Yeah, I could have changed the title, but “Hello world!” just felt right.  Welcome to the warts and all, blow by blow production blog for The Year After Infection.

We join our heroes, right after they have completed principle photography on the first segment of the film.  And after many hassles, trips, vacations, holidays etc., they gear up to tackle part two.  Things aren’t quite going  as planned, and we’ve had some colossal hurdles to jump, but at long long last, we are getting the last details together to start filming again.

Scene
INT: Dusk.
We open in a kitchen in a non-distinct house in suburban Missouri. Four people, two men, two women, stand around an island in the kitchen drinking coffee, smoking, and debating exactly what happens next, and when it happens.  It’s obvious to look at them that none of them have gotten a lot of rest recently…

Due to running long filming spring, we lost one cast member, and due to an auto accident we may be loosing another, which will, in true domino effect fashion, cause us to lose a third.  Happy is not a place I’m visiting right now…  I’m keeping my fingers crossed for a lot of things, but we’ve already scheduled a casting call and did some reads just in case.  I just wish there was more we could do about it, but, at the end of the day,  it is what it is.

As we gear up to get all of the wardrobe and props and makeup together for shooting, the casting dilemma has left us in a buy two, and hopefully return one, frenzy.  But everybody is upbeat.  Hopefully part three will go smoother, if we can just avoid any further delays.  Oh please don’t let there be any delays.  In the back of my head, DELAY is a super villian, who waits around corners near sunny streets with a roll of duct tape and a lead pipe, itching to crack you over the head as you stroll by and usually only on good days.

It appears we have everything sorted, and now all we have to do is race the weather.  Standing in a freezing river holding a camera is not real high on my list of things to do…And we can’t really have orange trees in the background and maintain the appropriate theme…And it looks like it’s going to be an early fall this year.

The upside is spring is editing together wonderfully, and I really couldn’t be much happier with where we wound up.  The performances are great, the footage looks wonderful.  I can’t wait to get everyone together and let them see the rough cut, so they can see where all the work they put in went.

I always intended to start blogging much sooner than this, but waited until now, because the prep work is really pretty boring stuff.  What’s involved in making 1500 feet of fake barb wire  just really doesn’t  scream “READ ME!”  I’ll just go ahead and spoil it for you… A couple of weeks and about four times what it costs for real barb wire… But, now we’re actually to something worth writing about, and there is actually a glimmer at the end of the tunnel, so I feel comfortable writing about it now.  There’s the part of me that thinks…”Great!  Just what the world needed.  Another indie film production blog.”  I ultimately decided that what I wanted to do was write what I was thinking it, while this process moves forward.

So.  Anyway…  Here goes…