Apocalyptica - Teaser Trailer

Code of Honor - Sundance Trailer

Sundance, meet CODE OF HONOR.

Z.CAM teaser traler ONLINE!

Check it.



Broadcasting LIVE from the ZOMBIE APOCALYPSE.

The zombieless teaser trailer for our upcoming zombie internet mini-series, Z.CAM.

What if everyone you ever knew and loved told you to leave them behind? Z.CAM: Season One chronicles the lives of four teens in Southern Florida as they try to escape the peninsula of flesh-eating ghouls. JON is using his video camera as a coping mechanism. MIKE just wants to keep everyone alive. JAKE is concealing a violent infection. KATIE is eating for two.

Z.CAM was shot on a PANASONIC HVX200A.

Code of Honor NEEDS YOUR HELP!

COME BE MEDIEVAL WITH MIKE AND DONNY

This Saturday, you are invited to come out and participate in the filming of Code of Honor! We've finished building the set for the town, but we need your help to fill it out. We need people who want to come out for a day (or two!) and play peasants in the movie. Costumes will be provided for you, but if you feel the need to tear up some t shirts or you happen to have medieval looking clothes lying around, please, feel free to show up with your own stuff!

Free food (Krystal Burger? Pollo? Subway?) and a role in the movie? What more could you ask for?

Filming will be this weekend at 11:30. If you think you can show up, please let us know! It'll make scheduling a LOT easier. Also, feel free to bring your friends, provided they don't have anything that screams "not medieval times" about them. Adults are more than welcome.

To get to the set, just head down Sunrise towards the Swap Shop. After the turnpike, you're going to see a peach colored bridge (the second bridge) on your right. Head over that bridge and you'll see a big office building. Turn left and you'll see an identical building on the other side of a lake. Head down the road, make a right, and find #108. We'll probably have people out there to guide you, but if you get lost, call (954) 562-3581 and I'll give you directions.

If you can make it out, do it! What's a better use of your day than being in a movie?! Every person helps!

-dk

Code of Honor NEEDS YOUR HELP!

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

Code of Honor: Day 1

I've come to realize that every great film project has a terrible first day. This is a test, set forth by the ancient Aztec cinema gods to eliminate all those unworthy of recording time. If you can't get past the first day, you can't get past filming a movie, because, inevitably, it's going to get much worse. Art comes from pain, and your film is going to artistically stab you. I don't care what movie you're making, it's going to stab you. Accept this, and we can proceed.

For example, take the first day of our maiden voyage, The Rough Cut. The camera wasn't charged, there was a severe lack of working tapes, leather bound fight scenes ended in near heatstroke, and, worst of all, my hair looked terrible. On the first day of pre-production for Splinterwood, when we all gathered around and shook hands for the first time, it was over the lifeless body of a baby kitten, who's adorability was nothing short of LOL cat. It was dropped (unwanted) from a moving car, after which is seized to death. And, on the first day of Code of Honor, we had trials and tribulations that will go undiscussed until our tell-all autobiographies, but car accidents and epically unsuccessful guerilla filmmaking were among our tests on that day.

Now, on a more positive note, everything looks great. We got Shawn into the Autumn Seed, a spaceship we built inside of Jim Allen's van. Steel bars from Home Depot created the framework for the ship, with computer monitors and HDTV playing the computer displays Mike made in after effects (very similar to what he did for the Voodoo Ninja's introduction in The Rough Cut). We got to test out the 750 watt lights that we bought from Home Depot, which you may know from the screenshots as the sun. And, as we started building the ship last week, Mike had been driving around with it in his car for days. Luckily, it's been disassembled, and will shortly be reassembled as the smuggler ship.

That's the plan for today: build the smuggler ship. I'll be playing to pilot, Jasco, so be sure to check out my brief cameo when you buy the DVD to support our next ridiculous project.

More updates soon,
dk