Lets shoot this !@#$er!

At last I have finished another scene for The Vampire from Beyond the Crypt! Scene 7. I really should have finished this scene long ago, but Vampire seems to be turning into the project that never ends. Last night I knew that I needed to finish the last shot, I had been putting it off quite a while, first there was a family reunion that killed about three days of productivity, after returning from that I found 2 new books I had ordered had arrived, “Chris Gore's Ultimate Film Festival Survival Guide” and “The Complete Independent Movie Marketing Handbook” and got sidetracked reading them (for the record I can highly recommend both to independent film makers.) It was getting later in the day and I knew I should shoot the shot, but my brother Greg came over and we chatted over wine, after he left I really regretted drinking the wine because I was getting tired and just wanted to go to bed but I had put the shot off long enough. To combat my drowsiness I went out and bought some caffeinated beverages, I really should have just made a pot of coffee but for some reason I hate making coffee at night.

I had mostly set the shot up the day before, I was about to try a new technique, it was where you looked the camera into a mirror so you could get an close angle where the camera could not get to, however when I was looking at a test frame I realized that the mirror was creating a ghosting, this is because the reflective surface was separated by a plane of glass and the glass was creating a semitransparent double, this would not do! So I had to re-frame the shot, I hate doing that, setting up shots is the part of animation I like the least, what I wouldn't do for a DP. The shot was just about the hardest shot I've done in the movie, I don't think I really realized this until I started, but I had to deal with getting up, hair movement, arms swinging, making a clay dress look like a cloth dress and a mopey walk; now that's a tall order! To my surprise the shot turned out rather well, I was convinced that it would be good enough to keep but somewhat sub par, but I was quite pleased with how it turned out. I guess that uncertainty and fear is part of the reason I love animation, it's not steady or safe, you can mess up and have to completely redo it, but you won't know until you finish the shot, and it's the thrill of that suspense that I really love.