Blood Creek Woodsman - September Shoot Pix

Here are a bunch of pictures from the September 2009 shoot for BLOOD CREEK WOODSMAN!


Happy campers Darla Doom and Francis Growth.


One flashlight and two headlights.


Branch through the head rig I made for Darla Doom!


Pair of fake legs I made. I should've taken a picture before I covered it all with foam and t-shirts - it's closet rods and hinges underneath.


Shooting upstairs with Mike on sound and Daren waiting for his close-up!


Shooting the "party house" scene. They are playing a game I made up called Sweet Corn!


Jaime screams for the first time in a movie...and she was great!


Annie performed a fantastic death scene!


Annie and Rob bask in the blood!


Hot chicks...kissing! Nice.


William meets the Blood Creek Woodsman.


Annie and Daren get close for a scene.


Sex and violence.


William splattered against the side of the RV.


Amanda screaming bloody murder!


Another great and bloody death scene in the can!

Blood Creek Woodsman - August Shoot Pix

Here are a bunch of pictures from the August 2009 shoot for BLOOD CREEK WOODSMAN!


Rob Merickel and Bryn Kristi.


Madeline Morgan.


Madeline screams, reflected in blood splatter!


Thanks to Mike and Ward, we had this great police car to use!


Mike Hegg's rig done up as the sheriff's vehicle. Vinyl lettering, a color xerox sheriff's star and a real police car light bar made this look great!


We put this sign on the two police rigs when we were driving them to a location or around town.


Morgan Mayhem ready for some fake blood!


Bryn Kristi and Tom Stedham.


Tom Stedham argues with Jeremiah Benjamin while Michelle Ame Mahoney looks on.


Talking over the next shots with Adam Paris.


Michelle Ame Mahoney and Bryn Kristi beat the snot out of each other!


Tom Stedham takes aim.


Pigging out at The Markum Inn - me with John Bowker, Tom Stedham and Bryn Kristi.


Tom Stedham and Bryn Kristi share a quiet moment.

Thicker Than Water

Rob Merickel and I travelled up to the lovely Markum Inn last Friday night to play extras in a "honky tonk" scene for a local indie vampire flick called THICKER THAN WATER. Things got started about 11 p.m. and we ended up getting home around 4 a.m. It was really nice to not be working like a sleep-deprived dog and worried about every aspect of production! We just relaxed in the bar, had some iced tea and waited to be told where to sit. The director brought the cowboy hats and I kind of like the look as a character type of thing. Maybe I'll have to get myself a decent cowboy hat and have this fella show up in some future project! Thanks to Gary for the invitation and thanks to Eric for the hats and ginger ale! Good luck on the project - can't wait to see it!


Rob, Ward and I, all thinking, "You're not from around here, are ya?"

August Vacation

We traveled up to Seattle to visit friends for a few days in August and we visited crazy pop culture weird stuff store, Archie McPhee.


I love pickles!


I love bacon!


Here is my son with his purchase - a unicorn impaling a mime. Classic. It also comes with a snooty businessman and a hippie to impale.


Here is some awesome lasagna I had down the street from Archie McPhee...with a unicorn.


Darth Vader puts the death grip on me in front of Comics Dungeon during their anniversary sale.


Me and members of the 501st.


We stopped at a used record store called Golden Oldies. Great place crammed with vinyl. I picked up some old Hall & Oates records as well as this rare gem:


Apparently this was some special premium or gift to Canada Dry distributors - a 4-record set of a radio special celebrating H&O's 10 years together. 3 sides are cuts from various albums with the pair providing anecdotes about writing the songs, people they worked with, etc. And Don Imus is the host! The other 5 sides are a concert recording from Montreal. Totally sweet!


We stopped at the world famous Scarecrow Video in Seattle. All I can say is holy cow! Mike was nice enough to take the kids on a long walk while I spent an eternity checking out their gigantic inventory. I rented a dvd-r of the 1978 TV-movie Cotton Candy, directed by Ron Howard and written by Ron and his brother Clint (who also starred, alongside Charles Martin Smith).



For all of it's 1970's trappings, I still dig this movie (likely a lot due to nostalgia) and sure wish Ron would put it out on an official DVD. It was produced by Ron Howard Productions and Major H Productions (which according to Biography.com was a company founded by Howard) as part of a multi-year deal with NBC. Someone in some Internet Movie Database comments said that Disney bought it and has it locked up in their vaults. Who knows?

I've love to see a DVD release of it, with some extras. Ron and Clint and Charles could do a commentary track. Heck, Leslie King (who played the drummer) is still around from what I can tell - she directed a short film back in 2004 and appears to have cowritten a new project that's in development. Here she is in 1979's Gas Pump Girls.




Pretty decent BBQ pulled pork sandwich at a Texas BBQ place.


Then we went to Portland's Oaks Park amusement park with my sister for the first time and it was a blast. This is where they filmed part of the Sasquatch Dumpling Gang, one of my favorite flicks!




That was an awesome corndog.


We rode Big Pink, one of the rides that the characters in the Sasquatch Dumpling Gang rides. It was fun!


Later, we went to the Oregon coast with friends and had a swell time. Here I am hurling some seaweed back to the ocean at the coast and thinking it would be cool to make an H.P. Lovecraft movie someday.

At a pirate-themed shopping mall, I picked up some old VHS tapes including Breeders, the ridiculous sci-fi horror b-movie by Tim Kincaid. Here's a monster shot:




In other August events news, our dog got a haircut.


My son earned his third degree blackbelt. He's only 12! In fact, he is the youngest student to achieve third degree blackbelt at his school. I am constantly impressed.

So now the summer is over. School is cranked back up and I am still trying to finish shooting on BLOOD CREEK WOODSMAN. Getting great performances and bloody kills (like the one below), but it is taking a long time.



After that's all shot and the footage is off to my buddy (and the movie's writer/producer) John for editing, I'll get back to finishing up all of the stuff still on my plate.

Onward!!!

---

Brooke Wilberger, Rest in Peace

I had this flier taped to the door to my garage for years. The apartment complex where she was abducted is just down the road from my house. It was one of those situations where you can't believe something like that has happened in your town.

We screened one of my flicks at a theater at the beginning of August. I'd shot a lot of the movie in my house and I noticed the flier on the door in the background of a few scenes. We'd taken it down only a while back, after Joel Courtney had been extradited to Oregon for a while.

All of the information released by the DA thus far adds up to the location of Brooke's remains being anywhere from 10 to 20 minutes from my house. It's eerie.

The first thing I thought when I heard the news was that her family would be able to finally lay her to rest.

Time is Flying

I cannot believe summer is over!!!!! Geez louise it went by in a flash. My kid's back to school next week so my nights will soon be booked up with helping with homework when not occupied by Boy Scouts or other activities.

Had a good time visiting Seattle, then Portland, then Bend over the last few weekends. Will post some vacation photos soon.

Still need to call my website host and see if they've been able to track down the bandwidth issues with the drsquid.net site.

Movie-wise have mostly been busy planning the next round of shooting for BLOOD CREEK WOODSMAN. May not fit it all into September, but hopefully can get everything done by the first part of OCTOBER.

Heard that Luc Bernier and Isabelle Stephen finished shooting the "BeetleManiac" segment for TRULY DREADFUL TALES. I have another package ready to go out for a segment and need to get a monster costume done so my friend Rob Merickel can take a crack at the last segment for it.

Ridiculously busy so pardon the sporatic postings here. After October, things should settle down a tad and I can hopefully start posting some real progress reports from all these projects!!!!

Deadly Premonitions World Premiere!

We held the DEADLY PREMONITIONS world premiere on Friday, August 7, 2009 at the Northern Lights Theater Pub in Salem, Oregon. This capped off a week of shooting with Tom Stedham on the BLOOD CREEK WOODSMAN. Tom had flown out from Alabama so it was extra swell to have him out for the premiere!


Tom says, "Hey! Look at me on the big screen!"

I started shooting this movie back in the summer of 2005 when Tom had offered to come out to Oregon to star in a project. It was the only thing I had close to a finished script for, so I quickly fleshed it out and we shot for a quick 4 days. Over the next two years, I shot the rest of the movie here and there with local folks. After a good six months or so of editing, my buddy Mike helped with some post-production and DVD authoring stuff. What we screened at the premiere was a 99% done version - just needing some color work on one scene and a bit of sound work.


Sabrina, Tom and the rest of the crowd waiting for the show to begin!

We had sent Amanda ahead to buy a block of tickets earlier in the day. Unfortunately, one page of the theater's website said 9 p.m. and the other said 9:30 p.m.! So there was a whole gaggle of people outside in the parking lot waiting for their tickets, but it didn't really matter because I had the copies (one plus a black-up disk) of the movie! The projectionist was pissed because I guess no one had told him he needed to set up the digital projector - I had arranged the screening through some local film festival folks as I have with all of my other screenings there.

The film fest guy showed up just before the show and then everything went great.


Well, here we are - the cast of DEADLY PREMONITIONS! Me, Darla Doom, Toni Draggon, Alexandra Paris (showing off), Rob Merickel, Barb White, Amira, Tom Stedham, Morgan Mayhem, Robert J. Olin, Michelle 'Ame' Mahoney, Terry and Jerry Eckert.

During my intro, I had suggested that the movie's drinking game was to drink whenever there were boobs on the screen. Well, boy did everyone get into that! They started holding their glasses in the air and counting down when they even thought that boobs were coming. Since most of the cast were there, along with their friends, and there was lots of beer, there was a lot of yelling and cheering whenever someone appeared on screen or did something cool or sexy on screen. When Darla and Michelle's make out scene came on, the place nearly exploded!


(back) Toni Draggon, Me, Darla Doom; (front) Michelle 'Ame' Mahoney, Tom Stedham


Amanda Bounds can't get enough of that Tough Tom Stedham!


Amanda and Morgan were inspired by Darla's strangulation death scene!


Others might say that there are seven boobs in this photo, but I would never say such a thing about my buddy Tom.


Mike Hegg and Rob Merickel check for rain inside the pool hall/bar after the screening.

It was a mind-blowing experience and afterwards most of us headed across the parking lot to a bar/pool hall to hang out and chat. I can't thank everyone enough for coming to the show - it was a great way to end a grueling week!

Much To Do, Much To Do

So it's been a while and I have been very busy.

Last week Tom Stedham flew out from Alabama to star in a horror flick called THE BLOOD CREEK WOODSMAN. John Bowker wrote and produced it and he asked me to shoot and direct it. Rob Merickel came on board to play the deputy as well as do make-up and special effects and my BLOODSUCKING REDNECK VAMPIRES partner Mike Hegg picked up a sweet new HD camera and allowed us to use it for the shoot.

I was a crazy few weeks of planning, storyboarding, asking for favors, borrowing and buying props, designing logos, costumes, etc. Then it was a crazy week of shooting. I totally blew the scheduling and we were behind from day one. We had to have a bit of a pow wow and thankfully a few actors and actresses could make it for an additional day. We also pushed even more stuff off to sometime in September, adding to several sequences we had already planned to pick up then.



Great performances and some real magic captured on tape. Life has also been busy at home and work has been a killer, both before I took the week off and now that I have returned.


We capped off the week with a premiere of DEADLY PREMONITIONS at the Northern Lights Theater Pub in Salem, Oregon. It was extra special because Tom Stedham could be there for it, being out from Alabama for the movie shoot and all. We screened a nearly perfect DVD-r, that only really needed one scene's lighting tweaked and some sound fixed. Everyone said the thing looked finished to them. Because of those last few tweaks, I didn't have copies for everyone, so will have to take care of that in the coming months.

Several folks were taking pics during the shoot, so I'll try to look at them as well as my own and then put a bunch up here on the blog.

You may notice my snazzy blog design is gone - I had some bandwidth issues with my website host, so have taken a bunch of files down temporarily so they can track traffic and see if it's just someone hotlinking to some of my stuff or if by some weird fluke I am actualy getting TONS of traffic to the site. In the meantime, I've reverted back to this green motif that I like quite a bit.

Going to be travelling a bit in the next few weeks as well as getting back to some of my other movie projects and planning for the September shoots for BLOOD CREEK WOODSMAN.

More soon...