In October 2005 I was a pretty miserable bastard. I’d moved back to New York from Dublin just in time to catch an Air Tran flight down to Pascagoula, MI on the Katrina-, and FEMA-ravaged Gulf Coast. I worked with the Red Cross for three weeks, and on my day off I found myself wandering along the beach in Biloxi. It looked like a yard sale gone wrong, with whole living rooms and home offices buried in the sand. A gambling boat had ridden up onto shore and crashed into the side of a hotel. One of my most vivid memories was of an A-frame apartment building. You’d look at the top two floors and think to yourself, ‘Gee, nice place to live’ and then your eyes would wander down to the bottom three stories. And they were just gone.

That’s what inspired me to do the film. Life’s too short to not try to do something you love.

The Story

Not much to tell here. I had always wanted to write a scene where a guy gets eaten by demonic breasts, and one in which an intestine gets yanked out of somebody’s ass by a hot tub gone haywire. Being rather broke, I knew that the one thing I had going in my favor was the availability of a good location in Hampton Bays. My brother-in-law had his bachelor party out there. The rest basically boiled down to arithmetic and close study of Robert McKee’s book ‘Story’. Film school folks may snicker, but McKee’s book really helped keep me focused on telling the story. Like it or hate it, I doubt that anybody’s going to sleep through Bachelor Party in the Bungalow of the Damned.

The Script

I started by laying out the major sequences on index cards. Originally there was no bartender, just a menacing little girl on a tricycle who was eventually going to run down Sammy and Chuck. During pre-production it became clear that the Suffolk County Film Commission was never going to return my phone calls and as a result I was never going to get permission to film on a street in Hampton Bays, I had to drop the scene and come up with something else. Luckily, Gregg (Sammy) knew the owner of Uncle Sam’s in Hicksville, NY and we were able to shift the scene indoors. And to top it all off, Nathan Faudree just knocked the rather skimpy role of the bartender right out of the ballpark.

One scene that I was loathe to part with, but which even early on I knew wasn’t going to work had to do with policemen called in by the neighbors. They were going to be ambushed on the front lawn by an impulse sprinkler. I’ve always hated those things since I fell on one as a child. It tore an enormous hole in my butt and I had to endure my next door neighbor stitching it up. Naturally I wanted to do the same to the cops. The sprinkler was going to behave like a snake, and basically strike at one guy’s ass, crawl up through his chest cavity, then smash through his teeth, jump into the other guy’s mouth, and tear through his ass before crawling away into Shinnecock bay. The scene was cut less because there was no money to do it (although there wasn’t any) than because I really couldn’t find a way to make it work with the story.

In all it took about a week to write the script and another week to do revisions. My gaffer Eve Rametta actually told me that she agreed to do the movie because it was one of the only scripts that she had read that didn’t have any typos. But a word of wisdom to prospective film directors: most of the people who will work on your movie--including the actors—will not have read your entire script.

Pre-Production

When the script was done, I figured that the best way to get the ball rolling was to try and cast the vampire stripper roles. I sent the script out to a couple of leading ladies on the independent exploitation horror circuit. The number of positive responses I received frankly astonished me. I then sat down with good friend and fantastic artist Al Della Valle to storyboard the major action sequences. We even went so far as to produce little Quicktime movie animatics. Then I broke down the script into its elements: actors, props, wardrobe, locations, and so on, and produced a schedule and a budget. (There’s a very inexpensive program called Filmmakr that was an enormous help with the budget.) With storyboards, head-shots, location photos, a complete script, shooting schedule, and budget in hand I then produced a fifteen-page investor’s prospectus and hit the streets…

…where I shortly learned that anybody interested in film finance is interested in financing films with at least a $5 million budget and theatrical potential. They weren’t interested in financing a first-time director in the slightest. And especially not one directing a movie whose title alone practically ensured that the MPAA wouldn’t waste its collective nitrates by pissing on it. So at the end of the day, despite my best efforts, I wound up raising money from the likeliest of suspects: relatives, my best man, and my in-laws. Naturally, the amount of money I could raise was a hell of a lot less than I had hoped for, and suddenly I could no longer afford to ship in talent from the four corners of the US.

Which meant that in general, the time had come to prioritize. I knew that with so many calls on my attention, I was going to want a good director of photography with a ton of initiative. Having seen quite a few low-budget horror movies, I also knew that I needed a good sound recordist. Nothing makes a film less watchable than bad sound. Since I was doing a horror movie with lots of gore, I knew that I needed an incredible make-up effects company. My first choice was a place out in Suffolk County; they laughed when I told them the budget. And then came WickedFX, the most talented, hands-on, down-and-dirty, make-it-work-with-what-you-got, guerilla effects artists I have ever met. I will never forget the first words that I heard from the lips of Jason Alvino: ‘Dude, we have GOT to make this fucking movie.’ He even managed to convince me that it was possible to do it. Two weeks later, Monique Dupree (Emerald) was sitting in a chair in East Rockaway with alginate and Vaseline smeared all over her chest—the opening salvo in what I firmly believe to be the most ambitious prosthetic ever attempted on a film at our budget-level.

Finding a place to do casting was a bigger challenge than I’d anticipated. There were insurance issues, and the difficulty of not being affiliated with a studio. I could probably have gotten a space in my local library if I had pretended that it was a not-for-profit film, but I had decided to keep things as above-board as possible. When I asked, they declined. I ended up renting a room in New York Spaces for about $80/day for three days (four if you include the read-through). That’s $240 (or $320) that should have been on the screen instead of in a landlord’s pocket. On the other hand, getting the space nailed down and out of the way freed up my time, so I could spend it doing storyboards, working out prop design and wardrobe, and getting the project ready for production. It’s a ‘weighting’ game of sorts, figuring out how to best make use of a very limited amount of cash. Sometimes you win, other times you don’t; in this case, I think I would have been better off looking for a different option.

TIP: When casting your movie, do not bother putting an ad in the Village Voice. You will waste your money. When I lived in New York, everybody read it. Apparently during my time in Ireland the paper went to hell. My call for auditions in the Voice brought out about four people. Likewise, do not bother posting in Backstage. There you will waste a hell of a lot of your money, and get ‘professional’ actors whose fees and production demands you will not be able to meet. I spoke with one actress who demanded to see my insurance card before auditioning. It’s all about the Internet—particularly Craigslist. During production, a key actor dropped out sixteen hours before we began filming her scenes; an ad posted on Craigslist got a replacement out to Hampton Bays within nine hours.

The same goes for hiring your crew. Open an account on Mandy ASAP and don’t be shy about explaining exactly what it is you’re trying to do. My Director of Photography agreed to do the project because I didn’t hype a theatrical release or pretend that we were making Citizen Kane. I told him that this was a direct-to-DVD horror movie that would be filmed under punishing conditions in 12 days, and I think he respected my honesty.

Production

You heard me correctly: a 12 day shooting schedule. The shortest time anybody in the cast or on the crew had spent on a feature was 19 days. And that was for a ‘talkie’ movie largely improvised in a room. We, on other hand, were making a special effects extravaganza (as I never ceased to remind the exhausted troops) in half a dozen locations spread out across Long Island. On nearly every day of the shoot my DOP wore a shirt with the IATSE regulation hours for film production: 12 hours shooting, 12 hours off, and so forth. We managed to do it on the last two days of the shoot, but the previous ten had more than their fair share of 20 hour days. I never heard a complaint. (This is not to say that nobody complained; just that I didn’t hear it!) Giddiness sets in after 16 hours, and by 20 it has turned into soul-crushing hatred for anyone and anything within a fifty foot radius.

TIP: Get an Assistant Director. This is the guy who makes sure your actors are in wardrobe, or in the make-up seat, or on the set when you need them to be. He or she makes sure your props are there. In short, he makes sure that the director has time to direct, instead of chasing down that missing pom-pom, or figuring out how to get a gallon of Karo syrup out of your leading man’s last shirt. I didn’t hire one. Didn’t think I needed to. Our second week of shooting was 6 days long and I lost 16.5 pounds. Hyper-metabolism due to stress. With an AD, I probably only would have lost about 7. And I would have made a better film because I would have had more time to work with the actors and the camera department. You’re responsible to your investors, your cast, your crew, and yourself to make the best movie possible, and in a sense I shortchanged them all by what I mistakenly believed to be an economy. Not hiring an AD was without question my biggest fuck-up.

Assuming you’ve done your homework and set up a workable schedule, your biggest expense during production is going to be catering. You may think that you’re going to be able to cook meals for people, but once you realize that you’re only half-way through the 60 set-ups on the day’s shot list and you’ve already been shooting for 12 hours, suddenly you don’t have time to stand in front of the stove for an hour. You might not even have the energy to stand anywhere for an hour. And you find yourself saying, “To hell with it; who wants Subway?” And then you will tally your receipts at the end of the shoot and discover that you have spent nearly a fifth of your budget on food. Except that you won’t have had the cash to do it since it wasn’t budgeted for, and so you’ll find yourself with a fifth of your budget plus 15-20% interest on a credit card.

And if your biggest expense during production is catering, your biggest headache is going to be transportation. Moving people and equipment around is a huge pain in the ass. If you can afford a transport captain, or can press someone you trust into this role, then by all means do it. I was incredibly fortunate to have both an actor (Joe Riker) and a PA (Bob Byrnes) who had access to vans. And I still nearly tore my hair out every single week of the production. If one person is late arriving at the meeting point, then everybody else gets antsy and testy (and hungry) and before you know it you’re burning your shooting time. Transport was also the cause of the most irritating, useless expense incurred during the production: I got a ticket for driving a commercial truck through the Lincoln Tunnel in the wrong lane. Like catering and Assistant Directors, this is another area where you can really benefit by throwing money at the problem, but if you don’t have it to throw, have some Excedrin on hand and be ready to waste a hell of a lot of your time on logistics.

Shooting a movie is easy. You show the actors what to do. You show the director of photography where you want to point the camera. He and his crew adjust the lights so your actors look good. The sound guy finds an unobtrusive point (preferably off-camera) from which to lower his boom. You call, ‘Roll sound’. He responds, ‘Speeding.’ You say, ‘Roll camera’. The camera operator responds, ‘Speeding’. You call, ‘Mark it’ and somebody (most likely your script supervisor—thank you, Rose!) will clap the slate in front of the camera. She hustles out of the way, and after a brief pause you call, ‘Action!’ Your actors do their thing. If they do it right, you make them do it one more time for safety. If they do it wrong, you have them do it again (and again) until they get it right—and then you have them do it one more time for safety. You then repeat this about 700-1000 times for the rest of your shots. That’s all there is to it.

I personally would have to say that I agree with Alfred Hitchcock, who always maintained that shooting the movie is probably the least interesting part of the whole process of making the movie. Shooting a movie sucks. When you’re the director AND the producer, it really sucks. And when you are the director, the producer, AND the Assistant Director, it is ulcer time. And the funniest thing about it is that what makes shooting a movie so goddamn stressful is how BORING it is. Even on an insane schedule (like 12 days for a special effects extravaganza), the amount of time that about 90% of the people on the set have absolutely nothing to do is positively staggering. It isn’t that you don’t want to be doing something: no, every fiber of your being tells you to be doing something this fucking instant, if not sooner! But for one reason or another, you can’t. If you don’t believe me, check out Terry Gilliam in Lost in La Mancha, probably the one film that any prospective filmmaker should see before jumping into this industry. At the end of the Bachelor Party shoot I had to buy a new pair of shoes. I had worn out the soles on my old shoes (Hah! about 3 months old) through pacing.

Here are a few of the nightmares encountered over the course of the Bachelor Party shoot.

The Shot: A simple dolly move down the hallway, tracking Sammy (Gregg Greenberg) and Chuck (Joe Riker) as they go to wake up Gordon (Joe Testa).
The Reality: The dolly wheels were somewhat less than perfectly balanced, so they kept drifting to the side. It took about six takes before we got one that didn’t end with the camera crashing into the wall. But by take 6, everybody was getting a little giddy and the actors started flubbing their lines. We wound up with 12 takes before getting a good one and a usable safety shot. If you think that 12 takes is not too bad, then I can only assume that you are kin to Stanley Kubrick and have an unlimited budget for an unlimited schedule. We aimed for a 3:1 shooting ratio, and we got it for the most part.

The Shot: Sammy gets kicked by Emerald (Monique Dupree), sprawls backwards, and crawls to the fireplace.
The Reality: Monique had either been in the make-up chair or in the prosthetic (through which she could neither eat or drink) for about 16 hours. We had shot her kill scene, the chase scene, and her death scene without much difficulty. But we still needed to shoot the lead-up to the chase scene, where she fails to seduce Sammy, he whacks her with the shovel, and so forth. So down she went to make-up. One hour passes, then two, then three, then…? I knew it was going to take 1-2 hours to get the prosthetic off, but I hadn’t counted on the time it would take to get her back into regular make-up. By the time we began shooting the scene, we could hear the birds twittering outside. By the time the sun came up, we still had half a dozen SET-UPS left—and we could no longer have a window in the shot! And if you’ve seen the film—or even the trailer—you’ll know that the living room of the house is surrounded with windows. Luckily, Demian had a brain storm, crawled up on top of the fireplace and we shot the end of the scene from a bird’s eye point-of-view, with no windows visible. We did have to cut one of the effects we had planned for the scene, but at least we ended up with a scene that played.

The Shot: Michelle gives the hedge-clippers back to Sammy and they escape from the backyard down to the bay.
The Reality: Once again there was some extravagant choreography, this time involving the decapitated vampire Snowy (Zoe Hunter). Unfortunately, Zoe was beginning to show signs of hypothermia and couldn’t breathe too well in the extraordinarily uncomfortable sod rig Wicked had devised for the effect. And once again, those birds were starting to twitter in the trees. Demian once again came to the rescue, suggesting that instead of having her in the shot, we could shoot the scene from her POV. Zoe got warmed up, and we finished the scene in two takes instead of three set-ups. And it’s frankly a superior shot than the ones that I had blocked out.

TIP: Listen to the people around you, especially if they have more experience than you. I wrote my PhD thesis on Graham Greene’s relationship to the cinema, and a lot of it had to do with the way that auteur theory had influenced scholarly approaches to his work. I thought auteur theory was a load of bullshit then. Now I know beyond the shadow of doubt that auteur is a steaming load of bullshit. I was about 90% of the pre-production team and 100% of the post-production team on this movie, and it is no more ‘my movie’ than George Bush is ‘my president’.

ANOTHER TIP: As Demian once told me, ‘It pays to be lazy.’ Always look for the simplest solution to the problem at hand. It will almost always be the most elegant fix. Scientists call the principle Occam’s Razor, and you should apply it with scientific rigor to all of your undertakings (if you don’t want to go insane). This is what folks mean when they talk about killing your babies. If a scene doesn’t play, cut it. If the scene has to communicate important information, figure out how to work it into a different scene. My hunch is that we cut about a quarter of the script during production. One of my favorite pieces of dialogue was a phone call Sammy makes to a mechanic after the strippers return from the house. But in order for it to make sense, we needed to shoot a scene of him examining the strippers’ car. Lighting the exterior would have taken several hours that we didn’t have. So that scene went, the cherished dialogue scene went, and we ‘fixed it’ by having Sammy deliver a line by the door. As I was editing the film, I realized that even if we had shot the scene I probably would have cut it because it would have slowed down the pace too much at a point when the audience is expecting some action.

Post-Production

I lost 16.5 pounds during production; during post I gained about 30. I remember telling the cast that I hoped to finish the film in about 4 months. They grumbled a bit and weren’t too happy. I remember telling my crew that I hoped to finish the film in about 4 months. They laughed their asses off.

Post took a little over a year. 27,000 cigarettes by my count.

I had several problems right off the bat. First of all, I didn’t have the equipment that I needed to do post. In one sense, the hype is true: it is perfectly possible to make a movie on an old Mac G4 and nothing else. It just might prove difficult to convince anybody to watch it. Some of the gear I needed to gather for the film:
1. A broadcast monitor. Your movie is going to be judged first and foremost on the quality of your picture. In order to see that picture correctly, you can’t trust a computer monitor or a consumer television. This is especially the case when one of your main post-production tasks is taking footage shot in some of the brightest daylight New York has ever seen, and turning it into footage that looks like a reasonable facsimile of night. $250 got me a used 9” Panasonic monitor with 16 X 9 capability, blue-gun for calibration and underscan (necessary to see the entire frame). I wish that I had picked up this particular item before shooting, because the day for night stuff probably would have needed a lot less post-work if we had been able to check an accurate representation of the image we were recording.
2. A DAT deck. We recorded sound to Digital Audio Tape, a format that bears the same relationship to your camera sound that a CD does to an LP. It’s starting to be phased out now in favor of solid state, but it remains an industry standard. We recorded DAT with timecode, which makes synching your sound back to the picture much easier. Unfortunately, a DAT deck with timecode costs THOUSANDS OF DOLLARS. For $100 I picked up a used, non-Timecode Sony deck to transfer our sound to the computer. And then I spent about a month synching the sound to picture. Sound professionals can do this a hell of a lot faster, but it’ll cost you.
3. Speakers. Computer speakers are worthless, and computer speakers with separate bass speakers are downright hostile to the task of mixing. When you’re doing work on audio, you don’t want it to sound GOOD: you want it to sound ACCURATE. $200 got me a pair of used Event Project Studio 5 monitoring speakers with built-in amplifiers. Get the best ones your budget allows.
4. Hard Drive(s). Everybody knows that digital video eats hard drive space. I wouldn’t try to do a feature with less than 320GB. If you’re doing a movie with digital effects, I’d go for 500. And I’d go for a second one in order to back up all of your files at least once a week. And I’d go for a third one because at the end of the project you’re going to need a Digibeta master if you want to submit to festivals or create a DVD that doesn’t look like dog shit, which means outputting your movie as an uncompressed 10-bit 4:2:2 file. Bachelor Party runs about 80 minutes. The file for the master is about 200GB. All together I’ve got about 1TB of storage on Maxtor USB 2.0 drives. Make sure they can do 7,200 RPMs, or your video will be unwatchable for stuttering.
5. RAM. Lots of it. As much as your computer can hold.
6. Books. At every stage of the project I consulted books. The most valuable by far have been the DV Expert series from CMP. From the technical intricacies of 24p, through audio post and color correction, they’ve probably got the best book on the subject. The Meyers’ book on Creating Motion Graphics in After Effects will teach you more about compositing digital effects than any other title that comes to mind. Jay Rose’s books on audio production and post have been constant companions.
7. MIDI Controller. If you’re crazy enough to compose your own score, you’ll need something to play it on. M-audio makes cheap MIDI keyboards with nary a bell nor a whistle for under $100. They break if you look at them wrong, but even a replacement is probably cheaper than renting an orchestra.
8. Sound files. My single largest expense during post-production was a 10-disc collection of sound effects from Sound Ideas called ‘The Art of Foley’. $500 for all the footsteps, body-blows, punches, whooshes, swishes, metal impacts, door creaks, wood cracks, and squishes you could ask for. In case you’re wondering: yes, you could record most of this stuff yourself. As long as you’ve got a year to do it, and as good an ear (and recording facility) as Dan O’Connell’s. Check out his resume on IMDb and then tell me you don’t want him working on your movie for $500. The best thing about the set is that it gives you building blocks. Put a metal impact from a foley collection through an echo and reverb plug-in, and you’ve got an instant creepy atmosphere.

The best advice I can give to the filmmaker starting out on post is to get acquainted with the web forums that deal with the hardware and software that you’re using. DVXUser was really helpful for me, as was DVInfo, Creative Cow, and C4D Café (a Cinema 4D user group). Aharon Rabinowitz’s After Effects tutorial podcasts were hugely helpful in completing a number of the effects for the film. (The TV turning off at the fake ending and the bloody brain-matter background during the photo montage wouldn’t have been done without them.)

TIP: Working with anamorphic widescreen is a huge pain in the ass, but one that you’re going to have to put up with if you want to shoot widescreen on miniDV. Anamorphic DV doesn’t use square pixels, which means that any effects you create for the film will look weird when you try to composite them together. The Meyers’ book devotes an entire chapter to working with widescreen footage in After Effects, and I suggest that anybody working with the format have a look.

Editing the rough cut on Bachelor Party was a pretty straightforward process. We shot about 20 hours of footage for what was ostensibly a 90 minute film. Discounting the time that we kept the camera running between takes, we probably ended up with 12 hours of Bachelor Party. Taking into account flubbed lines, jerky dolly movement, and other factors, I generally ended up with a choice of two takes for any given shot. For any given scene, however, there was never a hell of a lot of ‘coverage’: cutaways, alternate angles, and so forth. That’s what happens when you shoot a film in 12 days: you do not give yourself an infinite number of choices in the cutting room. Duping the master tapes and then logging and capturing all the footage took two weeks. It should have taken one, except that I made a catastrophic error the first time around and ended up with a hard drive full of unusable footage. Once that nightmare was over, however, I had a rough cut within three weeks.

Next up was synching sound from the DAT tapes to the picture. (I could have done this before cutting, but decided that it would take less time to synch the DAT after the rough cut was complete.) I started by transferring each DAT tape to the computer as a single large file. All the video in the film was already synched to the camera audio in the Final Cut timeline, so what it boiled down to was scrubbing through the DAT file, finding the correct take, then moving it into the timeline below the camera audio, matching it as closely as possible by looking at the audio waveforms. Then you play it back and listen for an echo. If you hear one, you slide the DAT clip back and forth until the echo stops. Congratulations! You’re now in synch. Get rid of the camera audio and do it again. And again. About 700-1000 times.

If that sounds like a mind-numbingly tedious task, that’s because it is. And there ain’t no way around it if you’re broke. The best part? When you’ve seen the film 100 times, and decide that a different clip would work better, you get to do it again. You could, of course, synch up all of the clips right after you capture them if you have a sufficient supply of thorazine and Johnny Walker.

Editing Bachelor Party was made easier by the number of cuts we’d made to the script during shooting. There really weren’t many ways to order the scenes that would make sense. There was some intercutting during the sex scenes that gave me a little latitude, but for the most part the story was like a jigsaw puzzle that had been cut in advance. Of course, that’s also the opinion of the guy who wrote it. Under ideal conditions, perhaps somebody else could have come in and taken the editor’s reins and done something completely unexpected and wonderful with the material we shot.

That said, there were a number of problems that I had to work out as an editor.

In one of the ‘flashback’ scenes, Gordon suffers an embarrassing prank in front of a group of cheerleaders at a homecoming rally. The problem was that the footage was nearly unusable because of wind and rain. It looked stupid. And no matter how I cut it, the scene wouldn’t play. My solution—not the best I’m sure, but the one that worked under the circumstances—was to not use the footage as video, but rather to create stills from the footage and do the scene as a sort of montage with a voiceover. I was able to clean up the audio to some extent with EQ and an audio plugin called Soundsoap from Bias, but it didn’t sound natural at all. So I had the idea of laying down a creepy atmosphere, effecting the dialogue with a delay/echo, and embracing the unnaturalness of it. I still don’t love the scene, but now at least it does what it needs to do.

Another problem concerned a flashback scene in which Gordon hallucinates that Sammy is eating his heart. It was supposed to be a metaphor, but when I showed the film to a small audience the viewers got the impression that Sammy had, in fact, eaten Gordon’s heart. I tried a few different effects treatments--making the scene blurry and hazy, cartoony, and so forth—but the result was always the same. Nobody got it. Then I had the idea of simply cutting the scene out and—presto, chango—suddenly it worked. People got the implication, and because we weren’t actually watching Sammy eating Gordon’s heart, there was no confusion.

Then there are the problems that can’t be solved by editing alone.

We have a scene at a train station, which was filmed next to a warehouse without a train in sight. (Although there was an airport nearby which caused quite a few headaches for the sound department…) There wasn’t even money for a prop sign, so instead we created a sign in Photoshop and stuck it onto the wall using a displacement map in After Effects.

In another scene, Vermillion (Kaitlyn Gutkes) gives Paulie (Sean Parker) an acid snowball that melts his face off. On the day we filmed this, we brought in a piece of acrylic to place in front of the camera, with the idea that she would spit directly into the camera from Sean’s POV. It would have worked great too, except that the acrylic was far too cloudy and the image looked terrible. And then there was the issue of the ‘spit’. The guys from Wicked whipped up some ‘Vermillion juice’ that would have looked great flying into the camera: yellowish, semen-like, and totally disgusting. But when viewed from the only angle we could get on her, it didn’t look like much of anything. (It didn’t help that we were shooting inside a room the size of a shoebox.) I must have cut this scene a dozen times. And it sucked balls. What should have been one of the best scenes in the movie was turning out terribly.

I decided to solve the problem with a digital double. My first order of business was to go back to the location and take photos of the room from every conceivable angle. I then brought them into a 3D program and stitched together the room. I didn’t bother constructing the geometry of the objects in the room because I knew that a) the depth of field on the 3D camera would make it blurry; b)the motion blur from the camera would make it even blurrier; c)the camera move itself would be fast enough that people probably wouldn’t notice; and d)the girl was going to be naked, so the point was moot. The one exception was the bed, which I did model in order to receive shadows from the digital double. (This turned out to be a waste of time, since you don’t see the bed in the camera move.)

Step two involved the girl. Computer porn aficionados will probably recognize her: she’s Victoria, the 3rd generation model from DAZ. I worked out a skin texture that was reasonably close to Kaitlyn’s and applied it to the model. For her movement, I used a canned cowgirl-style animation from Renderotica. I then replaced her head with a skull, animated the mouth to open, and set up a particle system in C4D to synthesize the smoke.

Then came the camera move, which I wanted to whip around her body and into her mouth. I created a helix and linked the camera to it, then checked to make sure that nothing awkward happened. Then I hit the render button and waited 3 days to see if it worked. It did. Nobody was more surprised than I was.

For the second half of the animation, I created a tube with NURBS modeling tools, textured it with guts, and added a displacement map. Doing it with Nurbs enabled me to link the camera directly to the tunnel; all I needed to do was add some panning and adjust the timing. I used a fluid simulator to generate the acid semen. Hit the render button and in 2 days the second half was finished.

To composite the two shots together I used the alpha map from a Particle Illusion dust ball to dissolve from the first half of the animation to the second. Overall, I’m very pleased with the result, particularly for somebody who had never really touched a 3D application before attempting it. The shot cost well under $100.

The skull falling onto the fireplace was actually a bit tougher for a few reasons. First, it used a dynamics simulation to calculate how it hit the mantle, bounced around, and gradually settled. Second, because the particle system used to push the eyeballs out of the sockets was a lot more complex than the smoke. Third, because there was a camera move in the background footage: a real camera move, not a ‘virtual’ one through a 3D environment. This meant that step one involved mapping out the 3D space in a 2D shot. To do this I used an open source matchmoving software package called Voodoo. (Commercial-grade matchmoving software like Boujou’s 2D3 costs between $5,000 and $20,000.) Basically, it takes a frame of footage, analyzes the edges of objects in the frame, then figures out where they move in the next frame in order to generate both a map of the environment in the frame and the path that the camera follows. Once you’ve got that, you can bring the information into a 3D program so that your virtual camera matches the movement of the real camera, and anything you add in the 3D world will match up with the ‘real’ world in the frame.

After analyzing the shot with Voodoo, I brought all of that information into C4D. This time I did have to model most of the objects in the shot-- the floor, the fireplace, the ledge, and the back wall—because the skull was going to have to interact with them and cast shadows properly. I didn’t texture them or anything, since they weren’t going to appear in the shot, but they had to be physically accurate because black and white rendered versions of them were going to be used to ‘mask’ the parts of the skull that weren’t supposed to appear in the final shot. (The skull was seen from below, so the base of the skull had to be obscured by the ledge.) Then I set the original footage as a background and checked to make sure that my ‘virtual architecture’ lined up with the real stuff, and that the virtual camera was faithfully duplicating the movement of the real one. It was.

Setting up the dynamics simulation took a few days, largely because I had forgotten all of my high school math and physics. Basically, you need to get two numbers correct: the static coefficient (how much force it takes to cause a stationary object to move) and the dynamic coefficient (how much force it takes to get a moving object to stop). Don’t quote me on that; I may have that backwards. But once you figure those numbers out, doing the dynamics simulation is just another long and tedious process. But well worth the trouble. If I had tried to keyframe the skull dropping onto the ledge, it almost certainly would have looked worse than it does.

The biggest challenge, unsurprisingly, was turning day into night. The Hamptons in May are bright and sunny and beautiful—exactly the opposite of what I needed them to be. The best advice I can offer to somebody thinking about shooting day for night is this: Don’t do it. Swallow the money and rent a generator and lights. Or rewrite your script. (Day in the City? Day of the Iguana? A Day to Remember?)

Demian did everything he could when we shot the day for night scenes. And I truly tied his hands by not having a broadcast monitor on the set. We shot everything with a filter and camera settings that pushed the blues, but if I had to do it all over again—and thank Christ almighty that I don’t—I probably would have opted for capturing the best, cleanest image on set and doing all of the manipulation in post. Since you have to do so much to the footage in post anyway, starting with a degraded image is not necessarily the best idea.

USELESS INFO WARNING: My ‘process’ for handling this footage was to start with the stuff we captured and adjust the levels to what would have been a normal color, thus eliminating the blue tint. I would then layer a copy of it on top, push the contrast up and the saturation down so that it was largely a black and white blob, set the opacity at 50, and then set the transfer mode in After Effects to Overlay. I would then make this it’s own composition, and create a new composition from the original footage. I’d layer the first composition over the original footage and once again set the transfer mode to overlay. I’d then tweak the contrast, brightness, saturation, and levels until I could live with it and then send it through a Magic Bullet process. I then output the resulting footage as an uncompressed file and dropped it back in the Final Cut Timeline. The ‘useless info warning’ at the top stems from the fact that this worked for me, this time, and will probably not work for anybody else. Ever. Sorry, ladies and gents.

I tried to get the day for night footage to work six times. The grimmest memory I have of the entire film is of rotoscoping the sky (i.e., painting it out by hand) in over 3,000 frames of the movie. When I was done, it looked absolutely brilliant. Deep, dark skies, dark blue waters, gorgeous grasses; I was, for the first and only time during the entire production, deeply impressed with myself. Until I noticed the broadcast monitor. I’d disconnected it a month earlier in order to use it while filming a band playing at the Bitter End. And now, as it sat on my desk in its accustomed spot, I noticed that the brightness and contrast dials had shifted. Significantly. I saved my work and recalibrated the monitor. Then I booted up After Effects again. And for neither the first nor the last time during the entire film, I contemplated the soothing effect a hollow-point bullet would have had on my brain.

Conclusion

I did not set out to make Citizen Kane and I’m pretty certain that nobody will accuse me of having made it by mistake. I started out the process a greenhorn and have emerged a filmmaker, for better or for worse. In fact, I was less than a greenhorn when I started, since even a greenhorn usually understands—at the very least—the nature of the business he’s getting into. Robert Rodriguez says you’ve probably got a hundred bad films in you, so you might as well start young and hope that most of them are shorts that nobody ever sees. I skipped the shorts. My first film is Bachelor Party in the Bungalow of the Damned and, yeah, it’s probably a pretty bad film. I also think it’s a damn fine bad film. I mean, would anybody in their right mind go into a movie called Bachelor Party in the Bungalow of the Damned and think, ‘Fucking hell, man, I was really expecting Bergman and this guy gives me enormous man-eating boobies’?

If you’ve made it this far, you’re probably either related to me or a filmmaker yourself. I hope you’ve picked up something useful if you’re one of the latter. I’ll leave you with this. Steven Spielberg once said in an interview that he felt bad that he couldn’t necessarily make the sort of movies that he wanted to make. I made a film that has a digital double spewing a snowball of death on an unsuspecting post-coital victim, prosthetic demonic boobies eating people, intestines getting torn out of people’s butts, lawn gnomes smashing in people’s heads, and all manner of craziness. And I made it for next to nothing in the most expensive place in the United States. My hunch is that Spielberg could have made Schindler’s List at the abandoned asylum in King’s Park (near his summer home in Amagansett) on Hi-Def for under $100,000.

Stay hungry, comrades. We have an Old Guard to purge.

Brian