Code of Honor: Day 2

We just had our second actual day of filming, and oh man, did all of our work pay off. We've spent a week straight toiling away at building the set and I'm fairly sure that we all have Stucko permanently affixed to our fingertips, but it looks fantastic. I didn't notice that we had driven ourselves to a strange place until we were sitting in the set in 95 degree weather and none of us were the least bit bothered by the temperature (thank you, Sam Leibowitz, for making me realize we're crazy).

The walls were lined with newly assembled IKEA furniture, featuring our favorite old stuff from home, like torn up books, chipped bowls, and my badass sake keg from a thrift store in New York. Ali painted the symbol of the Monk's order on a strip of fabric and we hung that behind a shrine to the Living Stone. The amount of detail that we put into the set was impressive even to me, and I was there the whole time we were building it. We even covered the windows in plastic sheeting that we spraypainted blue, so the lights shining through the window made it look like night. One snag, however, was the strange shape these papers (pictured right) took once we glued them to the wall.

It didn't take very long for Jim and Shawn to get into character when they were sitting in this prettydamngood looking set wearing their prettydamngood looking costumes with a prettyfuckinggreat looking fire sword. The first test of the Knight's sword went fantastically. Okay, well, the sword actually broke and fell in two while we were filming because the fire somehow broke the magnets holding it together, but, until that happened, it looked fantastic. Don't believe me? Check out the picture and eat your words, heretic.

I'll be coming out with a making of video soon to fully detail how we made the Monk's hut/school, so I'm sorry if this was a bit lacking, but me explaining about how we smeared the the fake plaster is probably way less interesting than flamingfuckingswords.

By the Code,
dk

Code of Honor has Wood

The construction of sets is something pretty new to us. I did a lot of set dressing on Splinterwood, and Mike had school plays, but I don't think either of us has done anything as ambitious as build sets from scratch. We went to Home Depot and bought a hilarious amount of wood to build the interior of the Monk's hut. The plywood is going up inside of Jake's gazebo, after which it will be covered in plaster. The slathered plaster will give a medieval feel to the walls of the hut, with any luck, and will then be used as building walls in the town.

Getting the wood from Home Depot to Jake's house was a bit of an ordeal. We had to put the plywood on top of Mike's Rav-4 (which has those obnoxious bars on top of it that people use to move bikes or something, I don't know) and fasten it down with bungee chords attached to the hand holds. Then, we had to slide the wooden beams through Mike's trunk and out the passenger side window (a similar technique was used to transfer the dolly track during The Rough Cut). This process caused the Rav-4 to have a makeshift lance for car jousting (or something) that would either decapitate me or crush me to death if we hit something (with the bungee chords going through the window and onto the hand holds, it would be impossible for me to open the door).

Luckily, no one died. Jake and I wrapped various clothing items around our hands and held the wood down on the roof for the entire ride home, which was no small workout, lemme tell ya. The wood only threatened to fall forward once, but it was enough to make us paranoid and Mike's driving speed 30 mph for the rest of the trip. We did make it succesfully, however, and we're beginning construction of the hut today. Expect accompanying production blog.

By the Code,
dk