camp.



Camp is right, but I find it very hard to say no to a DVD that comes with an autographed pair of panties!

Next, is actually a clip for a sci-fi short called Re-wire courtesy of Twitch. You might recognize star Brandon McGibbon from his recent appearance in Splice.



Hey, guess what? There's a new Puppet Master movie coming out. On the heels of my Full Moon posts last month, is a trailer for Axis Of Evil.



Man, I love that theme music. I believe it's coming out in July sometime. You can also to click here to see a clip from the movie.

Here's a trailer that Quiet Earth posted on Monday for a new UK project called Darkest Day.



As you can see, it's got a LARGE 28 Days Later vibe, but you all know very well that zombies - or some infected variation thereof - equal my attention.

Lastly, below is a newly released trailer for the upcoming Splatterhouse video game.



Okay, that's a load off. See you back here Sunday for Don't Kill The Messenger!