Courtesy Of The Skinner

I'm back online again. Summer has come to its end, and I can finally shoot new scenes again. Living in the lower subarctic means there are no night at summer, dusk just changes into dawn without passing an actual night in between, leaving approximately one hour of at least enough darkness for me to be able to compensate with low exposure.
With that said, there has still been a lot made during these two months since I last updated this blog. Maybe not as much as I could have hoped for, I had an extreme allergic reaction to what I, after far too long, found out was due to mold from a silently leaky sink, making me very sick and wondering what the hell was wrong with me, but though I was far too tired to write any coherent blog-post , I've spent a lot of lime developing the soundscape and editing the footage. Which actually are becoming very impressive in both quantity and, considering it being recorded with a rather unimpressive cellphone, quality!
For a long time I had some difficulty finding a way to reconcile with the rather limited photage, but as I found a new program to replace the horrible built-in app, I learned to use its normally negative aspects as valuable tools for my new style, a style with absolutely no influence from other movies, but based all in what can be done here and now! I absolutely love working this way, you never know what you'll get!!!

We have such sights to show you

I think I might have written about this before, but going through all this material gave me a weird feeling of how much has actually happened during the almost a full year the project has been on.
What I had at the beginning worked for what I needed it for, a short demo of my capabilities as a sound designer, but for a full feature? No dice. I came to the sad realization I had to scrap everything from the very beginning, including the entire original intro of the movie. It pains me, I put a lot of work in it, but it can't be helped. It simple didn't work.
All in all I have had three power outages during the year so far, and during the last one, somewhere in the spring I think, I knew I wasn't quite pleased with a very important part of the intro. When I first recorded it I had never done something like this before, so I had no clue what I was doing. Some things still worked, but how the hell could I ever think looking at a *beeeep*ing door all the way while it's closing was a good idea?
Still beats me, but the first thing I did was replace that scene with a new one. One where I actually acted accordingly.
Already on set I got well pleased with the new scene, and especially with the new lighting and camera-style I developed on the fly. So pleased I scrapped everything I'd done to that point (in the intro, that is), and recorded it all anew.

But that was sometimes in last spring/early summer. Shortly after that I managed to find a small construction site where I treated myself to a little "study visit" in the middle of the night, but it wasn't until my girlfriend (also my sounding board!) and her ex husband cleared their old house that I really got a chance to finally break the involuntary summer-break.
Mind you, during all this time it was only ever me and different kinds of puppets and crude animatronics on picture. I simply didn't know exactly what I wanted, so I waited with recording actors until I did.
Now I do.
This was the first time me and my new assistant, also actor, Lisa Schröder, worked together on this movie! With my mom and dad as drivers we left for the small house and recorded as much photage as we could in a small combination of cellar and crawlspace carved right out of the living rock underneath the house. I was....pleased....mildly put!!!!
She reminded me something tremendously of why I love to work with others! There had always been parts where there had been light of some sort, after all, light is a threat here, but "the other light" had always been stationary ans static as I never had anyone but myself to handle it. Here, I had Lisa! What she helped spawn here was beyond my wildest dreams! During our short stay at this small mold-infested basement we made not only two new scenes - The Skinner's Room and a heavy extension to the previously pretty short Crawlspace, Lisa playing with a prop that wasn't supposed to be a prop ended up in an all new type of Wraith! Also, we managed to catch some animal life to film. First in the movie!
We should've returned for a second session at the same house, but regrettably the stale musty air made me sick again, and the opportunity passed as the new tenants moved in. Well, I'm good anyway, we got everything we really needed :-)

What awaits now is making contact with all the actors we need. Seriously looking forward to that!

/CvanC