The latest movie poster

It's been quite a holiday season. Between all the weekend traveling we've done (Yosemite, Vegas and a family cruise) and a family crisis that popped up the weekend we were going to be visiting China, I haven't had a lot of time to work on the film.

I have got a rough edit of the Flashback, which looks pretty good, although I need a couple of cutaways that I just didn't plan for. I'll be using our neighbors kid to shoot the pickups- fortunately, just some hands holding the rocket ship and pointing at stuff in the book. I'll also be fabricating a fireplace shot to indicate a younger Farnsworth and possibly his wife.

One thing that came up that was pretty cool- I had this good closeup of Jake, although during his line he kept looking at me instead of Alexia. So I brought the shot into AE, tracked and matted his eyes out, and then replaced his real eyes with a painting I made and jiggered them over just a touch and voila, he was looking in the right place.

Another thing that came up- Too much dialogue. As usual. I tend to have diarrhea of the mouth when it comes to dialogue, and in the editing process, cut a lot of it out. I'm also going to have some visual stuff going on so I might be able to lose the cards in a few places.

Regardless, here's the latest movie poster that shows my costume off. It's pretty cool- I've even lost a little weight.

I hope you enjoy!

And here are the actors!

 This is Alexia Van Den Bosch, playing Fanny. She's adorable.

 Here's Jake Dowling as Jack. I actually got the suspenders in the wrong size and we were trying to make `em work. Alas, young Mulvey had to do without. He ended up looking perfect for the part!

 And here's the two of them on the set. (Our bed.) In reality, there'd be a lot of shadows everywhere but I wanted to make sure everyone was visible. The lighting situation was perfect as we just used the overhead can lights which evened everything out. When this gets edited and finaled, it will probably be darker.

 Here's another view. My bedroom just wasn't that large. If I had a bigger budget, we'd be doing this in a huge room with a huge fireplace, but on a shoestring we had to make due with some flickering Ikea torches and a lot of imagination.

 Jake wanted a funny picture towards the end of the day.

Everyone was getting tired by 4:30. I like this picture because everyone looks exhausted. Or bored. That's Karen in the back, there. I don't actually have any good pictures of her- Her eyes were closed in every picture but this one.

Props for the shoot!

Here's my spread Friday night. Blimp/spaceship- mostly done. Book? Not even started.

Here's some of the props in their "native" environment. Mad scientist blocks, a toy fishing boat I picked up last May in Greece, a Primer and a Battledore from the eighteen thirties... Once the kids were added, it started looking crowded!

This is the book that has young Mulvey entranced at age eight- the thing that is going to inspire him for the rest of his life. I made it out of cardboard. What's really cool is that Jules Verne mentions a bunch of scholars, priests and writers that wrote about travels to the Moon and back before anyone really applied science to the problem. I used illustrations from Cyrano de Bergeracs story about the Moon, Edgar Allen Poe's tale of moon travel and a score of others. The results were pretty amazing.

I'm not sure if they even had a book like this in 1851.

This is the rocket ship that Fanny found so inspiring. 5$ bird house from Michaels, with a bunch of rivets to add a little foreshadowing.

This lantern was made from CB2's gear candle holder. We found these cheap wall sconces at Lowe's, pulled out the wiring and hot glued the gear onto it. Then we added the glass cups. Wow. Too bad you can't really see them in the shoot.

And here's the final blimp toy. Since the birdhouses were pretty cheap, I bought a damaged one as well. I ripped off the nose, sanded a part of the rim down so it could lock on to the back and then I made the gondola out of some thin wood sidings, balsa accents, wagon wheels I found at Kit Craft and rivets. Lots and lots of the little buggers.