I haven't made and entry for a while, but we've had three days of filming outside in the snow since the cold weather hit: one just before Christmas, and two this past weekend. (We nearly filmed another major scene, but a snowstorm hit, and driving became so dangerous,I called everyone on the way to the location and cancelled.)

Two of the days we were out in the snow were fairly nice days - mild temperatures without too much wind to kill our sound. The day we filmed Jay Cross driving around on back roads and pulling up to Jamie Picon's house looked beautiful, although the roads were pretty slick. We have several takes in which Jay stops at an intersection, then attempts to pull forward, but ends up spinning his tires. We also discovered that our tape recording heads were dirty on the DVX100 (which is hardly surprising). This caused bizarre digital lines to appear in some shots, but fortunately not often enough to ruin the bulk of the footage. After running a tape-cleaner through the camera, we haven't seen the problem re-appear.

This past Saturday was another nice day, although thankfully overcast. (I'm trying to keep all of our "real life" scenes somewhat gray and muted, to provide a contrast with the brightly colored dream sequences. So far, this has been working well.) We were actually re-doing several shots from last Winter that I wasn't happy with, as well as adding a few new ones. Since the back of Robert Stiefel's house, which we used as the abandoned Corwin House (the one in town; not the one in the woods - there are two now!), doesn't have a bulkhead, we had filmed Rob Kersey being helped out of the bulkhead by Kevin Barrett and Mark Landry at the Derry House, hoping it would be believable that it was the back of the Stiefel house. It wasn't. So we did a bunch of shots at the Stiefel house, framing it so you couldn't tell whether there was a bulkhead there or not. Then we went back to the Derry House on Sunday and did just a couple shots of Rob coming up out of the bulkhead, framing it so you can't see the HOUSE, this time. I haven't edited it yet, but I think it worked well. We'll see.

Apart from the bulkhead shots yesterday, and one miserable shot we had to film after dark, we were able to stay indoors for most of the day, which was good - it was freezing cold outside. The windchill was awful.

Instead, we did several indoor shots of the mysterious robed figure (Kevin Barrett), holding the burning hand of glory. In case I haven't mentioned it before, the hand of glory was a nasty magical invention of the Middle Ages. You take the severed hand of an executed criminal, soak it in wax and light it on fire. (There's more to it than that, of course.) It's supposed to render whoever carries it invisible, in some legends - which is what we're using it for. In other legends, it simply rendered people immobile.

Our hand of glory wasn't made from a real human hand, of course. Ken made it out of plaster of paris, painted appropriately brown and dessicated-looking. We coat the tips of the fingers with rubber cement, which burns very brightly (and smokily) for about ten seconds. This means that our shots have to be done quickly. It also means that the house reeks from it, and the nearby fire alarms have to be disabled. There's also the danger of catching the black robe on fire, since Kevin couldn't see a thing, with the hood drawn down over his face.

The final shot of the evening was the biggest pain in the ass. Kevin was supposed to walk from the front door towards the camera, holding the burning hand. Just as he neared the camera, a gust of wind was supposed to blow the hand out. Well, unfortunately, once the fingers start burning, they don't want to stop, so blowing them out is a challenge. I had Rob standing off to one side, frantically waving a board (our Ouija board prop, in fact) at it. Unfortunately, he sometimes blocked the light we had illuminating the scene, and Kevin had a tendency to list to the side (being blind, and all), causing Rob to chase after him, right into the camera frame. We only got one passable (but not great) shot, before we declared it way too cold out and decided to get back to it some other evening.