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You may want to read my previous posts about the making of Stormy Tempest, if you haven’t already:

The guerrilla filmmaking shoot at the Orange County Convention Center during MegaCon was exhausting, but successful. By “successful” I mean we didn’t get arrested or thrown out or injured, and we ended up with a movie with a beginning, middle and end.

In case you aren’t familiar with guerrilla filmmaking, let’s talk about what it is, and why we did it. Here’s the definition from Wikipedia, which sums it up nicely:

“Guerrilla filmmaking refers to a form of independent filmmaking characterized by low budgets, skeleton crews, and simple props using whatever is available. Often scenes are shot quickly in real locations without any warning, and without obtaining filming permits. Guerrilla filmmaking is usually done by independent filmmakers because they don't have the budget or time to obtain permits, rent out locations, or build expensive sets.”

As for WHY we did it, I’ll let Bill Black explain that in his own words taken from the Nightveil Media website:

“When, as a boy, I watched THE THING FROM ANOTHER WORLD in a darkened theater, I knew my life had changed forever. At the Saturday matinee, Westerns were giving way to sci-fi monster movies, and I was intrigued by their imaginative narratives. By the end of the 1950's I strived to see every fantasy film I could. Many were great but I embraced even the worst of them harboring the idea that maybe even I could make a film as good as that. Buying a used movie camera, I started making my own monster movies in high school and continued to do so at Florida State. Graduating from 8mm to Super 8 to 16mm, each production became more elaborate though all were extremely low budget. In the mid-1970's after I had completed location filming on my sci-fi superhero film, ASTRON, STAR WARS was released and in one fell swoop rang the death knell on ultra-low budget movies. I spent the next decades in publishing but my love for low budget imaginative films never waned. In recent years I have returned to film making via digital video in an attempt to fulfill a life-long dream.”

Basically, we were trying to replicate the big budget movies from the 50’s, 60’s and 70’s that Bill loved by using 2009 consumer technology and almost no production budget at all, while bringing his FemForce and AC Comics characters to life.

Which brings us back to Stormy’s cockpit…

I wrote the MegaCon Stormy Tempest movie so that Stormy could beam down from her ship to the convention center at the start of the movie, and then beam back up to it at the end. I had no intention of ever showing what the ship actually looked like. There are a few dialog exchanges in the script between Stormy and her ship, simply to give Stormy an excuse to deliver a few lines of dialog. She needed someone to talk to, and I reasoned that maybe her ship had an artificial intelligence that she could interact with, like K.I.T.T. from Knight Rider. I had no intention of ever showing what that A.I. interface looked like either. I named this character S.H.I.P., which stands for “Sentient Hyper-Intelligent Program” (though I don’t think I ever put what that acronym stands for in any of the Stormy scripts).

Once we had the film in the can (which is always in doubt until it’s actually done), Bill came up with the idea of building a cockpit interior set for his new sci-fi superheroine. This wouldn’t be his first cockpit build. You can see a very cool “control room” environment in his film Sangor Syndrome, there is a cockpit operated by a young Bill Black himself in Planet of the Damned, and Astron has a very compact cockpit also (which you can see if that film ever gets released).

Below on the left is a mockup design that I created for Stormy’s cockpit at the time, using the lid from my old broken washing machine as a control panel. I had Uhura’s Enterprise control station in mind from the 60’s TV show, but I was off by a decade. Bill loved the Space Patrol TV series from the 50’s and he wanted to take a crack at designing a cockpit in that style (a reference photo that he sent to me in 2009 is shown on the right).

Bill wanted curved walls, as if you were looking into a large tube (the interior of a cylindrical rocket or missile), but that turned out to be trickier than expected. Here’s an email that Bill sent to me when the cockpit construction started to move forward in April 2009:

“I have a buddy who has a truck. I spoke to him about how to build the cockpit for stormy and he told me of flexible 4' X 8' plastic sheets at Home Depot. So he volunteered to take me there and haul it to the office. Turned out to be an almost 4 hour event. But I got the plastic... almost $65. Now I gotta figure out how to construct it.”

Two weeks later, I received this:

“Saturday I had problems with the cock pit set. The materials that I bought to create curved walls was just too heavy to use. I tried to convert the CRYPT niche into the cockpit but we just could not install that curved plastic material. Neither existing side walls could support all that weight. So I went to plan B, and bought more plastic foam siding and am in the process of rigging that.”

What we ended up with had straight walls made of thin, delicate Styrofoam. The walls were so weak that they couldn’t support the weight of its Styrofoam ceiling, which was attached to a coat hanger and suspended from the alcove above by thin ropes so that it wouldn’t collapse. If you touched this thing, it would fall over like a house of cards.

But for under $100, it looked pretty cool!

I was just learning how to use Poser back then, and I found a 3D model that would eventually become the exterior of Stormy’s retro-style rocket ship. As for Stormy’s A. I. companion, my original intention was to create an oscilloscope wave graphic that would wobble in sync with a voiceover (again, like K.I.T.T. from Knight Rider, but with a more analog look). At this point in time, I was already editing Nightveil: The Sorcerer’s Eye and the rest of Stormy Tempest: Perils in the Past, while Bill was doing work for AC Comics and editing Planet of the Damned. There was just no time to add on more digital effects work if we could come up with a more practical, non-CGI solution.

If you’re familiar with AC Comics, Bill has a very psychedelic design sensibility. His character Azagoth appears as a talking fuzzy block with a giant eyeball in the middle of it. Channeling my inner Bill Black, I came up with the idea of a talking hand to serve as Stormy’s A.I. companion. A talking hand could gesture and emote, or operate nearby controls, or hold various tools, and would generally be more interesting to look at than a static prop. So, I went to Home Depot and bought a white work glove and a huge rubber gasket that was wide enough to stick my arm through. Felt was glued to the fingertips to make the articulation of the white glove easier to see on film, and the glove was bolted to the gasket so that it would all stay in one piece.

Bill cut one side out of a large cardboard shipping box, big enough for me to crawl into if I crouched down, and then he cut a small circular hole in the top, allowing me to stick my forearm up through the hole and puppet the hand from within the box. This would allow me to be hidden in the background of the shot inside the box, while interacting with Nicola Rae in real time, while Bill operated the camera. Two more holes were cut into the top of the box to mount hand-held, battery-operated spinning, light-up, souvenir toys from Disney to serve as sci-fi interface devices. These were covered with faceted glass bowls that belonged to Bill’s wife, along with matching candleholders to serve as “hologram projectors”.

To give the cardboard box a sci-fi look, Bill hot glued aluminum foil to the exterior of the box. While the foil seemed like a good idea at the time, it turned out to be a problem. The wall opposite of the cockpit opening was used as Bill’s semi-permanent greenscreen setup, which is where the camera had to be positioned in order to look into the cockpit. The foil acted like a mirror, reflecting the greenscreen that was behind the camera into the scene, giving everything (including Nicola Rae) a sickly greenish cast. To solve this issue, we took the whole thing apart and put an old black bed sheet over the box so that it would become non-reflective, and then we cut holes into the sheet so that I could still climb into it and stick my arm through the hole. All of this was assembled in a very small alcove in the AC Comics warehouse behind dozens of boxes filled with FemForce comics.

The resulting creation was… well… It was fragile and a little sketchy, but we thought it was good enough to get the job done.

I wrote new scenes to bookend the footage that we shot at MegaCon, then Bill hired Nicola Rae for a few hours to come in one afternoon and shoot the brief cockpit scenes. Bill took one of the leftover Blue Bulleteer masks and painted it red, so that Stormy could ditch the Disney princess “pillow mask” that we all hated. I wrote a line into the script about Stormy being forced to change into the pillow mask during her MegaCon away mission because of “regulations” that she was obligated to obey. This explains why she wears the pillow mask at MegaCon, but then NEVER wears it again in future films. (Though at that point in time, we didn’t know there would ever be any future films.)

You would think this would have been an easy shoot. Stormy just had to sit in her chair and deliver a few lines and we had four hours to get it done. How hard could that be? But, of course, it quickly devolved into a disaster. We were trying a new HD monitor setup, so that we could get a better look at what we were recording while we were recording it, but the alcove that we were shooting in was very cramped and the monitor was tilted towards Nicola Rae. This turned out to be extremely distracting for her, and she couldn’t stop looking at herself and laughing at the ridiculousness of the situation. Eventually, we had to turn off all of the external monitors because they were slowing us down.

I remember that we were all very social and talkative that day also. It was really our first opportunity to just hang out with Nicola Rae without the pressure of trying to get a complete film done, so we were all telling stories and having a good time and getting to know each other when we should have probably been working.

When the time came, I climbed into the box to do some amateur puppeteering, but the glove that I had assembled to use as S.H.I.P.’s hand was a left-handed glove, while the hole that Bill put in the top of the box was off-center to the right. This forced me to stretch my left arm awkwardly over my head, twisting myself into a pretzel in the confined space so that I could get my left arm into a hole above my right shoulder. But the dealbreaker turned out to be the weight of the cardboard box. It was so light that every movement of my arm would move the entire box. It was shaking and shifting all over the place in the background behind Stormy, creating a distraction and making it impossible for me to be in the box during the shot.

We decided that the glove would have to be a static prop in the background so that we could focus on Nicola Rae as she delivered her lines while we had access to her, and then we would re-engineer the box at a later time and edit in shots of the puppeted glove that we would film on some future date.

I crawled out of the box, posed the glove and we started to film again. As Nicola Rae expertly delivered her lines, Bill and I watched as the glove slowly fell over in the background like a deflating balloon, ruining the shot. Watching the poor glove go limp in the middle of the shot was like a hilarious metaphor for all of our technical issues while trying to bring this cockpit to life. I tried to fluff up the glove and posed him again for another try, but with the same result. I ended up having to crawl back into the box and I stuffed the fingers of the glove with leftover aluminum foil, giving the glove enough rigidity that the hand could be posed and would remain upright.

A low stress afternoon of filming an easy scene quickly turned into a panic, with an hour left of Nicola Rae’s time on the clock and nothing to show for it. Fortunately, after doing so many ruined takes over and over, Nicola Rae was able to sail through her lines and delivery, and we ended up with the entire scene in the can with about 30 minutes to spare.

Time is money and we wanted to get as much use out of Nicola Rae as possible, so we took a few promo shots like the one posted above. Bill disconnected all of the microphone equipment and cords so that he could get off of the tripod and move the camera in closer to Stormy and get some “action” shots of her in the cockpit. The story as written didn’t really call for it, but we had Nicola Rae act as if her ship was pitching and rolling, or getting hit by laser beams, or colliding with asteroids and stuff like that. We were just making stuff up on the spot, when it occurred to me that we didn’t just have to film Stormy in the cockpit… we were all standing in front of a greenscreen!

With 20 minutes left on the clock, we filmed all of Stormy Tempest: Attack of the Giantess, but that is a story for another day.

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 previous posts about the making of Stormy Tempest, if you haven’t already:

The guerrilla filmmaking shoot at the Orange County Convention Center during MegaCon was exhausting, but successful. By “successful” I mean we didn’t get arrested or thrown out or injured, and we ended up with a movie with a beginning, middle and end.

In case you aren’t familiar with guerrilla filmmaking, let’s talk about what it is, and why we did it. Here’s the definition from Wikipedia, which sums it up nicely:

“Guerrilla filmmaking refers to a form of independent filmmaking characterized by low budgets, skeleton crews, and simple props using whatever is available. Often scenes are shot quickly in real locations without any warning, and without obtaining filming permits. Guerrilla filmmaking is usually done by independent filmmakers because they don't have the budget or time to obtain permits, rent out locations, or build expensive sets.”

As for WHY we did it, I’ll let Bill Black explain that in his own words taken from the Nightveil Media website:

“When, as a boy, I watched THE THING FROM ANOTHER WORLD in a darkened theater, I knew my life had changed forever. At the Saturday matinee, Westerns were giving way to sci-fi monster movies, and I was intrigued by their imaginative narratives. By the end of the 1950's I strived to see every fantasy film I could. Many were great but I embraced even the worst of them harboring the idea that maybe even I could make a film as good as that. Buying a used movie camera, I started making my own monster movies in high school and continued to do so at Florida State. Graduating from 8mm to Super 8 to 16mm, each production became more elaborate though all were extremely low budget. In the mid-1970's after I had completed location filming on my sci-fi superhero film, ASTRON, STAR WARS was released and in one fell swoop rang the death knell on ultra-low budget movies. I spent the next decades in publishing but my love for low budget imaginative films never waned. In recent years I have returned to film making via digital video in an attempt to fulfill a life-long dream.”

Basically, we were trying to replicate the big budget movies from the 50’s, 60’s and 70’s that Bill loved by using 2009 consumer technology and almost no production budget at all, while bringing his FemForce and AC Comics characters to life.

Which brings us back to Stormy’s cockpit…

I wrote the MegaCon Stormy Tempest movie so that Stormy could beam down from her ship to the convention center at the start of the movie, and then beam back up to it at the end. I had no intention of ever showing what the ship actually looked like. There are a few dialog exchanges in the script between Stormy and her ship, simply to give Stormy an excuse to deliver a few lines of dialog. She needed someone to talk to, and I reasoned that maybe her ship had an artificial intelligence that she could interact with, like K.I.T.T. from Knight Rider. I had no intention of ever showing what that A.I. interface looked like either. I named this character S.H.I.P., which stands for “Sentient Hyper-Intelligent Program” (though I don’t think I ever put what that acronym stands for in any of the Stormy scripts).

Once we had the film in the can (which is always in doubt until it’s actually done), Bill came up with the idea of building a cockpit interior set for his new sci-fi superheroine. This wouldn’t be his first cockpit build. You can see a very cool “control room” environment in his film Sangor Syndrome, there is a cockpit operated by a young Bill Black himself in Planet of the Damned, and Astron has a very compact cockpit also (which you can see if that film ever gets released).

Below on the left is a mockup design that I created for Stormy’s cockpit at the time, using the lid from my old broken washing machine as a control panel. I had Uhura’s Enterprise control station in mind from the 60’s TV show, but I was off by a decade. Bill loved the Space Patrol TV series from the 50’s and he wanted to take a crack at designing a cockpit in that style (a reference photo that he sent to me in 2009 is shown on the right).

Bill wanted curved walls, as if you were looking into a large tube (the interior of a cylindrical rocket or missile), but that turned out to be trickier than expected. Here’s an email that Bill sent to me when the cockpit construction started to move forward in April 2009:

“I have a buddy who has a truck. I spoke to him about how to build the cockpit for stormy and he told me of flexible 4' X 8' plastic sheets at Home Depot. So he volunteered to take me there and haul it to the office. Turned out to be an almost 4 hour event. But I got the plastic... almost $65. Now I gotta figure out how to construct it.”

Two weeks later, I received this:

“Saturday I had problems with the cock pit set. The materials that I bought to create curved walls was just too heavy to use. I tried to convert the CRYPT niche into the cockpit but we just could not install that curved plastic material. Neither existing side walls could support all that weight. So I went to plan B, and bought more plastic foam siding and am in the process of rigging that.”

What we ended up with had straight walls made of thin, delicate Styrofoam. The walls were so weak that they couldn’t support the weight of its Styrofoam ceiling, which was attached to a coat hanger and suspended from the alcove above by thin ropes so that it wouldn’t collapse. If you touched this thing, it would fall over like a house of cards.

But for under $100, it looked pretty cool!

I was just learning how to use Poser back then, and I found a 3D model that would eventually become the exterior of Stormy’s retro-style rocket ship. As for Stormy’s A. I. companion, my original intention was to create an oscilloscope wave graphic that would wobble in sync with a voiceover (again, like K.I.T.T. from Knight Rider, but with a more analog look). At this point in time, I was already editing Nightveil: The Sorcerer’s Eye and the rest of Stormy Tempest: Perils in the Past, while Bill was doing work for AC Comics and editing Planet of the Damned. There was just no time to add on more digital effects work if we could come up with a more practical, non-CGI solution.

If you’re familiar with AC Comics, Bill has a very psychedelic design sensibility. His character Azagoth appears as a talking fuzzy block with a giant eyeball in the middle of it. Channeling my inner Bill Black, I came up with the idea of a talking hand to serve as Stormy’s A.I. companion. A talking hand could gesture and emote, or operate nearby controls, or hold various tools, and would generally be more interesting to look at than a static prop. So, I went to Home Depot and bought a white work glove and a huge rubber gasket that was wide enough to stick my arm through. Felt was glued to the fingertips to make the articulation of the white glove easier to see on film, and the glove was bolted to the gasket so that it would all stay in one piece.

Bill cut one side out of a large cardboard shipping box, big enough for me to crawl into if I crouched down, and then he cut a small circular hole in the top, allowing me to stick my forearm up through the hole and puppet the hand from within the box. This would allow me to be hidden in the background of the shot inside the box, while interacting with Nicola Rae in real time, while Bill operated the camera. Two more holes were cut into the top of the box to mount hand-held, battery-operated spinning, light-up, souvenir toys from Disney to serve as sci-fi interface devices. These were covered with faceted glass bowls that belonged to Bill’s wife, along with matching candleholders to serve as “hologram projectors”.

To give the cardboard box a sci-fi look, Bill hot glued aluminum foil to the exterior of the box. While the foil seemed like a good idea at the time, it turned out to be a problem. The wall opposite of the cockpit opening was used as Bill’s semi-permanent greenscreen setup, which is where the camera had to be positioned in order to look into the cockpit. The foil acted like a mirror, reflecting the greenscreen that was behind the camera into the scene, giving everything (including Nicola Rae) a sickly greenish cast. To solve this issue, we took the whole thing apart and put an old black bed sheet over the box so that it would become non-reflective, and then we cut holes into the sheet so that I could still climb into it and stick my arm through the hole. All of this was assembled in a very small alcove in the AC Comics warehouse behind dozens of boxes filled with FemForce comics.

The resulting creation was… well… It was fragile and a little sketchy, but we thought it was good enough to get the job done.

I wrote new scenes to bookend the footage that we shot at MegaCon, then Bill hired Nicola Rae for a few hours to come in one afternoon and shoot the brief cockpit scenes. Bill took one of the leftover Blue Bulleteer masks and painted it red, so that Stormy could ditch the Disney princess “pillow mask” that we all hated. I wrote a line into the script about Stormy being forced to change into the pillow mask during her MegaCon away mission because of “regulations” that she was obligated to obey. This explains why she wears the pillow mask at MegaCon, but then NEVER wears it again in future films. (Though at that point in time, we didn’t know there would ever be any future films.)

You would think this would have been an easy shoot. Stormy just had to sit in her chair and deliver a few lines and we had four hours to get it done. How hard could that be? But, of course, it quickly devolved into a disaster. We were trying a new HD monitor setup, so that we could get a better look at what we were recording while we were recording it, but the alcove that we were shooting in was very cramped and the monitor was tilted towards Nicola Rae. This turned out to be extremely distracting for her, and she couldn’t stop looking at herself and laughing at the ridiculousness of the situation. Eventually, we had to turn off all of the external monitors because they were slowing us down.

I remember that we were all very social and talkative that day also. It was really our first opportunity to just hang out with Nicola Rae without the pressure of trying to get a complete film done, so we were all telling stories and having a good time and getting to know each other when we should have probably been working.

When the time came, I climbed into the box to do some amateur puppeteering, but the glove that I had assembled to use as S.H.I.P.’s hand was a left-handed glove, while the hole that Bill put in the top of the box was off-center to the right. This forced me to stretch my left arm awkwardly over my head, twisting myself into a pretzel in the confined space so that I could get my left arm into a hole above my right shoulder. But the dealbreaker turned out to be the weight of the cardboard box. It was so light that every movement of my arm would move the entire box. It was shaking and shifting all over the place in the background behind Stormy, creating a distraction and making it impossible for me to be in the box during the shot.

We decided that the glove would have to be a static prop in the background so that we could focus on Nicola Rae as she delivered her lines while we had access to her, and then we would re-engineer the box at a later time and edit in shots of the puppeted glove that we would film on some future date.

I crawled out of the box, posed the glove and we started to film again. As Nicola Rae expertly delivered her lines, Bill and I watched as the glove slowly fell over in the background like a deflating balloon, ruining the shot. Watching the poor glove go limp in the middle of the shot was like a hilarious metaphor for all of our technical issues while trying to bring this cockpit to life. I tried to fluff up the glove and posed him again for another try, but with the same result. I ended up having to crawl back into the box and I stuffed the fingers of the glove with leftover aluminum foil, giving the glove enough rigidity that the hand could be posed and would remain upright.

A low stress afternoon of filming an easy scene quickly turned into a panic, with an hour left of Nicola Rae’s time on the clock and nothing to show for it. Fortunately, after doing so many ruined takes over and over, Nicola Rae was able to sail through her lines and delivery, and we ended up with the entire scene in the can with about 30 minutes to spare.

Time is money and we wanted to get as much use out of Nicola Rae as possible, so we took a few promo shots like the one posted above. Bill disconnected all of the microphone equipment and cords so that he could get off of the tripod and move the camera in closer to Stormy and get some “action” shots of her in the cockpit. The story as written didn’t really call for it, but we had Nicola Rae act as if her ship was pitching and rolling, or getting hit by laser beams, or colliding with asteroids and stuff like that. We were just making stuff up on the spot, when it occurred to me that we didn’t just have to film Stormy in the cockpit… we were all standing in front of a greenscreen!

With 20 minutes left on the clock, we filmed all of Stormy Tempest: Attack of the Giantess, but that is a story for another day.

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