notes

This whole project started as a quick little "Test" film for us to see exactly what was involved in shooting a film. After all, George Lucas could do it, why couldn't we?

We wanted to do a movie that could be shot entirely in the span of 2-3 days (a weekend)and use very few props with a location that we could just basically show up and shoot. Sounds simple enough, right? First we had to have a script. No problem, we have done one before (Silent But Deadly). So January of 2002 Chad and I began to bang one out.

Origianlly Chad wanted to do a horror movie during the winter. He figured you don't see to many of those and seeing as we live in Alaska, that should be pretty easy for the "Prop Department" to create by basically walking outside. We also wanted to try and make it really scary at the same time showing very little of this "Monster" we had yet created (Think "Blair Witch"). This would test our skills as writers without testing our budget which at the time was just under $19.73 in cash, one bottle cap and 2 paper clips.

Chad's goal was to have the movie shot by April. Remember, this is January-ish so we are talking 4 months to gather whatever props we needed, actors, equipment and most importantly finishing the script. So the writing began! We agreed on a general path and then separately got started. After a week or so we would compare notes and then decide on what looked best and then start again. Over the course of a few weeks the story began to come together. Of course it was supposed to be a horror film but as time went on we would think of stuff we thought would be funny to include. Then we would think of funny stuff to put into the stuff we already wrote. By this time we had resigned ourselves to write this as a comedy-horror film seeing as that was the way it was heading, like most of our stuff seems to inevitabley do.

Also as we wrote, the monster became a "Snowbeast" or "Snow Demon". And it was more visible and played a larger role than we initially planned. So we had to come up with a costume. Here's where Ebay comes in. Chad found a gorilla suit and succesfully bid on it. He took the black gorilla outfit and painted it with white spray paint giving it black undertones. The body came out looking pretty good. The head had to be done a little different though. The face in the head looked pretty cheesey so he cut it out. To replace it he bought a prosthetic gorilla mask that looked realistic and then made some gnarly looking teeth for the mask. Put this on and a pair of special effects contacts and you have a creepy looking outfit.

The hands were a little more trouble. I had a pair of alien hands I bought at Fred Meyers for $4.99 a couple years ago that we thought might work. (You just never know when alien hands might come in handy, one should always have a pair lying around just in case.) The hands looked pretty good as long as you did not touch anything. If the fingers hit then they would bend in a rubbery-non scarey kind of manner. Not to convincing as flesh ripping tools. Maybe this would have to be some type of beast that kills by kneeing his victims in the groin in a frightening way... We would have to work on this.

Saturday,March 29, 2003: We went back up to Eklutna to film more scenes. Some we were doing over because on review they did not look right or Chad had his thumb in front of the camera. Was pretty chilly out, fortunately we had the cabin and a wood stove and the actors knew each other well enough by this time that spooning for body heat was not a problem between scenes although Carl did complain somewhat about Mark being a bit to free about his hand placement. Something Mark attributed to poor circulation.

We shot several of the scenes surrounding the outhouse explosion and the aftermath and we shot a few scenes containing "The Beast". I always get a little nervous running around the woods in a big, hairy evil Sasquatch outfit for fear of some local with a rifle thinking they found themselves World Record Possum or something. Gunshots were heard during this time causing me to soil myself in a frightening monster way but it turned out the shooting was directed at half a dozen beer cans and the disembodied hood of an old Ford Fiesta.

Sunday, March 30, 2003: Shooting the beginning of the movie at Thunderbird Falls parking lot. It was not without it's MANY problems. Wind noise, car noise, airplane noise would quite often halt shooting until it subsided. Cold and windy with no warm place to sit between shots took their tole on the actors and made the director even grumpier and more ill-tempered than he usually is.