SX Heroes

Okay, we have a few more pictures today than usual.  And none of them are of Madison, who sadly spent the day at home, still recovering from this 104 virus.  This does have something to do with her though, as the movie we were shooting today will be shown at Summer Xtreme in a very short time.  Above you can see the Mayor of this particular movie, addressing "random citizens."

And here is one of our villains.  His name is Praxis, which was a joke name that sort of stuck.  It has that outer space menace to it, while at the same time being a funny in-joke for teachers.

So yeah, we were doing a lot of filming today.  Many of us got toasted in the sun, in fact.  We had this courtyard area all to ourselves this whole day, pretty much until around early evening - and even then, we were free to film pretty much anywhere we wanted to.

Here's one of our heroes.  He represents the fourth graders, I think.  We haven't gotten a name for him yet, but he's clearly inspired by DC Comics' Cyborg character.  Ironically, a major production studio was shooting a theatrical motion picture about a block away from here.  The end result was the police department blocking off a few roads on the other side of the square.  This may have resulted in even less traffic for us to deal with - no interruptions, and a perfect day for filming.

Here's another one of our villainous characters, grabbing hold of the governor.  Look at that make-up job!  Josh spent a while working on the gauntlets and 'armor' for the various characters as well, pretty much all week at the warehouse sculpting and painting these bits of foam.  They turned out well!

Oh, and here's the green screen as well.  We brought it along for those added effects that we'll insert later on.  These characters have powers, so you can assume there'll be a bit of that in our final product.

The rogue's gallery turned out well, although they looked amazingly hot in those costumes.  The temperature was pretty warm outside, and I'm sure there was a huge desire to scratch and itch or wipe a forehead. But these characters held steady all day long.  And as you can imagine, it took a bit of time to get all that make-up on in the first place.

There's the master there.  Josh is off on his own, marking off shots that were taken while preparing for new ones.  We had the sound team with us, and all kinds of direction going on behind the camera, all preparing for a big day with the superheroes.

Speaking of which, here they are.  Some of our regular volunteers are here, along with some new faces that will add some excitement to Summer Xtreme.  Each of these characters represents a certain grade, and has a superpower, such as (from right to left) super strength and flight, super speed, ice powers, fire powers, an ability to shrink like Ant-Man, and the of course there's a character with Cyborg features.  We shot a fun bit here where they run towards each other, sort of like the Civil War movie that's forthcoming.

One other hero joins the mix, a character based on the Dark Knight.  He's sort of the rebel of the group, the guy with the attitude.  This sort of counters the boy scout character, just like Wolverine counters Cyclops, or Batman counters Superman.  That sort of thing.  Here he is below with our super powered girl character.

She should be pretty cool.  We had a few sequences with her where she takes off into the air, into flight.  We used that green screen again, and as you can see below, everyone got into the act helping out.

Plus, there was all sorts of choreography involved with some of the battle scenes.  Paul here below is seen battling Pastor Lance, who happens to be heavily in disguise as one of the villains (who we named General Zarg).  Yes, there are a lot of references to existing characters in this thing.

Anyway, it was a huge day for filming.  We were there from 9:00 am to around 9:30 pm or so.  And there's more filming to be done tomorrow as well.  

There were some pretty funny moments when there had to be bathroom breaks - imagine those three blue-skinned aliens walking into a restaurant to use the restroom.  But the flow of filming was so smooth, the weather favorable, and the amount of interruptions not even worth mentioning.  It was ideal, in other words, and a great start to filming for our new Summer Xtreme series.