The blood cannon |1:32 PM|
The damn food coloring, it's rather tenacious in its grip on my skin. Who'd have thought a dye would be so good at changing the color of something?! Anyhow, among all the other duties and tasks last night, I perfected the compressor tank/hose/valve system to launch blood sprays for the movies. I won't bore you with the technical details, but I'll mention the Jell-O. I made cherry Jell-O, and squeezed into a...well paste doesn't work. Mush? I "smooshed" it until it had a lower viscousity. That solved some of the spray and splatter issues. The big problems were directing the spray, and getting enough volume of gunk out during a shot. We'd been using a funnel as the resevoir for the blood, which I replaced with surgical tubing. This also functioned as a barrel. Now, all of the blood material was acted on by the air pressure. Instead of 80PSI, we could get an incredible shot with just 20PSI in the tank. Awesome. The difference was staggering. Instead of a short range glop, we had a torrent of blood rocket out and hit with a great deal of force. In fact, we can't safely point this thing at people's faces. I call it the blood cannon.
I wish I had some video to post, but that will have to wait until later tonight.
Blood and Auditions |9:41 AM|
We're getting down to the wire for various movie related deadlines. Filming can't start (by contest rules) until 7pm Friday, but we still have preparations to do.
We had some auditions/screentests the past two nights, and we have some folks that show promise. We're still hauling a couple more people in front of the camera tonight (with any luck).
Location scouting is pretty much complete, we've got some extremely interesting places to film. We've got creepy houses, an enclosed boiler room, unusual forest areas, and this frightening basement with stone walls, and a hole that goes...somewhere. (A side note, a basement in central Texas would have required such incredible labor, dynamite most likely, they're quite rare due to the granite/clay makeup of the earth around here)
Right about now I'm working on script outlines based on the crew's ideas. I'm miserable at dialog, but I can give a skeleton to the stories and we can flesh them out when we know our sub-genre. After auditions we were going to kick some ideas around, but I missed out on that meeting. I should be getting the notes later today. I wanted to stay last night a little later, but obligations (work, etc) took priority. Some crazed film maker I am.
Today is final testing of the blood sprayer I've designed/built/purchased. This consists of a 10 gallon air tank pumped to 80 PSI with a lead in hose coming off of the valve. A pushbutton valve at the other end is the control, and from there a funnel or length of surgical tubing is the resevoir for blood/gore. Later this afternoon I'm going to try adding diced jellow to the mix, to see if it can give some much needed density in the tube, without clogging or making overly visible "chunks". So far I've been proud of that bit of technical work. If I can video capture blasting Joe with it for the first time, I'll share it with you blog readers.