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You may want to read my post from yesterday first, if you haven’t already…

To set the stage, Maria Paris had left Florida, and Bill Black and I had just met Nicola Rae during the filming of Nightveil: The Sorcerer’s Eye. Nicola Rae is a six-foot tall, beautiful, and talented actress with long brunette hair. Perfect for FemForce icon Tara Fremont, in my opinion, but Nicola Rae assured me that she would not be running around the woods barefoot in a camouflage bikini. She DID love watching all the fun stuff that Maria got to do, and she was game to become an AC Comics superheroine, we just had to figure out which one.

One of the tricky things about micro-budget filmmaking is finding a location. You can rent one, but that costs money (that we didn’t have). And as soon as you tell someone you intend to shoot a movie, suddenly people want permits and insurance and they treat you like you’re trying to make a Hollywood film, even if it’s just two guys walking around with a camera. We filmed Nightveil: Sorcerer’s Eye in a local theater, which was cool, but we needed to get the FemForce girls out in the public with people around to witness their heroic deeds! We needed some place out in the open, where we could run around in crazy superhero costumes and do stage combat and not get arrested.

This reminded me of a surreal experience that I had the year before while attending MegaCon. I saw people dressed in full tactical gear carrying what I THINK were fake assault rifle props, and no one so much as batted an eye in their direction.

So, I had a crazy idea: What if we filmed a FemForce movie DURING a comic book convention! Specifically, MegaCon at the Orange County Convention Center in 2009, which, of course, was only a few weeks away when I came up with the idea.

Bill was onboard with the concept and thought it sounded like a fun challenge. We then needed bad guys. Bill knew some of the artists that would likely attend MegaCon, either with booths of their own or at tables in Artist’s Alley. Maybe we could recruit some of them to be bad guys? We knew AC Comics artist, inker and co-publisher Mark Heike would be attending, so we knew we could at least get him to “volunteer”.

A plan started to come together. Now I just needed a superheroine…

We had Nicola Rae, but we had no heroine identity for her, and we had no costume. With limited time before the convention, it was also unlikely that we could get a good costume made. I didn’t want to put a crappy costume on one of the main FemForce heroines. We had already established a high bar with the Blue Bulleteer and Nightveil costumes. If I was going to have to put together a B-grade costume on short notice, I wanted to put it on a B-list character.

My love of AC Comics goes WAY back to Bill’s early stuff that he drew during the Paragon Publication days before AC Comics existed. Stormy Tempest was a sci-fi heroine that he created in 1974. Reprints of her adventures popped up on rare occasions as supporting features in FemForce, but she never really reached the level of popularity that I personally thought she deserved. In her AC Comics appearances, she was most often drawn and colored as a platinum blonde, but I knew that (in her early Paragon appearances) Stormy Tempest had straight, long brunette hair… just like Nicola Rae.

What if we went back to the early days of Stormy Tempest’s career, before she became an outlaw, to a time when she was still a space cop? We wouldn’t have to put her in an actual Stormy Tempest costume. We could maybe just put her in blue jeans and give her a white t-shirt and maybe find a way to put a big red star on it. Not many people knew who Stormy was any way at that time, not even most FemForce fans, so maybe no one would care too much about the accuracy of the costume. She was almost a blank slate, but with lots of potential.

Bill was a fan of the old Space Patrol TV series, which was before my time, so I did some research and found mention of a bad guy named “Gorla”. I found some cheap plastic hokey masks that I could spray paint silver, and cheap brown robes that were “monk” costumes at a Halloween costume store, and thus came up with the idea of the “Gorla Monks”, bad guys who travelled back into the past to alter the future… unless Space Patrol cop Stormy Tempest can stop them! Since the Gorla Monk costumes completely cover the wearer from head-to-toe, they could be played by ANYONE that we could get to show up.

So, I pitched all of this to Bill and he loved all of it, except for the part about the cheap Stormy costume. He has a soft spot for Stormy as well, and he didn’t want to put her in blue jeans and a t-shirt. Neither did I really, but what choice did we have?

As it turns out, Mike Acord, the guy that plays The Cloak in Nightveil: Sorcerer’s Eye, had a wife that had made a few princess costumes for the Disney theme parks. Bill reached out to her to see if she could put together a Stormy Tempest costume on short notice, and she agreed to give it a shot. We pitched all of this to Nicola Rae and she agreed to do it, and she volunteered another actress that she knew to participate as well. With only days remaining before the convention, I wrote the script, Stormy Tempest vs. The Queen of the Gorla Monks, and we were off and running.

Bill and I bought a weekend pass to MegaCon and went to scout locations on that opening Friday, so that we would have a plan of attack on Saturday when we filmed the movie while the convention was in full swing. We ended up finding this secluded stairwell, a creepy hallway, and a door (without an alarm) that accessed the roof of the Orange County Convention Center. Definitely places where we shouldn’t be, and would never get permission to be, but they were all PERFECT with no apparent foot traffic. We also planned to film a quick scene on the convention floor, and another in front of the building. Things were looking good, if we could pull it off and not get caught.

Our seamstress had worked quickly off of Nicola Rae’s measurements to make the costume, and that Friday night we had a fitting over at Bill’s house. The costume seemed to look amazing on the coat hanger… but it didn’t fit!!!! Nicola Rae couldn’t even get it on to model it for us. Also, the cape and the mask were not done! Nicola Rae had been tasked with getting her own boots. She ended up bringing high-heeled go-go boots to the fitting, but they were black! And to top it off, Nicola Rae’s actress friend flaked out and cancelled at the last minute, which meant that my script now had no villainess! The entire script revolved around Stormy Tempest vs. the Queen of the Gorla Monks! We had no functional Stormy costume and no Queen!

The seamstress assured us that she could fix the costume overnight and that we’d have it in the morning. Nicola Rae could pick it up at the crack of dawn, and she could get ready at the seamstress’s house and arrive at MegaCon in full costume and makeup, ready to film.

I went home to write a brand-new script the night before we were supposed to shoot the film, cutting out the Gorla Queen entirely. On the plus side, I was able to optimize the script for the locations that we had mapped out that day. The new script was finished at around 3:00am, and I showed up the next day with printouts of a new script to make a movie that Bill Black (the director and cameraman) and Nicola Rae (the principal actress) had never read.

The Saturday morning of MegaCon, I woke up after just a few hours of sleep, drove to Bill’s house, helped him load the camera and sound equipment and the Gorla Monk costumes into duffle bags, and we drove to the Convention Center, still wondering what our superheroine was going to look like when we got there.

When we met up with Nicola Rae in the parking lot of the Convention Center, she was standing next to her car and was in the middle of spray painting her go-go boots red. Apparently, she had tried to do this the night before, but the paint wasn’t covering very well. Also, she was NOT in full costume and makeup and ready to film. Surprise, surprise.

For the first time, we got to see the cape, which looked awesome. Nicola Rae was wearing a jacket, but we could see that she was wearing the main costume underneath and it looked amazing. Then, we got to see the mask, which looked… like a damn pillow on her face!

Our Disney princess seamstress had, for some inexplicable reason, decided to add a layer of padding to the mask and wrapped it in glittering red fabric. The mask was so fluffy and thick that it cast a deep shadow over Nicola Rae’s eyes, to the point that you couldn’t really see her eyes at all. There was a huge debate in the parking lot about whether or not she should wear the mask, or to just ditch it. Bill decided that it made sense for her to wear a mask in the story, since she was traveling into the past and wouldn’t want her face photographed or recorded during her mission. Stormy Tempest has always been depicted with a mask and it was important to Bill that she wear one. So, (long sigh) we kept it, even though none of us really liked it.

We carried our gear from the parking lot into the Convention Center, while trying not to get fresh wet red paint on everything. We were hours ahead of when MegaCon was supposed to start, but a significant crowd of people was already in attendance, many of them walking around in costumes of their own. We found a ladies’ room just outside of the ticket booth for Nicola Rae, so that she could finish her makeup and put the entire costume together for the first time, while the rest of us started pulling gear out of the duffle bags and setting up tripods and checking batteries and so forth. Bill wanted to get a shot of her coming out in costume for the first time, so imagine a couple of guys with huge cameras on tripods pointed at the door of the ladies’ room. Not suspicious at all…

Nicola Rae finally emerged and looked breathtaking. She was already six feet tall, but the go-go boots added another four inches. The full costume made her seem larger than life. I don’t know if any picture or footage we ever shot captured what it was like to stand next to her in that costume in person. Nicola Rae immediately smiled when she saw our cameras and put her hands on her hips dramatically to strike a pose. So, there we stood in front of the bathroom, taking pictures and ooing and ahhing. At that point, I knew we’d have a fun movie. Didn’t matter if it sucked. We could just film her standing in front of the bathroom in that costume and it would be worth buying.

Then, something that I did not anticipate happened… we drew a crowd. Or rather, Nicola Rae drew a crowd. More people with cameras showed up and started taking pictures. Complete strangers jumped into the shot and stood next to her to get a picture with her. People started asking questions and shouting comments.

“Great costume! I love your boots! Look, it’s Wonder Woman!”

At first, it was cool, but Bill and I quickly realized that we were neutralized by the crowd. We couldn’t get the shots that we wanted to take, and the crowd just kept growing and rotating and it was endless. We tried to make our way to another area, but the crowd followed. Nicola Rae wasn’t helping. She loved the attention and stopped for everyone that asked for a picture. If we were there to sell comics, it would have been great, but we had a movie to make!

We made it to an escalator, and that finally left the crowd behind. We quickly made our way to the roof so that we could get to work.

The picture above is a shot of Nicola Rae in full costume, standing on the roof of the Orange County Convention Center while thousands of people are attending MegaCon below our feet.

That day of filming and the making of the movie itself is another story for another time…

You can still buy Stormy Tempest: Perils in the Past as a download directly from Bill Black at his Nightveil Media website. If your expectations are low, lower them even further and then you won't be disappointed.

Or you can buy a comic from me now!

The IndieGoGo campaign for Amazon Arrow: Immortal Reign #1 graphic novel is still "Indemand" for a limited time!

Here's the link:
igg.me/at/amazonarrow

Description

You may want to read my post from yesterday first, if you haven’t already…

To set the stage, Maria Paris had left Florida, and Bill Black and I had just met Nicola Rae during the filming of Nightveil: The Sorcerer’s Eye. Nicola Rae is a six-foot tall, beautiful, and talented actress with long brunette hair. Perfect for FemForce icon Tara Fremont, in my opinion, but Nicola Rae assured me that she would not be running around the woods barefoot in a camouflage bikini. She DID love watching all the fun stuff that Maria got to do, and she was game to become an AC Comics superheroine, we just had to figure out which one.

One of the tricky things about micro-budget filmmaking is finding a location. You can rent one, but that costs money (that we didn’t have). And as soon as you tell someone you intend to shoot a movie, suddenly people want permits and insurance and they treat you like you’re trying to make a Hollywood film, even if it’s just two guys walking around with a camera. We filmed Nightveil: Sorcerer’s Eye in a local theater, which was cool, but we needed to get the FemForce girls out in the public with people around to witness their heroic deeds! We needed some place out in the open, where we could run around in crazy superhero costumes and do stage combat and not get arrested.

This reminded me of a surreal experience that I had the year before while attending MegaCon. I saw people dressed in full tactical gear carrying what I THINK were fake assault rifle props, and no one so much as batted an eye in their direction.

So, I had a crazy idea: What if we filmed a FemForce movie DURING a comic book convention! Specifically, MegaCon at the Orange County Convention Center in 2009, which, of course, was only a few weeks away when I came up with the idea.

Bill was onboard with the concept and thought it sounded like a fun challenge. We then needed bad guys. Bill knew some of the artists that would likely attend MegaCon, either with booths of their own or at tables in Artist’s Alley. Maybe we could recruit some of them to be bad guys? We knew AC Comics artist, inker and co-publisher Mark Heike would be attending, so we knew we could at least get him to “volunteer”.

A plan started to come together. Now I just needed a superheroine…

We had Nicola Rae, but we had no heroine identity for her, and we had no costume. With limited time before the convention, it was also unlikely that we could get a good costume made. I didn’t want to put a crappy costume on one of the main FemForce heroines. We had already established a high bar with the Blue Bulleteer and Nightveil costumes. If I was going to have to put together a B-grade costume on short notice, I wanted to put it on a B-list character.

My love of AC Comics goes WAY back to Bill’s early stuff that he drew during the Paragon Publication days before AC Comics existed. Stormy Tempest was a sci-fi heroine that he created in 1974. Reprints of her adventures popped up on rare occasions as supporting features in FemForce, but she never really reached the level of popularity that I personally thought she deserved. In her AC Comics appearances, she was most often drawn and colored as a platinum blonde, but I knew that (in her early Paragon appearances) Stormy Tempest had straight, long brunette hair… just like Nicola Rae.

What if we went back to the early days of Stormy Tempest’s career, before she became an outlaw, to a time when she was still a space cop? We wouldn’t have to put her in an actual Stormy Tempest costume. We could maybe just put her in blue jeans and give her a white t-shirt and maybe find a way to put a big red star on it. Not many people knew who Stormy was any way at that time, not even most FemForce fans, so maybe no one would care too much about the accuracy of the costume. She was almost a blank slate, but with lots of potential.

Bill was a fan of the old Space Patrol TV series, which was before my time, so I did some research and found mention of a bad guy named “Gorla”. I found some cheap plastic hokey masks that I could spray paint silver, and cheap brown robes that were “monk” costumes at a Halloween costume store, and thus came up with the idea of the “Gorla Monks”, bad guys who travelled back into the past to alter the future… unless Space Patrol cop Stormy Tempest can stop them! Since the Gorla Monk costumes completely cover the wearer from head-to-toe, they could be played by ANYONE that we could get to show up.

So, I pitched all of this to Bill and he loved all of it, except for the part about the cheap Stormy costume. He has a soft spot for Stormy as well, and he didn’t want to put her in blue jeans and a t-shirt. Neither did I really, but what choice did we have?

As it turns out, Mike Acord, the guy that plays The Cloak in Nightveil: Sorcerer’s Eye, had a wife that had made a few princess costumes for the Disney theme parks. Bill reached out to her to see if she could put together a Stormy Tempest costume on short notice, and she agreed to give it a shot. We pitched all of this to Nicola Rae and she agreed to do it, and she volunteered another actress that she knew to participate as well. With only days remaining before the convention, I wrote the script, Stormy Tempest vs. The Queen of the Gorla Monks, and we were off and running.

Bill and I bought a weekend pass to MegaCon and went to scout locations on that opening Friday, so that we would have a plan of attack on Saturday when we filmed the movie while the convention was in full swing. We ended up finding this secluded stairwell, a creepy hallway, and a door (without an alarm) that accessed the roof of the Orange County Convention Center. Definitely places where we shouldn’t be, and would never get permission to be, but they were all PERFECT with no apparent foot traffic. We also planned to film a quick scene on the convention floor, and another in front of the building. Things were looking good, if we could pull it off and not get caught.

Our seamstress had worked quickly off of Nicola Rae’s measurements to make the costume, and that Friday night we had a fitting over at Bill’s house. The costume seemed to look amazing on the coat hanger… but it didn’t fit!!!! Nicola Rae couldn’t even get it on to model it for us. Also, the cape and the mask were not done! Nicola Rae had been tasked with getting her own boots. She ended up bringing high-heeled go-go boots to the fitting, but they were black! And to top it off, Nicola Rae’s actress friend flaked out and cancelled at the last minute, which meant that my script now had no villainess! The entire script revolved around Stormy Tempest vs. the Queen of the Gorla Monks! We had no functional Stormy costume and no Queen!

The seamstress assured us that she could fix the costume overnight and that we’d have it in the morning. Nicola Rae could pick it up at the crack of dawn, and she could get ready at the seamstress’s house and arrive at MegaCon in full costume and makeup, ready to film.

I went home to write a brand-new script the night before we were supposed to shoot the film, cutting out the Gorla Queen entirely. On the plus side, I was able to optimize the script for the locations that we had mapped out that day. The new script was finished at around 3:00am, and I showed up the next day with printouts of a new script to make a movie that Bill Black (the director and cameraman) and Nicola Rae (the principal actress) had never read.

The Saturday morning of MegaCon, I woke up after just a few hours of sleep, drove to Bill’s house, helped him load the camera and sound equipment and the Gorla Monk costumes into duffle bags, and we drove to the Convention Center, still wondering what our superheroine was going to look like when we got there.

When we met up with Nicola Rae in the parking lot of the Convention Center, she was standing next to her car and was in the middle of spray painting her go-go boots red. Apparently, she had tried to do this the night before, but the paint wasn’t covering very well. Also, she was NOT in full costume and makeup and ready to film. Surprise, surprise.

For the first time, we got to see the cape, which looked awesome. Nicola Rae was wearing a jacket, but we could see that she was wearing the main costume underneath and it looked amazing. Then, we got to see the mask, which looked… like a damn pillow on her face!

Our Disney princess seamstress had, for some inexplicable reason, decided to add a layer of padding to the mask and wrapped it in glittering red fabric. The mask was so fluffy and thick that it cast a deep shadow over Nicola Rae’s eyes, to the point that you couldn’t really see her eyes at all. There was a huge debate in the parking lot about whether or not she should wear the mask, or to just ditch it. Bill decided that it made sense for her to wear a mask in the story, since she was traveling into the past and wouldn’t want her face photographed or recorded during her mission. Stormy Tempest has always been depicted with a mask and it was important to Bill that she wear one. So, (long sigh) we kept it, even though none of us really liked it.

We carried our gear from the parking lot into the Convention Center, while trying not to get fresh wet red paint on everything. We were hours ahead of when MegaCon was supposed to start, but a significant crowd of people was already in attendance, many of them walking around in costumes of their own. We found a ladies’ room just outside of the ticket booth for Nicola Rae, so that she could finish her makeup and put the entire costume together for the first time, while the rest of us started pulling gear out of the duffle bags and setting up tripods and checking batteries and so forth. Bill wanted to get a shot of her coming out in costume for the first time, so imagine a couple of guys with huge cameras on tripods pointed at the door of the ladies’ room. Not suspicious at all…

Nicola Rae finally emerged and looked breathtaking. She was already six feet tall, but the go-go boots added another four inches. The full costume made her seem larger than life. I don’t know if any picture or footage we ever shot captured what it was like to stand next to her in that costume in person. Nicola Rae immediately smiled when she saw our cameras and put her hands on her hips dramatically to strike a pose. So, there we stood in front of the bathroom, taking pictures and ooing and ahhing. At that point, I knew we’d have a fun movie. Didn’t matter if it sucked. We could just film her standing in front of the bathroom in that costume and it would be worth buying.

Then, something that I did not anticipate happened… we drew a crowd. Or rather, Nicola Rae drew a crowd. More people with cameras showed up and started taking pictures. Complete strangers jumped into the shot and stood next to her to get a picture with her. People started asking questions and shouting comments.

“Great costume! I love your boots! Look, it’s Wonder Woman!”

At first, it was cool, but Bill and I quickly realized that we were neutralized by the crowd. We couldn’t get the shots that we wanted to take, and the crowd just kept growing and rotating and it was endless. We tried to make our way to another area, but the crowd followed. Nicola Rae wasn’t helping. She loved the attention and stopped for everyone that asked for a picture. If we were there to sell comics, it would have been great, but we had a movie to make!

We made it to an escalator, and that finally left the crowd behind. We quickly made our way to the roof so that we could get to work.

The picture above is a shot of Nicola Rae in full costume, standing on the roof of the Orange County Convention Center while thousands of people are attending MegaCon below our feet.

That day of filming and the making of the movie itself is another story for another time…

You can still buy Stormy Tempest: Perils in the Past as a download directly from Bill Black at his Nightveil Media website. If your expectations are low, lower them even further and then you won't be disappointed.

Or you can buy a comic from me now!

The IndieGoGo campaign for Amazon Arrow: Immortal Reign #1 graphic novel is still "Indemand" for a limited time!

Here's the link:
igg.me/at/amazonarrow