Filming Begins

Preduction

After the long two hour drive out to this dilapidated visual treasure, we decided that the best thing to start filming was the arrival and entrance to the house.

As you can see from the photos it looks as if this scene takes place during the day. It does not. My new and educated(?) cameraman told me that we can film 'day for night'. This technique has been done in hundreds of films to save money and time. The trick is that you have to film with the sun at your back and show very little sky. Then once the aperture is set on the camera the processed film would look as if all the action is happening at night. Cool! Unfortunately since my cameraman was only a student, as I, we had completely forgotten about this little trick. Look again at the picture above and you can see that we're filming right into the Sun!

I guess the only excuse that we could use looking back at it now is that it was so damn cold out there! We were all out in the middle of the flat farmlands filming a movie in a place where the only heat around was from inside the car. Once we would finish a shot all who were out of the car would rush back in to warm up. I swear, the temperature had to be at least 5 with a wind chill (if they had one back then) around -20.

We were shooting fast and furious to finish a soon as we could just so we could get out of this frozen iceland. All major exterior shots were completed except for a few that would contain our monster.

That's right, monster. See according to the story I wrote these teens come across a werewolf of some kind that was trapped way below the farmhouse many years ago. Now you may be wondering where a guy like me was going to get a werewolf to be in my film. That was easy. Makeup and fur!

I was always good at makeup creations so the face was no problem. The major thing was we needed a body. Since it was going to be a 'dark' film it really didn't need to be that great, just furry. We weren't going for that clothed werewolf look, but the big beast kind.

Perry jumped at the chance to portray this beast and that was cool. It was also cool that his mom agreed to stitch up a furry costume for us.

The face of the creature was not your basic werewolf face seen around that time in films. I was always upset that after a guy turns into a wolf the dog like snout would always disappear. So I created out of Morticians wax and putty a snout for Perry. Not a long one but big enough to look cool on a profile.

Another added feature were the little red LED lights that were placed in the makeup for the beasts eyes. The wires were hidden in the hair and strung along to Perry's back that led to a small pack of two 9 volt batteries. It looked awesome!

I should mention at this time that unfortunately no pictures were taken of Perry in this outfit. In fact the only pictures that were taken of this project were the ones on this first day of shooting. Exterior shots only. I think this was again caused by the reason that we were all just too damn cold out there. Our minds were just set at 'Let's just get it done'.

The only existing shots of this beast creation is on 16mm film. It will soon be transferred to video and then at least I will have some video scans of my film up here. Until then please just use your imagination.

It's also something to note that my actors had to really be somewhat professional on this shoot. They had to imagine what this beast looked like just like you are now.

I told them that most of these 'monster' movies use effects or blue screen the same way. The actor has to react to basically nothing.

These guys really had to act, and they did a pretty good job at it too.

This first day of shooting was pretty well on it's way. We planned to do it all 'Day For Night' like I said so we didn't bring any lights. Once that sun went down that was it. It was then way back on that long haul to the Northside to drop off Ann, then back to Columbia to drop off the film into the process drop box.

That first day we realized we had a major problem.

We only shot the exteriors, just a small portion of the story, and we had already used up two rolls of film.

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Copyright ©1998 Roger B. Domian