movie stuff

Oh hey, I forgot to mention the movie shoot I helped with this week. My good friend Rusty Pietrzak, an incredibly resourceful microbudget filmmaker and photographer who specializes in underwater work, has been in the Philly/western Jersey area to work on a pair of short movies featuring a vampire mermaid character named Destiny. The character has apparently been around in the comics for years and has quite a following, and an actress who goes by the name of Debbie D, who makes the rounds at fan conventions as the official live-in-person incarnation of Destiny among many other fantasy-related pursuits, plays the bloodsucking mermaid in these two shorts. Also starring in the first, Crimson Currents, are Laura Bongiovanni as a swashbuckling pirate captain and legendary B-movie scream queen Debbie Dutch as the captain's first mate. (Laura's pregnant, by the way...they even wrote that into the script. Let's all wish her and her young 'un well. Thanks also to her and her very nice husband for being such great, patient hosts.) The second, Something in Common, is a crossover between the "Destiny" series and Rusty's own "Dolphin" series, which I've also been involved with over the years. The two Debbies also star in that short, this time with Ms. Dutch as one of the "aquatics" of the Dolphin universe.

Where does humble little me fit in to this glamorous stuff? Well, Cherie and I created the wood backdrop for the pirate-ship cabin set, although Cherie deserves more credit than me for the final product, which looked absolutely phenomenal. My contribution was more the physical-mechanical aspect of it--after totally striking out finding suitable cardboard, I switched to a folded 1/4" blue Styrofoam insulation sheeting from Lowe's that I cut into 4'x4' interlocking panels and Cherie painted using three colors of semi-gloss latex house paint. I added the lines between the "boards" with a Sharpie, and we packed the whole thing into my back seat before driving to Carneys Point for the shoot. In no time Cherie, Rusty, and I turned a suburban attached garage into a movie soundstage dressed as a pirate ship. Everyone was stunned by the quality of the backdrop. As I said, Cherie deserves every bit of the accolades she got for that set.

Yesterday was a pool shoot with Rusty, Debbie D and Debbie Dutch at a very secluded house out in the country near Milford, NJ. This was familiar territory as I've assisted with a lot of Rusty's underwater shoots over the years. My role here was setting up the black plastic sheeting backdrop, acting as safety diver, handling the weight belt on Debbie Dutch's legs each time she went under for her shots (Debbie D was in her mermaid-tail outfit so obviously she didn't need any assistance...except when the swim-fins built into the tail decided to work their way loose, which was often), and basically just assisting wherever assistance was needed. Later when Rusty did some more typical out-of-character underwater posed shots of the two Debbies, I helped rig up a deck chair on the pool bottom, and shot video while Rusty shot stills with his classic Nikonos/flash setup (yup, he still shoots film, and is therefore awesome). Tons o' fun. Nice pool too, though just a bit cold. Debbie D kept joking that it was December. Maybe she wasn't joking. I was fine, personally.

Rusty had one more shoot today, I think in Philly, but I couldn't make this one. Sucks.

Can't wait to see how these two movies turn out. Also can't wait to work on another one.