Headknocking

I put on my director pants, last night. Man, it was fun.

With the help of Chris Cranford of Jones Productions, Duke Boyne and Allen Williams, we managed to get some awesome slow-motion footage of guys in motorcycle gear hitting shit against greenscreen for the book trailer of my novel, This Dark Earth, currently out at major publishers. I'm going to composite all this with blood spatter, courtesy of Video Copilot's Action Essentials library, distending zombie heads, paper textures, and graphic text elements.

I'm really excited about this project now. It's growing larger in my mind as we speak.

Those are the directors pants. They don't fit so good. Here I am telling Allen his motivation in this scene. "Kill zombies. Hit them in the head with the bat."

"But why aren't we shooting them?"

"Because."

"Because?"

"Because these zombies are blind and trigger on sound and smell. If you fire a gun, you'll just draw more of them. And ammunition doesn't grow on trees. It's a murderhole. It's industrialized extermination of the zombies. Cheap way to do that is baseball bats. Crowbars. Shit like that."

"Still seems stupid not to shoot them."

Sigh.

"That's not how we're filming this one."

"Are they fast zombies? Or slow?"

"Oh, for the love of...don't get started on that. They're fucking SLOW zombies! The classic fucking Romero zombie."

"Romero's zombies could see. And the survivors used guns."

"Just do the goddamned take before I beat you to death myself with this bat."

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There's so much to do, though. I have to find two skinny people, a male and female, willing to do multiple takes of shambling on the greenscreen. That way I can dupe them and make it look like there's hundreds. I also need to get multiple photos (or video) of grasping hands, and footage of gnashing teeth. I think.

A few stills of a trestle bridge like the one featured in This Dark Earth.

Okay. The project is definitely growing. But in a good way, I think.

Not gonna be finished next week, Stacia.

A little promo I threw together. It's looking a bit Mad Max-ish. Not that that's a bad thing, except for the Mel Gibson angle.