Third week of prep - The Pale Figures
Started the third week of prep today. Nice day.
Met with Lau about the temple set. She’s coming up with some great ideas for that thing and it’s really going to be crazy once we get it built. It’s literally going to be a bunch of cramp-ass tunnels in the middle of a field. And we’ll be inside of it. We somehow have to light it, get the actors in there and find a way to shoot it. I want the camera to feel like it’s right in there as Melissa crawls in throughout that thing. It will be in there, actually. It’s going to be sweet when we pull it off.
Met with William, too. He had some fabric samples for the outfit of the man who is lighting the King of Hell on fire. Four the AD came up with the idea of making this a bit of a ceremony, an old man with a really long pole reaching up and lighting the King of Hell statue high off the ground. Cool shit.
Also showed me some t-shirt samples for an early scene. He’s designing a really ugly tourist t-shirt that Yul gives the driver, Ping, at the beginning of the film. I told him to turn his good design sense off and give me an abomination of a shirt. But he can’t help himself, the shirts still look too cool. Make them uglier, louder, more annoying.
Emailed with Tony and Kent last week, too. I put the temp score and some local music we recorded live at the Hungry Ghost festival last week up for them to download and Kent flipped at the local music. He’s going to try to layer it into their music. That shit is going to be tight.
And the work on the Pale Figures continues at break-neck speed. Larry and his crew are molding actors’ teeth daily and they’re now beginning the sculpting work on the creatures’ bad set of choppers. Getting molds has been a bit challenging, though. Let’s just say LISTERINE has been brought in and leave it at that.
Four continues the search for Pale Figures. There isn’t a day that passes without seeing shirtless young men acting like animals in front of the camera in the office. It’s funny as shit sometimes. We’re all sitting there trying to work, the most horrible human sounds coming from the outside hallway. We just sit there, just another day at the office.
Some of them are really great and are already scary, even without rehearsing and the make-up. Some of them can’t get the retarded zombie walk out of their system, no matter how many times we tell them that it’s lame. Some people just can’t get in touch with the cannibalistic, humanoid, underground dweller inside of them.
So starting my shot sheet tomorrow. It’s as far as I’m going to take the storyboarding this time around. I want to make sure I know what I want to get out of each scene but I want to stay very loose this time around. This sheet will let me troubleshoot and make sure I have all the tools I need on the set to get the job done. It’s scary but it’s liberating as hell. It leaves a lot of room for shit to happen on the set and that’s the way I want to make this film.
Then more meetings tomorrow afternoon. It’s mostly a night shoot, so one night this week we’re going to scout some of the locations at night and see how conditions are out there during the dark hours. Should be loads of fun.
Dan Karcher is working on a holding page for the website with links to the blogs and junk. I sent him an image, some music and a cool idea last week. I’m going to record a creepy voice speaking in Cantonese over here and send that to him, too. I can’t wait to see what that fool comes up with. If you’re not familiar with his work, check this shit out and surf around a bit. He’s the man.
All right, off to bed. Peace and love from Hong Kong.
-ed