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Description
You might want to read my post from yesterday first, if you haven't already:

Before I go much further with this story, I should mention that I am trying to recall what happened throughout one chaotic day in 2009. I’m pretty sure this is all accurate, but if you asked Nicola Rae or Bill Black to tell the same story, the details may vary. This is what happened though, to the best of my recollection…

Once we made it to the roof of the Orange County Convention Center, we finally had some peace and quiet. No one stopped us from going up there, and the maintenance hallway that we took to get there didn’t seem to be the kind of place that would ever have heavy foot traffic. The rooftop seemed sturdy and there was a large concrete pad that was clearly reinforced, so we endeavored to stay on the pad so that we didn’t step in the wrong place and fall through the roof to our deaths.

As I mentioned in my story about Nightveil: The Sorcerer’s Eye, that film almost didn’t have an ending, which would have rendered all of our previous efforts moot. Learning my lesson, I specifically wrote the Stormy Tempest script so that we could begin and end the movie from the rooftop location. Stormy would beam down to the roof to start her adventure, then at the end of the movie she would make her way back to the roof and beam back up to her ship. We filmed BOTH of those scenes at the very start of the day, so even if we ended up with problems in the middle, we would still definitely have a movie with a beginning and an ending. I also wrote it to be what I called “modular”. The script was made up of small scenes that didn’t necessarily have to interconnect. If we ran out of time or ran into problems, the script would allow us to just cut out entire chunks of the script and we’d still have a semi-coherent story: Stormy arrives, does some stuff fighting Gorla Monks, then she leaves. Nightveil: The Sorcerer’s Eye was a learning experience, and I was trying not to make the same mistakes twice. Once the annual MegaCon ended, we wouldn’t be able to get pickup shots until the following year! That was not an option. We had to have a FINISHED film by the end of the day.

We started off great. The rooftop scenes were knocked out quickly and then we moved back into the maintenance hallway where Stormy would be ambushed by a Gorla Monk, played by her husband Pierce Knightly. We filmed a pretty fun shoot out in this hallway, knowing that I would be adding laser beam FX during post-production.

While filming this scene, we almost got busted. Bill and I were on one end of the corridor with cameras and gear spread out all over the floor, Nicola Rae was in full costume, Pierce was dressed in the Gorla costume, when suddenly a door burst open and a duded that obviously worked at the Convention Center came walking in! We all froze, expecting him to bark at us, or to at least tell us that we shouldn’t be there and to leave. Instead, he didn’t even make eye contact with us and never said a word. He just walked through one door, down the hallway in complete silence, until he reached Pierce who said “Hey, how’s it going?” through his Gorla Monk mask. The guy nodded at Pierce and then left through another door, and he was gone. All very surreal.

After a fit of laughter, we got back to work, trying to wrap up the scene quickly to get out of there in case someone else came along. The maintenance corridor connected to a dark stairwell, where we filmed a suspenseful scene with Stormy getting ambushed and knocked out by a point-blank laser blast. All of this worked out great and I felt like we were off to an amazing start.

At that point, we needed help. The “story” called for Pierce to play the part of a civilian attending the comic book convention. Like John Connor in Terminator, his character was somehow important to the future. I didn’t explain why. I didn’t even know why at the time. He was just the MacGuffin that the Gorla wanted, and that Stormy had to rescue. I wrote it that way because I knew that Pierce would be with us all day and he was the only reliable performer I’d have access to besides Nicola Rae herself. I had to have SOMEONE wearing the Gorla Monk costume while they kidnapped Pierce and Stormy pursued. I just needed a volunteer to put on the Gorla outfit. A human coat rack. No acting talent required.

We went down onto the main convention floor and met up with some of Bill’s friends at Artist Alley. We were able to recruit one volunteer to play a Gorla Monk briefly for our next scene: Paul Monsky, frequent AC Comics contributor, and creator of the VaVaVaVoom! anthology comic book series.

We went down to the very front of the Convention Center’s bus loading area and found a reasonably quiet bench where we filmed Pierce’s abduction scene. Bill had one functional wireless microphone that he put on Pierce to record his dialog, while our Gorla Monk gestured and nodded his head and pretended to deliver lines without actually saying anything at all. (I provided the voice of all of the Gorla Monks, recorded and added weeks or months later during post-production.) After a few lines, we have the Gorla grab Pierce, zap him, and drag him into the building.

We then filmed a quick scene right in front of the entrance to the main hall at MegaCon with the Gorla leading Pierce through the crowd while Stormy pursued about 50 yards behind them. At that point in the day, the convention was in full swing, and no one even acknowledged that we were there. As Pierce, the Gorla and Stormy moved through the crowd, Bill and I moved parallel to them. I acted as quarterback, cutting a path through the crowd, while Bill followed me with the camera and focused on keeping the actors in frame.

We were doing great, but we had reached lunchtime and we all needed a break, so we went to a semi-quiet corner on the second floor of the convention center. The actors grabbed a snack while Bill and I assessed what we had filmed and what to do next.

This was when we discovered our major obstacle of the day: We were almost out of battery power. Bill wasn’t quite equipped for filming the entire day outside of a studio at that point. He brought every battery that he owned, but we were ripping through them, and back then it took almost 12 hours or more to charge a camera battery. Whatever we were going to do that afternoon, it had to be done quickly.

The area where we had stopped for lunch offered a bit of a solution… outlets! We had a battery charger and the camera cord with us, so we came up with the plan of charging one of the batteries while putting the camera on the cord. This limited our camera movement and positions to a roughly 20 foot space around the outlet, but it was better than nothing. It conserved our mobile battery power, allowed us to give our remaining battery a little more juice, and allowed us to keep filming, which is exactly what we did.

We were terrified of fight scenes back then. We didn’t want anyone to get hurt. Bill and I knew nothing about fight choreography. Our saving grace was Nicola Rae. She is a classically trained theater actress and she had stage combat training and experience! With her help, we put together a brief little fight scene in which Stormy catches up to the Gorla, wrestles with him for a bit, kicks his ass, and rescues Pierce, all while trying not to move the camera too far away from the outlet, and with everyone stuffing sandwiches into their mouth between takes.

In the background of our fight scene you can see lots of people attending the convention. There we were, wrestling around on the floor and throwing kicks and punches, and it didn’t draw a crowd (or security) and no one complained. It was awesome.

At that point, we could have called it done, and we almost did. Paul Monksy had to get back to his table to sell some comics, so we were about to lose our Gorla Monk. We had a beginning and an ending. In the middle, we had the bad guys acquire the MacGuffin, and then Stormy recovers it. Not great, I had hoped to do more, but good enough. We had maybe 30 minutes left on the battery, even after trying to recharge it. Best to just call it a day.

We went with Paul Monksy back into the main hall of the convention, just to hang out for a bit and enjoy being there. The Stormy costume soon attracted a crowd and Nicola Rae posed for pictures. There were thousands of people, vendor booths, costumes, colors, lights, excitement, and we were right in the middle of all of it. Bill told me at that point that he really wanted to get some shots here in the main hall into the movie.

The remaining “modules” in my modular script were all more complicated than anything that we could shoot in 30 minutes, so the script was now useless. And our “story” was mostly complete already, so if we filmed anything more it had to be a SHORT scene that made sense with its own beginning, middle and end. So (not for the first or last time) I came up with a scene on the spot:

Stormy would lock Pierce in an elevator and hunt down the remaining Gorla Monks (who had fled into the crowd at MegaCon). She would get attacked, which would send her fleeing outside, where she would dispatch the last of the Gorla Monks in a VERY BRIEF fight scene. Then she would let Pierce out of the elevator and depart for her ship, segueing into the ending that we had already filmed. We could shoot the elevator scenes with the camera plugged in, but the rest would have to be filmed with the 30 minutes remaining on the battery.

So, we gathered everyone around in a huddle in the middle of Artist Alley and I tried to yell out the new plan over the constant roar of the crowd, which required a Gorla Monk or two. We had two brown robes and one black robe with us in the duffle bags, plus three masks. Nicola Rae then yelled into the crowd: “Does anyone want to be in a comic book movie right now!” Four complete strangers, just random young guys attending MegaCon that just happened to be standing nearby, volunteered on the spot.

Three costumes, four volunteers… Screw it. Let’s go!

We put Pierce back into one of the Gorla Monk costumes and filmed him ducking in and out of the crowd, then we did the same with Stormy. This was trickier than we thought it would be because the crowd was too thick. People kept moving slowly and then stopping between Bill (our cameraman) and Nicola Rae. It’s not like we had permission to rope off our own private area in the middle of MegaCon. The crowd was just doing its thing, and we were trying to work around oblivious people that had no idea what we were trying to accomplish. It was taking too much time and eating up too much battery. We needed to get out of there fast.

I told Bill to film Stormy as she approached the camera, then we’d have the Gorla pop into the frame and pretend to blow some kind of chemical powder/poison into Stormy’s face. That would make Stormy dizzy, and she could head outside for some fresh air, and then we’d film the fight scene outside of the convention center.

It was a good plan, but I almost started a REAL fight.

We filmed the scene, with Pierce dressed as a Gorla pretending to blow something into his wife’s face. Nicola Rae reacted as if she had been drugged. It was great, but then some HUGE DUDE immediately stepped into the frame and asked Nicola Rae if she was ok. She dropped the act and said that she was fine, but she didn’t have time to offer an explanation before this guy turned on Pierce and was about to kick his ass. Bill and I and everyone that knew what was going on started yelling: “Whoa! Whoa! They’re acting! It’s just for a movie!” The poor guy was obviously confused, and it all happened very fast. Nicola Rae thanked him for trying to be helpful. Then we pressed on.

So, we got the poison attack on film, but we didn’t get Stormy’s reaction to being poisoned because of the interruption. I told Nicola Rae to stagger and sway a little and make her way through the crowd and head for the exit. We got maybe three seconds of this footage before more concerned citizens jumped into the frame to check on Nicola Rae to see if she was okay.

On one hand, all of this reaffirmed my faith in humanity. Multiple complete strangers were clearly willing to jump to Nicola Rae’s aid without hesitation. It was a beautiful thing. On the other hand, all of these nice people were f*cking up my scene!

Knowing that we had to quit before we ended up in trouble, Bill came up with the plan of filming POV style. We would let the camera act as Stormy’s perspective and make it all trippy and weird as she headed for the exit. We grabbed our volunteers and headed out, with Bill swinging the camera all over the place to simulate what a drugged Stormy Tempest might be seeing.

We were finally free of the crowd, but we needed a location for our final fight. As we walked around outside of MegaCon, we found a loading dock that recessed below ground level. We put the Gorla Monk costumes onto our volunteers, distributed the plastic weapons/toys that we had brought along, and tried to come up with a plan for this fight scene: Stormy Tempest vs. four villains, one of whom had no costume at all, just a dude in a yellow visor. We reasoned that perhaps the Gorla Monks had him under mind control somehow. I think we filmed a quick scene to establish that, but I don’t remember if it made it into the movie. We were just making stuff up as we went along.

By the time we were ready to roll, we were running out of both battery power and daylight. Bill couldn’t keep the camera on between shots. We would set up, he’d turn it on at the last second, yell action, we’d do the scene, then he’d turn the camera back off to save power. I was running around barking orders and telling people where to stand and what to do, while Bill circled around the perimeter of the area trying to line up interesting shots. We were so far apart that Bill didn’t even know what I was telling people to do, so he was just trying to guess and anticipate movements as much as possible. Just like the last hour of filming Nightveil: The Sorcerer’s Eye, we were once again in chaos mode.

Halfway through the fight scene, the camera battery was in the red. I just needed to get all of the Gorla Monks DOWN so that Stormy could win the fight and reconnect this scene to the rest of the movie. I came up with the last-minute idea of having Stormy shoot a beam out of the star on her chest, both to end the fight quickly and to give us a final cool moment to wrap the scene. Stormy didn’t have a chest beam in the comics (which we would later call “the boob laser”), but it seemed reasonably plausible at the time.

Bill was constantly reminding us that the battery was on fumes. The daylight was nearly gone. I wanted one last shot of Stormy standing around all of the fallen Gorla Monks. I got everyone in place, told them to hold still, told Stormy to strike a heroic pose, then I ran out of the shot. Bill got into place, set up the camera and yelled action, everyone paused in place for a moment, then he said: “And cut!”

The camera beeped, shut itself down, and the battery promptly died.

I asked Bill if he got the last shot. He didn’t know. The camera was dead. There was no way to replay it. We were done, one way or the other.

We were all exhausted and high on adrenaline. We probably filmed the fight sequence in about 45 minutes, using 15 to 20 minutes of battery power. I remember someone criticizing the film because you could see that one of the Gorla Monks was wearing tennis shoes during the final fight. Now you know why. Everything was shot in a panic and tennis shoes were the least of our issues.

But it was fun!

We let everyone but Pierce and Nicola Rae go home, then we went back inside to film the elevator scene. MegaCon was winding down. There were far less people, and the halls were quieter. We found an elevator with an electrical outlet nearby. Plugging in the camera, we reviewed the footage and discovered that we DID get that last shot before the camera battery had died. Bill was too tired to stand. He filmed the elevator scenes while sitting on the floor, angling the camera up at the actors. Pierce’s character tries to give Stormy an awkward farewell kiss, but Stormy wants nothing to do with it. (Keep in mind this is Nicola Rae ducking a kiss from Pierce, who is her actual husband.)

The last shot of the day was of Stormy Tempest walking away from the camera, swaying her hips, exhausted but victorious… which is pretty much how we all felt at the time.

We had a movie!

But Bill wasn’t done with it just yet. Now that he had a live action Stormy Tempest, he wanted to build her a spaceship cockpit! 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 might want to read my post from yesterday first, if you haven't already:

Before I go much further with this story, I should mention that I am trying to recall what happened throughout one chaotic day in 2009. I’m pretty sure this is all accurate, but if you asked Nicola Rae or Bill Black to tell the same story, the details may vary. This is what happened though, to the best of my recollection…

Once we made it to the roof of the Orange County Convention Center, we finally had some peace and quiet. No one stopped us from going up there, and the maintenance hallway that we took to get there didn’t seem to be the kind of place that would ever have heavy foot traffic. The rooftop seemed sturdy and there was a large concrete pad that was clearly reinforced, so we endeavored to stay on the pad so that we didn’t step in the wrong place and fall through the roof to our deaths.

As I mentioned in my story about Nightveil: The Sorcerer’s Eye, that film almost didn’t have an ending, which would have rendered all of our previous efforts moot. Learning my lesson, I specifically wrote the Stormy Tempest script so that we could begin and end the movie from the rooftop location. Stormy would beam down to the roof to start her adventure, then at the end of the movie she would make her way back to the roof and beam back up to her ship. We filmed BOTH of those scenes at the very start of the day, so even if we ended up with problems in the middle, we would still definitely have a movie with a beginning and an ending. I also wrote it to be what I called “modular”. The script was made up of small scenes that didn’t necessarily have to interconnect. If we ran out of time or ran into problems, the script would allow us to just cut out entire chunks of the script and we’d still have a semi-coherent story: Stormy arrives, does some stuff fighting Gorla Monks, then she leaves. Nightveil: The Sorcerer’s Eye was a learning experience, and I was trying not to make the same mistakes twice. Once the annual MegaCon ended, we wouldn’t be able to get pickup shots until the following year! That was not an option. We had to have a FINISHED film by the end of the day.

We started off great. The rooftop scenes were knocked out quickly and then we moved back into the maintenance hallway where Stormy would be ambushed by a Gorla Monk, played by her husband Pierce Knightly. We filmed a pretty fun shoot out in this hallway, knowing that I would be adding laser beam FX during post-production.

While filming this scene, we almost got busted. Bill and I were on one end of the corridor with cameras and gear spread out all over the floor, Nicola Rae was in full costume, Pierce was dressed in the Gorla costume, when suddenly a door burst open and a duded that obviously worked at the Convention Center came walking in! We all froze, expecting him to bark at us, or to at least tell us that we shouldn’t be there and to leave. Instead, he didn’t even make eye contact with us and never said a word. He just walked through one door, down the hallway in complete silence, until he reached Pierce who said “Hey, how’s it going?” through his Gorla Monk mask. The guy nodded at Pierce and then left through another door, and he was gone. All very surreal.

After a fit of laughter, we got back to work, trying to wrap up the scene quickly to get out of there in case someone else came along. The maintenance corridor connected to a dark stairwell, where we filmed a suspenseful scene with Stormy getting ambushed and knocked out by a point-blank laser blast. All of this worked out great and I felt like we were off to an amazing start.

At that point, we needed help. The “story” called for Pierce to play the part of a civilian attending the comic book convention. Like John Connor in Terminator, his character was somehow important to the future. I didn’t explain why. I didn’t even know why at the time. He was just the MacGuffin that the Gorla wanted, and that Stormy had to rescue. I wrote it that way because I knew that Pierce would be with us all day and he was the only reliable performer I’d have access to besides Nicola Rae herself. I had to have SOMEONE wearing the Gorla Monk costume while they kidnapped Pierce and Stormy pursued. I just needed a volunteer to put on the Gorla outfit. A human coat rack. No acting talent required.

We went down onto the main convention floor and met up with some of Bill’s friends at Artist Alley. We were able to recruit one volunteer to play a Gorla Monk briefly for our next scene: Paul Monsky, frequent AC Comics contributor, and creator of the VaVaVaVoom! anthology comic book series.

We went down to the very front of the Convention Center’s bus loading area and found a reasonably quiet bench where we filmed Pierce’s abduction scene. Bill had one functional wireless microphone that he put on Pierce to record his dialog, while our Gorla Monk gestured and nodded his head and pretended to deliver lines without actually saying anything at all. (I provided the voice of all of the Gorla Monks, recorded and added weeks or months later during post-production.) After a few lines, we have the Gorla grab Pierce, zap him, and drag him into the building.

We then filmed a quick scene right in front of the entrance to the main hall at MegaCon with the Gorla leading Pierce through the crowd while Stormy pursued about 50 yards behind them. At that point in the day, the convention was in full swing, and no one even acknowledged that we were there. As Pierce, the Gorla and Stormy moved through the crowd, Bill and I moved parallel to them. I acted as quarterback, cutting a path through the crowd, while Bill followed me with the camera and focused on keeping the actors in frame.

We were doing great, but we had reached lunchtime and we all needed a break, so we went to a semi-quiet corner on the second floor of the convention center. The actors grabbed a snack while Bill and I assessed what we had filmed and what to do next.

This was when we discovered our major obstacle of the day: We were almost out of battery power. Bill wasn’t quite equipped for filming the entire day outside of a studio at that point. He brought every battery that he owned, but we were ripping through them, and back then it took almost 12 hours or more to charge a camera battery. Whatever we were going to do that afternoon, it had to be done quickly.

The area where we had stopped for lunch offered a bit of a solution… outlets! We had a battery charger and the camera cord with us, so we came up with the plan of charging one of the batteries while putting the camera on the cord. This limited our camera movement and positions to a roughly 20 foot space around the outlet, but it was better than nothing. It conserved our mobile battery power, allowed us to give our remaining battery a little more juice, and allowed us to keep filming, which is exactly what we did.

We were terrified of fight scenes back then. We didn’t want anyone to get hurt. Bill and I knew nothing about fight choreography. Our saving grace was Nicola Rae. She is a classically trained theater actress and she had stage combat training and experience! With her help, we put together a brief little fight scene in which Stormy catches up to the Gorla, wrestles with him for a bit, kicks his ass, and rescues Pierce, all while trying not to move the camera too far away from the outlet, and with everyone stuffing sandwiches into their mouth between takes.

In the background of our fight scene you can see lots of people attending the convention. There we were, wrestling around on the floor and throwing kicks and punches, and it didn’t draw a crowd (or security) and no one complained. It was awesome.

At that point, we could have called it done, and we almost did. Paul Monksy had to get back to his table to sell some comics, so we were about to lose our Gorla Monk. We had a beginning and an ending. In the middle, we had the bad guys acquire the MacGuffin, and then Stormy recovers it. Not great, I had hoped to do more, but good enough. We had maybe 30 minutes left on the battery, even after trying to recharge it. Best to just call it a day.

We went with Paul Monksy back into the main hall of the convention, just to hang out for a bit and enjoy being there. The Stormy costume soon attracted a crowd and Nicola Rae posed for pictures. There were thousands of people, vendor booths, costumes, colors, lights, excitement, and we were right in the middle of all of it. Bill told me at that point that he really wanted to get some shots here in the main hall into the movie.

The remaining “modules” in my modular script were all more complicated than anything that we could shoot in 30 minutes, so the script was now useless. And our “story” was mostly complete already, so if we filmed anything more it had to be a SHORT scene that made sense with its own beginning, middle and end. So (not for the first or last time) I came up with a scene on the spot:

Stormy would lock Pierce in an elevator and hunt down the remaining Gorla Monks (who had fled into the crowd at MegaCon). She would get attacked, which would send her fleeing outside, where she would dispatch the last of the Gorla Monks in a VERY BRIEF fight scene. Then she would let Pierce out of the elevator and depart for her ship, segueing into the ending that we had already filmed. We could shoot the elevator scenes with the camera plugged in, but the rest would have to be filmed with the 30 minutes remaining on the battery.

So, we gathered everyone around in a huddle in the middle of Artist Alley and I tried to yell out the new plan over the constant roar of the crowd, which required a Gorla Monk or two. We had two brown robes and one black robe with us in the duffle bags, plus three masks. Nicola Rae then yelled into the crowd: “Does anyone want to be in a comic book movie right now!” Four complete strangers, just random young guys attending MegaCon that just happened to be standing nearby, volunteered on the spot.

Three costumes, four volunteers… Screw it. Let’s go!

We put Pierce back into one of the Gorla Monk costumes and filmed him ducking in and out of the crowd, then we did the same with Stormy. This was trickier than we thought it would be because the crowd was too thick. People kept moving slowly and then stopping between Bill (our cameraman) and Nicola Rae. It’s not like we had permission to rope off our own private area in the middle of MegaCon. The crowd was just doing its thing, and we were trying to work around oblivious people that had no idea what we were trying to accomplish. It was taking too much time and eating up too much battery. We needed to get out of there fast.

I told Bill to film Stormy as she approached the camera, then we’d have the Gorla pop into the frame and pretend to blow some kind of chemical powder/poison into Stormy’s face. That would make Stormy dizzy, and she could head outside for some fresh air, and then we’d film the fight scene outside of the convention center.

It was a good plan, but I almost started a REAL fight.

We filmed the scene, with Pierce dressed as a Gorla pretending to blow something into his wife’s face. Nicola Rae reacted as if she had been drugged. It was great, but then some HUGE DUDE immediately stepped into the frame and asked Nicola Rae if she was ok. She dropped the act and said that she was fine, but she didn’t have time to offer an explanation before this guy turned on Pierce and was about to kick his ass. Bill and I and everyone that knew what was going on started yelling: “Whoa! Whoa! They’re acting! It’s just for a movie!” The poor guy was obviously confused, and it all happened very fast. Nicola Rae thanked him for trying to be helpful. Then we pressed on.

So, we got the poison attack on film, but we didn’t get Stormy’s reaction to being poisoned because of the interruption. I told Nicola Rae to stagger and sway a little and make her way through the crowd and head for the exit. We got maybe three seconds of this footage before more concerned citizens jumped into the frame to check on Nicola Rae to see if she was okay.

On one hand, all of this reaffirmed my faith in humanity. Multiple complete strangers were clearly willing to jump to Nicola Rae’s aid without hesitation. It was a beautiful thing. On the other hand, all of these nice people were f*cking up my scene!

Knowing that we had to quit before we ended up in trouble, Bill came up with the plan of filming POV style. We would let the camera act as Stormy’s perspective and make it all trippy and weird as she headed for the exit. We grabbed our volunteers and headed out, with Bill swinging the camera all over the place to simulate what a drugged Stormy Tempest might be seeing.

We were finally free of the crowd, but we needed a location for our final fight. As we walked around outside of MegaCon, we found a loading dock that recessed below ground level. We put the Gorla Monk costumes onto our volunteers, distributed the plastic weapons/toys that we had brought along, and tried to come up with a plan for this fight scene: Stormy Tempest vs. four villains, one of whom had no costume at all, just a dude in a yellow visor. We reasoned that perhaps the Gorla Monks had him under mind control somehow. I think we filmed a quick scene to establish that, but I don’t remember if it made it into the movie. We were just making stuff up as we went along.

By the time we were ready to roll, we were running out of both battery power and daylight. Bill couldn’t keep the camera on between shots. We would set up, he’d turn it on at the last second, yell action, we’d do the scene, then he’d turn the camera back off to save power. I was running around barking orders and telling people where to stand and what to do, while Bill circled around the perimeter of the area trying to line up interesting shots. We were so far apart that Bill didn’t even know what I was telling people to do, so he was just trying to guess and anticipate movements as much as possible. Just like the last hour of filming Nightveil: The Sorcerer’s Eye, we were once again in chaos mode.

Halfway through the fight scene, the camera battery was in the red. I just needed to get all of the Gorla Monks DOWN so that Stormy could win the fight and reconnect this scene to the rest of the movie. I came up with the last-minute idea of having Stormy shoot a beam out of the star on her chest, both to end the fight quickly and to give us a final cool moment to wrap the scene. Stormy didn’t have a chest beam in the comics (which we would later call “the boob laser”), but it seemed reasonably plausible at the time.

Bill was constantly reminding us that the battery was on fumes. The daylight was nearly gone. I wanted one last shot of Stormy standing around all of the fallen Gorla Monks. I got everyone in place, told them to hold still, told Stormy to strike a heroic pose, then I ran out of the shot. Bill got into place, set up the camera and yelled action, everyone paused in place for a moment, then he said: “And cut!”

The camera beeped, shut itself down, and the battery promptly died.

I asked Bill if he got the last shot. He didn’t know. The camera was dead. There was no way to replay it. We were done, one way or the other.

We were all exhausted and high on adrenaline. We probably filmed the fight sequence in about 45 minutes, using 15 to 20 minutes of battery power. I remember someone criticizing the film because you could see that one of the Gorla Monks was wearing tennis shoes during the final fight. Now you know why. Everything was shot in a panic and tennis shoes were the least of our issues.

But it was fun!

We let everyone but Pierce and Nicola Rae go home, then we went back inside to film the elevator scene. MegaCon was winding down. There were far less people, and the halls were quieter. We found an elevator with an electrical outlet nearby. Plugging in the camera, we reviewed the footage and discovered that we DID get that last shot before the camera battery had died. Bill was too tired to stand. He filmed the elevator scenes while sitting on the floor, angling the camera up at the actors. Pierce’s character tries to give Stormy an awkward farewell kiss, but Stormy wants nothing to do with it. (Keep in mind this is Nicola Rae ducking a kiss from Pierce, who is her actual husband.)

The last shot of the day was of Stormy Tempest walking away from the camera, swaying her hips, exhausted but victorious… which is pretty much how we all felt at the time.

We had a movie!

But Bill wasn’t done with it just yet. Now that he had a live action Stormy Tempest, he wanted to build her a spaceship cockpit! 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