John was in town last night and we went to John's house to block out scenes for the first couple days of shooting. Thankfully, the set-up of the room is different than I remembered from shooting there before so there are a couple of perfect spots for me to plant the camera and get all the needed elements in (doorway, bed, closet, window) without breaking the line. We also decided that instead of cheating the two people under the bed with a set-up in the garage, we would just set them on the the floor and use an extreme close-up shot. We blocked out stuff in the other bedroom and hallway and then into the garage. That's going to be tight because there are scenes where there are about 10 people in there including zombie soldiers. We pretty much decided that we'll shoot everything looking in from the garage door.
John has gotten a lot of response to the OSU Barometer ad - unfortunately it's all people wanting to be zombies, not the main characters. John said he's going to let it go another week and if he can't get any hot college co-eds to cast, he'll start talking to some of the people we've worked with in the past. He'll basically be asking people to take a week off of work with only three weeks notice, os it may be pretty rough. As I said before, though, somehow these things tend to come together at the last minute.
Platoon of the Dead Production Diary - October 2
John called me last night and told me he had two women and a guy interested in playing main parts in the movie. He planned to be in town next Tuesday and was hoping to meet them all with me and have them do some readings. This morning, I got an e-mail from Tom asking me for the specific dates so he could get his place tickets. I guess maybe he couldn't get a hold of John. I e-mailed him the dates and then dropped John a note to let him know what I'd told Tom. After lunch, I got a voicemail from John asking me to tell Tom to hold off on getting tickets as John said there may be a problem with him getting the time off of work for the shoot! He said he'd call me tonight and sounded really upset. I'll be at a shoot for DEADLY PREMONITIONS for much of the night, so might not hear until tomorrow. One thing is for sure, these movie projects never seem to come together smoothly!
Platoon of the Dead Production Diary - October 4
I shot scenes for DEADLY PREMONITIONS with a friend of a friend, Morgan Mayhem, at Marie's house on Tuesday night. She was a real trooper and is totally interested in maybe being a part of PLATOON OF THE DEAD as she loves zombies and horror movies. It was also cool to shoot at her house as kind of a trial run before PLATOON. John called and basically he's not going to be able to take that many days off in a row. So believe it or not, John has to leave in the middle of the shoot, make the three-plus hour drive with snow in the pass back home, work for one lousy day, then drive back over for the rest of the shoot. He offered two solutions: give everyone else the day off from the shoot and combine those scenes on to other days, or make me director for that day. Since we already have 12 and 13-hour days scheduled, I told John there was just no way to get the whole movie done taking that day off without chopping things out of the script. So I agreed to direct the day that he is gone. Luckily it will be only the third day of the 9-day stretch, but there is a lot of scenes to cover, it's all outside and I bet it will be raining. It will be a challenge but I'm looking forward to that challenge.
Meanwhile John is coming to town next Tuesday and is setting up a face-to-face meeting with some of the people who've responded to the newspaper ad about playing some of the major roles.
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