The easiest route to the C++

As the 12 hour production days become 16 hour zombie marathons, my blogging window starts to suffer.

Yesterday started at the standard 9 AM as the freshly-recovered Jake arrived at Charmed Central, and ended at about 1:30 AM this morning when we finally got back to Winchester from a trip to London to hook up with our gore guys. By which time I was beyond even Tweeting.

Not that I’m complaining – yesterday was all about dismemberment and splatter, and time spent planning that is never dull.

I won’t bore you with the admin nonsense that passed for a day’s work until mid-afternoon. Thankfully Robbie-the-Gore stepped in with an invitation to his workshop in Deptford, and the day positively blossomed from there. A couple of hours later, after a guided tour through zombie heaven and about twenty deconstructed take-downs, and the three of us were in a pub in Waterloo to meet Adam-the-DFX.

Then it all got a bit hazy.

I’ve mentioned before that the horror romantic in me is all about the in-camera splatter. It’s what I fell in love with as I grew up in the 80’s, before computers came along and made everybody’s life safer. But this naïve romantic now has to share a brain with a pragmatic producer, and he can be a real ball-buster when he wants to be.

Why can’t we just fire off a bunch of pangos inside someone else’s school when a zombie gets shot? What’s wrong with filling a room with a shallow pool of blood? Why do we need to worry about hiding a supposedly amputated leg if we can just chop the real one off?

Producer says no. The git.

So Jake and I brought the prosthetics guru and the digital wizard together into one place. And plied them with beer. How can we make the join between their respective disciplines as seamless as possible, to forge the perfect fusion of Latex and software?

At last we got to feel like filmmakers again, rather than email shepherds. Although that could have just been a contact-high from all the solvents in Robbie’s workshop. Jake woke up with 101 additional lighting solutions, and this morning the prosthetics order went in. Cash got transferred, and we are officially rolling.

But then, how can you say no to this fellow? Cuddly.