My Celebrity Look-alikes

MyHeritage: Celebrity Collage - Family search

3:13 PM - 1 Comments - 2 Kudos - Add Comment

My vote for the harshest movie review line ever

From IMDb.com's recap of the WE ARE MARSHALL reviews:

" If the public reacts to We Are Marshall (starring Matthew McConaughey and Matthew Fox) the way many critics have, the film will come crashing down like the plane that carried 75 Marshall University players to their deaths in 1970."

9:26 PM - 4 Comments - 6 Kudos - Add Comment

DIE & LET LIVE PREMIERE - a call to arms!

Hey folks, Just wanted to let everyone know that the world premiere of DIE & LET LIVE was an outstanding success with 191 tickets sold! I'd like to thank everyone who came and were able to bear the lack of parking due to the Girl Talk show at 123.

Now, it's time for me to ask a favor. As far as I could tell, people seemed to enjoy the movie. Now, without any kind of real marketing campaign, the movie's doomed to obscurity unless people actually start talking about it. So, if you wouldn't mind, why don't you be a shameless whore for me and tell all your friends about DIE & LET LIVE?

Just send all of your friends to our YouTube page (http://www.youtube.com/user/iwcfilms) and show them the clips that are availible from the film. Pimp out the D&LL myspace (http://www.myspace.com/dieandletlive)

We'll hopefully be doing some screenings again soon, if not at the Warner, then just about anywhere we can set up a TV or projector.

ACTUALLY, we're playing at The Hatchet Jack Film Festival on December 30th at the Metropolitan Theatre on High Street in Morgantown. There will be a short film competition, a band, DIE & LET LIVE, and HATCHET JACK from Eddie "Mayor of Rivesville" Mahalick. Tickets are $10 and I forget the times. Whoops.

8:22 PM - 0 Comments - 0 Kudos - Add Comment

what's been up with me.

Yeah, I just felt like finally doing another blog.

This has been quite a week, beginning with nearly last-minute promotion for the DIE & LET LIVE premiere and culminating in the death of my grandfather, Argle Channell, who passed away earlier this morning at Mon General Hospital.  I feel like I should really say more about this, but I don't know... I just don't feel comfortable about it.  :-/

Promotion for the D&LL premiere was in the Dominion Post and Times WV today, and I believe we will be getting an article in the Daily Athenaeum tomorrow.  I just got off of a cell phone podcast with some folks who did a little film called DESOLATION with D&LL star Trent Haaga.  And there's fliers on just about every bulletin board, trash can, window, pizza box, etc. our little promotional army could tape them to.

Yeah, so... tomorrow night.  Midnight.  At the Warner Theatre... come see DIE & LET LIVE for five bucks.  Make a man happy, will ya?

10:25 PM - 2 Comments - 2 Kudos - Add Comment

DIE & LET LIVE HAS WRAPPED!

Yes folks, the words that I've been wanting to hear for the past six or seven months have finally come:  DIE & LET LIVE is finished!

I spent the past week getting the final little bits of sound, music, and ADR and this weekend patching everything together and authoring our first small batch of screener DVDs.  Keep your eyes peeled for an announcement about the premiere and other news!

8:05 PM - 4 Comments - 6 Kudos - Add Comment

DIE & LET LIVE: updates and an EXCLUSIVE SNEAK PEAK!

First off, HOLY SHIT WE MADE FANGORIA:

And now, for the updates:

9:21 PM - 1 Comments - 2 Kudos - Add Comment

DIE & LET LIVE - finally, some more updates

I've been putting off actually giving everyone somewhat amusing production stories from DIE & LET LIVE since before our big zombie extra night.  But I just discovered that my 10:30am class was cancelled (which I knew, but promptly forgot), so I thought I'd use my hour off to sit down here at the WVU library and share what's been happening with the movie since August 4th.

First off, our zombie extra night was overwhelmingly successful, which was surprising, since I was almost positive that dealing with 30 extras and getting them all in makeup would be both time consuming and incredibly difficult.  Luckily, Zane enlisted the help of the staff of The Illusive Skull, Fairmont and Morgantown's infamous Halloween costume and makeup shop, which made getting our extras into makeup go much faster.  They also donated full-face prosthetics from their own collections.  My sister, Tammy, and her fiancee, Nino Mancino (whom you might remember as Sex Offender Marty from Raising The Stakes) came with a van full of Nino's family members, most of whom ended up with those prosthetics glued on to their face.

Once they started putting on the prosthetics, Tammy came up to me and asked if she could avoid having one put on.  I told her that I wasn't even planning to use them, so it was just something extra the makeup team were doing and that it wasn't required.  About ten minutes later, I came in the house at the kennel where the makeup was being applied to find her having a full-face prosthetic applied.  Apparently the prosthetic fit her face better than any one else who came, so she unfortunately had to be a trooper and be forced to have foam latex glued to her face with medical adhesive.  I can't count how many times I heard her say "you owe me" or "look what I do for my siblings" and other varients.

About the same time, I was figuring out lighting with Eddie Mahalick (director of the upcoming film Hatchet Jack, the honorable mayor Rivesville, and the guy who helped light on our first day of shooting as well), I saw Josh Lively's car come down the driveway.  I had been aware that Josh and Jordan were planning to go to a party before the shoot, but didn't really think much of it, as long as they showed up on time.  But when I saw Jordan's cousin Jakob carrying Jordan, who appeared to be barely conscious, out of the car and then promptly dropping him on the pavement and leaving him there, where he laid for at least 20 minutes, I knew we were in for a bit of a problem.

Apparently, Jordan had gotten completely trashed at the party, despite the warnings of Josh who was staying sober for the drive and the shoot.  They got him up and carried him up to the porch, where he passed atop a stack of empty pizza boxes.  The top pizza box was wide open and Jordan's head rested in a large grease stain for a couple hours, much to the enjoyment of the extras waiting to either be put in makeup or for me to get all the technical stuff ready to shoot.

I remember telling everyone, "Yeah, I think it's hilarious right now, but when the sun goes down, it'll probably stop being funny."

It was already dark and I needed to start shooting something as soon as possible, so I ran in to check how much longer makeup would be.  Zane gave me the horrible line "Uh.... I don't know" so I just decided to go ahead and start shooting the scenes where zombies start to approach, since we didn't need the whole crowd.  We needed to get them a bit more bloody, so I grabbed the bottle of spray blood and Nips and I went to town making our first extras as bloody as possible.  When the bottle was empty, we soon discovered that we had just used the entire night's spray blood supply on about 10 zombies.  Oops.  We still had enough karo syrup, though, so things worked out okay.

Even though I thought working with that many people would be a tedious task, it turned out to be probably one of the easiest shoots we've ever had.  Everyone was very cooperative and I actually had a crew, as opposed to just me running camera, Zane doing makeup, and someone holding the boom pole (up until our beat up used Sennheiser met it's maker after getting lost and then found in the bushes outside after several days of rain).  We got some great footage of the zombies outside of the gate and then it was time to shoot the remaining deaths of the main characters.

Of course, that required waking up Jordan from his alcoholic slumber.  When he woke up, he was still drunk and was so confused that he thought he was still in Morgantown at first and couldn't remember how he ended up in Fairmont, yet alone that he had to be in the movie.  What made this even worse was that he had lines of dialogue, had to be thrown into the pool, and then had to be killed by a zombie in the pool.

Even though it took longer to shoot than any sequence of the film, my previous claims that Jordan's drunken stupor would stop being funny once we needed him on set ended up being completely untrue.  If anything, it was funnier.  The bystanding extras got to be entertained by us trying to get a decent line delivery and Jordan's continuing incompetence.  I'd start rolling camera, shout "action", and he'd promptly say "Wait... what am I doing again?"  Another hold up was when his life jacket came undone and he was unable to get it latched again, resulting in makeup artist Brian West having to help him ("Hold on... my life vest is coming off.  I can't do it.  Can I just have it coming off?  Is that okay?  Oh wait... hold on... this guy's got it.  He's better at it than me.").

After we were done with our extras, it was down to the dirtiest part of the shoot.  Despite my intentions of not using any animal parts for effects in this movie (for the simple reason that they smell bad and I didn't want to ask anyone to touch them), Zane went ahead and got a whole cooler full of various cow parts from a butcher for a scene where zombies rip open one of the party guests' stomach.  Apparently, he had to dig through three large barrels of cow entrails in the 100 degree heat to get the parts.  Since I still stood by the latter of my concerns for the cast, I made him find the people that were going to be handling the rancid animal intestines.  It ended up being him in a prosthetic and much to both of our surprises, Latisha Kriston.  In fact, I'm still in awe that she volunteered to help out that effect.

But I gotta agree with Zane, it added a shitload of production value.

From there, we've just been doing small pickup shoots to get the movie done as soon as possible, the highlight of which is the Vietnam flashback that Smalls has when remembering how far back he and Benny go.  Trust me, it'll all make sense.

August 11th-13th, we traveled to Hunt Valley, MD to help get the word out about the movie at Horrorfind Weekend, my personal favorite horror con.  We distributed about 300 fliers at the convention, which lead to my personal favorite shameless promotion stunt of my guerilla promotion career.  The Hunt Valley Marriot puts out large coolers of water for the convention, so for a gag, I taped one of our fliers to a cooler and then put a piece of masking tape above it which read "FREE WATER COMPLIMENTS OF:"  Amazingly, the flier stayed up for all of Saturday, the busiest day of the convention, even after several refills from the hotel staff.

Also on Saturday, we were lucky enough to get our trailer screened on the big screen TV at the Lionsgate booth.  Please take note that this DOES NOT mean that Lionsgate has anything to do with Die & Let Live, we just got lucky and talked to the right people.

And, if you haven't already done so, check out THE OFFICIAL DIE & LET LIVE MYSPACE, which has the aforementioned trailer: http://www.myspace.com/dieandletlive.  The trailer's been covered on Fangoria.com and Troma posted a news bulletin about it.  It pretty accurately represents the teen romance satire moments of the movie, as well as provides a nice reel of some of the best gory moments, so be sure to czech it out.

As of now, we're VERY close to being finished with the film.  We have about two or three pickup shoots left and then I have to finish post-production work.  Considering the fact I just started college at WVU and got a job working at the Warner Theater on High Street in Morgantown, it may be a slight bit longer than expected, but I'm hoping to have the film done sometime this month and hopefully have a premiere in October.  Keep your eyes peeled, bitches.

Now, I have class in about 25 minutes, so I'm out.

7:29 AM - 2 Comments - 4 Kudos - Add Comment

DIE & LET LIVE - pics and shiite

For starters, we need zombies tomorrow night (August 4th).  If you can make it and are interested, message me.

Now, I'm feeling generous, so here's some pics:

7:21 PM - 3 Comments - 6 Kudos - Add Comment

DIE & LET LIVE - fuck the rain, man

We had set our date for the big zombie sequences for July 28th.  We planned on shooting as much zombie action (most of which is in the end of the film) that night, to prevent from having to continually call back extras.  We had been telling people for weeks about this date, to make sure we had enough extras.

Then at 11am, I was awoken by a call from my sister's boyfriend, Nino Mancino, who was bringing us a lot of extras.  The first thing he asks is:

"So, are you still doing this stuff, since it's supposed to rain all day?"

I looked outside, to see it downpouring.  I checked the forecast, only to discover that there were scattered thunderstorms scheduled for all night.

After calling Zane and freaking out, we eventually decided it'd be best to call off shooting, because if we got 20-30 extras in makeup and couldn't shoot, we'd be wasting a lot of money.  I was worried, because it started to look like things were going to clear up, but I still didn't want to risk running this movie overbudget and pissing people off after covering them with makeup.

Then I get a call from Zack Boyce... he tells me that this weekend was the last one he'd have free until September, due to several weddings coming up next month.  He'd still be free during the weekdays and since we only needed to shoot one last scene with him and Ashley Goddard, we could just do it one night during the week.

When I pass this idea by Ashley, I found out that weekdays aren't good for her at all.  If we were going to shoot their scene, we'd have to do it that night.  So, with worries of weather still looming, we decided to go ahead and shoot one scene.  And since it was Ashley's death scene, we at least had the advantage of spending more time on the effects.

To be quite honest, I felt pretty bad for Ashley.  This was the first time she saw Zane and I discussing effects and gore and I'm almost positive we freaked her out a bit (especially considering the amount of times she said "Okay, I'm really scared now" during the shoot).  We were just going to do our regular blood-filled-condoms effects, but then Ashley managed to sign her death warrant by jokingly saying "Can we have him bite my ear off?"

One ear prosthetic, a jar of ultra slime, fake blood, some toilet paper and about an hour later, she got just that.  We had already done one bite effect, so she was covered in karo syrup and about the time we started to do the ear effect, she had to keep the goopy-ultra-slime concoction on her ear for about four takes.  Around the second take, I could tell by the look on her face the amount of uncomfortable pain that we were putting her through, so I was trying to get shit done as quickly as possible. 

You know, when you torture your friends with fake blood and makeup, it's incredibly fun.  When you do it to someone who's been volunteering her time for the past two months (for only the pitiful amount of gas money I can provide) who quite frankly wasn't prepared for the abuse, then you start to feel guilty.

But the footage looks incredible.  And to tantilize you, here's a screen cap:

And for everyone who was set to be a zombie, we've rescheduled the zombie extras night to August 4th.  Then, we're wrapping up our Book N Bean scenes on August 5th.  After a bunch of pickup shoots, we'll hopefully have a rough cut done pretty soon.

Oh, and for the record, it didn't rain at all Friday night.

10:56 PM - 2 Comments - 4 Kudos - Add Comment

DIE & LET LIVE - more updates

Well, we're still moving along on shooting DIE & LET LIVE, though not without problems.  A few nights ago, we shot some more zombie scenes (and were forced to reshoot a couple pickup shots, since one of our actresses had changed her haircut) and a couple of small pickups with the main cast.  About the time we started to shoot the effects, we managed to somehow disrupt a hive of yellow-jackets and I was stung about five times.  Once it was all over, I discovered one had crawled up my shirt when it stung me.  I ended up having to strip down to my boxers to make sure no more bees had gotten in my clothes.

Following that ordeal, we shot some quick scenes with Sarah at the Book N Bean, since we needed to wrap up as much of her scenes as possible before she went to Ohio for two weeks.  Not much of a story, but we did go see a midnight screening of Clerks II afterwards.  Everyone, do yourself a favor and go see it... Chasing Amy is now my second favorite Kevin Smith film.

Then Friday night, we managed to shoot all but two of the scenes we had left that do not involve zombies or extras.  Amazingly, it did not rain, considering the fact the forecast called for scattered thunderstorms until at least 9pm.  When I discovered this, I just about had a nervous breakdown, since I'm aiming to be near-completion by August.  But hey, everything pretty much turned out alright.  Among the scenes shot this night was the long-anticipated makeout scene between Josh and Ashley and a shot of Matt Coffman being thrown in the pool that probably won't make the final cut (but it was fun to shoot anyway).

Hopefully, we'll be picking up the scenes we missed on Friday this Tuesday night.  And Friday the 28th will be our most elaborate shoot to date... I'm incredibly worried.  We have another Book N Bean shoot on the 30th and once that's over with, principle photography on DIE & LET LIVE will be complete!

Then we just have to figure out how the hell we can afford some of the second unit scenes... anyone have any soapbox derby cars we can use?

5:35 PM - 1 Comments - 2 Kudos - Add Comment