The Ride Production Journal #8

With the cast in place, shooting dates (mostly) pencilled in, and all crew accounted for, things are really zipping along over here. We locked down our Pet Food Store location. I finally brought an Art Director into the fold (my friend Mike Winingham, whose also connected to Vroman's - his girlfriend works in the children's department!). And this past Sunday, we had our first read through of the script, and then went over to the FX artists house to make a head casting of Armen, with an aim towards having his prosthetics ready for a test by the end of this month.

The reading was terrific - both Armen and Clinton have a fantastic grasp of who their characters are. We went through the script three times - once completely cold, once where I made suggestions throughout, and once more so I could get it on video for posterity. Basically, these guys barely need any direction at all!



The head casting also went amazingly smooth. Armen was in and out of there in about 40 minutes - a long way from the days when me and my friend Shannon where trying to figure out what we were doing while we were doing it - and the final product came out very precise, with only a few small air pockets to sand down.

Below are some pics of our trip to FX man Adrian Marcato's house, as well as Armen's adventures under Alginate. Adrian lives in an apartment that is part macabre museum, part FX work shop, and part living quarters. My kind of place!





Armen comes on the scene; he got a huge kick out of the whole process.

With the FX moving along, our last big hurdle involves the van. We've mostly decided on renting a van from Enterprise and then dressing it up; however, it's all theory at this point, and I don't think anyone will feel truly comfortable until this idea has been test run, which I'm trying to do the last Saturday of the month. There's also the question of how to get some of the driving shots that I feel will be unsafe to have an actor perform while actually behind the wheel of a moving car. We've all batted around a number of suggestions, and are hoping to test some of them this Sunday, when Amy, Joel and I do our final location scout in Riverside. Stay tuned for more on this next week!