Tuesday, March 2, 2004

WHAT’S ON MY BRAIN

This is a different, and kinda cool "What’s on" this week, among the fifty million things going at Heavy Metal Los Angeles, we needed to put together a "mock" film poster for the "American Film Market" that runs from February 25th to March 3rd, and we’re going to show you how we did it.

The poster is for the "Fistful of Blood" live action movie project that we’ve nearly completed all the fund raising for. I’m not going to tell you today it is a 100% go, as in Hollywood you want to believe you’re making a film when you’re on set shooting it. But I will tell you it is looking REALLY GOOD, and I should be able to make more formal announcements in the next few weeks.

Okay, so we had to make a "Mock" poster, with no time, no official cast or set. We did have a "Fistful of Blood" costume that Julie made at Trashy Lingerie here in Los Angeles, as we were going to create some live action "FOB" posters to sell on the website. So the first thing I did was work up a few concept sketches of what I thought would work, before calling my ol’ buddy Lorenzo Sperlonga to see how we could pull it together on his computer. Photos one and two are my rough drawings.

After getting all the shots we needed of the characters, we pulled a photo of a sky from Julie’s collection of "early morning drive by shootings" and found a image of a western town we could lay in the background. That’s when Lorenzo’s real work began. Cleaning up all the photos, getting the contrasts right, beefing them up when required, creating the layers and pasting them together.

About 30 hours later, the basic images began to work together, and about another 10 hours of laying in more tones and effects, logos and text, Lorenzo had pulled together a master piece in our eyes, and in record time. Mike Tristano deserves all the credit for the tag line of "She drifted into town…with a few days to kill!" I love it. Photo #7 is the finished poster. Let me know your thoughts on it.

I want to extend a very special ‘Thanks" to this year’s "Penthouse Pet of the Year" Victoria Zdrok, for a number of reasons. Not only was she the original inspiration for the female character for the comic book, she happened to be doing a photo shoot here at the house when Simon and I were just starting the book, and we both agreed the "Gal" should look just like her. But we also wanted to get her to play the lead character in the film. She’s not in, but she’s not out, and we’re fighting everyday to keep her as the lead, and will have to see where it all ends up. In the mean time, I wanted to show you this "Bonus Photo" of a quick series of shots Julie took of her in the costume to help convince the investors she was the one. Enjoy!