7-15-01
Today was somewhat of a short day, thank goodness. But, it did involve a lot of smoke and digging. Hell, I even burned my fingers on some smoke bombs. It was interesting, because smoke was supposed to engulf Kylene and Jon. We (or at least I) didn't take into account the wind factor. So, we were down to our last few smoke bombs and we decided to light them off on a shovel so we could move it back and fourth in front of the camera, depending on which way the wind was blowing. Pretty entertaining. This is the middle of the shoot, the low point for me. You aren't starting a project so you don't have the adrenaline rush and your not close to finishing with that large energy boost, you are just moving along.

8-30-01
Man, I feel so bad. Elana was in an accident and broke her foot. She really wants to be in this thing and I want her to as well.

9-14-01
Tonight we shot the footage with the two goth women and Shannon, only it ended up only being one goth woman. Had to do another re-write, but it turned out okay. Jon Wilmot connected me up with this woman who was interested in playing the part, and it looked like things were going to go fine. But, I made the mistake of telling her it shouldn't take that long and she was there until 4:00 AM. By the time she left, she was wiped out and will probably never do another movie for me. A lot of action was to be filmed and her back was covered in my make up guys Rob-O-Matic goop. The girl (Kelly) has long hair and at one point she whipped her hair back and got it stuck in the stuff. Needless to say, she was ready to leave. I talked to her a couple of days later and she is fine. It was a long night...

Another cool thing was there was a major wind and electrical storm that night. The lights would flicker once in a while and I found myself praying on several different occasions "please, lights, don't go out...don't go out.." There was thunder in the background and it really added to the scenes.

9-15-01
Okay, today was an interesting day. Today was the first day I have ever filmed a "sex scene" between two people. It was between Shannon and Warren, and I knew that both of them had to be nervous as well. We got set up, and I just let Joe roll the camera and let things go. (Please note, they did not have sex!). It was kind of uncomfortable at first, at least on my end, but by the time it was all said and done, we were laughing. Of course, that was a closed set. J The rest of the day we shot outdoor scenes down by the culvert with Jon and Kylene. Not problems except the bright sun and glaring, but Joe fixed it. He is the man.

9-16-01
Today we shot a couple of scenes I was looking forward too. In the morning we started with Betty (she played Serena's mom in part one) and I knew there was going to be tons of laughter. There was. It was a short scene and didn't take that long to film. The funny thing was, we HAD to shoot it that morning because the location had been sold.

In the afternoon I had a total blast. I got to be in front of the camera as well. I had to re-write the hitchiker scene with Elana's broken foot in mind, so I had to add a charcter and I played him. It was so much fun. We also got to goop Elana up really good. The only downer was cleaning up that room after. It was a mess.

Elana did an awesome job for the camera, a real natural.

10-30-01
Tonight we finished up all the scenes involving the house. Poor Felicia, she went through three heavy make up changes and costume changes. It was a heck of a night for her. We also had to re-shoot some stuff, but it all came off very well. A 14 hour night. I'm shocked I made it home, I don't remember driving it. Everyone was glad to finally finish with the house. The funniest thing, in June it was FREEZING out there when we were doing all the outdoor night shoots, and in November, it was so much warmer. Go figure.

A couple of bad things though, the front deck of the house was soaking wet and very slippery. Rob took a tumble down them and hurt his wrist. He's fine though, just a little sore. Kylene was two hours late. She hit another deer...

11-1-01
Tonight we shot all of the hell footage. Man, now that was fun. I had to drop the original location, where we shot hell stuff from the first movie, because they had raised their prices several hundred bucks. Nope. So, once again it was a re-write. I rented out a room from the public library. Little did they know, we were actually shooting downstairs in the parking garage. What an errie setting and it was very cool. Once again I got into the action and was being chased around by Felicia weilding the ax. I told her to come at me full speed, and damned if she didn't do it. I was running backwards and she came at me like an out of control freight train swinginf the ax. A couple of times I thought she might actually connect. No worries, it was a fake ax created by our one and only make up guy Rob Merickel.

Joe got some great dolly shots by sitting down in a desk chair and someone pushing him along. Awesome footage.

We did finish out the night (or should I say early morning) in the room. I'm not going to tell you what we were filming, but it was great to see the expressions on the janitors as they came walking in as we were filming. A long night, but awesome.

11-2-01
Today was the final day. We started out by shooting at my house and then moved on to an office where we shot some more stuff with Warren. He looked so professional. J Then, for the final shots, we went to a hotel room and finished it off. It was funny, because Kylene was supposed to wake up screaming, so we figured we would shoot that last so if the cops were called, we would have time to get out of there.

She screamed very loud.

No cops came.

Scary.

When I finally said "It's a wrap", I felt so relieved and sad at the same time. The filming is over, but when you put a year of your life or better into getting the thing shot, you grow close to people and it's sad in a way when you know you won't see some of them as much or at all anymore. Nature of the biz.

We all got crazy and took some candid shots with the film we had left and oh my god, I hope people never see some of them, heh heh. We went nuts.

Someone has already asked if I'm going to do a 3. I'm not sure yet, don't even want to think about it. I was to relish in the fact that we did an awesome job on the sequel and it's on to editing. I want to thank everyone who was involved in ABOMINATION: THE EVILMAKER II. You are all incredible.

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