The Prospectors Cult - shoot day (Patreon)

HELLO ALL YOU LOVELY FOLKS!! 

First things first: basically since the day I started the Patreon, I've had my friend Nate over, and we've been working on stuff basically all day every day, meaning I'm really behind on messaging a bunch of you back (and figuring out why the Discord doesn't seem to be working!) I'm back at a computer for a bit, so hopefully going to be getting caught up on all that sort of stuff.

But!  

The shoot went well! 

The staff turned out pretty great (more pictures below), and the final shoot should work great in the scene. It's only a shot or two, but I think it's going to be a great moment in the episode. 

We also did some brainstorming and re-worked the ending. I think it's going to be a delightful combination of a lot more effective, now, and significantly easier to shoot. And slightly more bizarre. Because hot damn sometimes things need to be slightly more bizarre. 

These guys are just random background people, but it was fun fleshing them out as much as we could. Also ignore my blue shoes- they shouldn't be visible in the final shot... hopefully...

But yeah! Here's Michael with the finished staff. I think I want to hang it somewhere in the church. 

It's one of those situations where it really doesn't look as cool in photos as it does in real life (it's always nice when it's the opposite of that. With props, at least :P). 

 FEAR MY MOOON POWERS 

Also recolored/grimed an old 90s wall-mounted fan to fit an aesthetic of cyberpunkery. I might go back and make the grill look like straight steel... yes I should definitely do that. And add cobwebs (or just wait for 6 months). 

Nate hot-glued an LED strip back behind the vending machine buttons, since they were previous un-lit.  We can make them color change and all that fun stuff now- it's subtle, but it makes the machine feel more high tech :D. 

He also made a new module that fits on the front. That's an old phone built in, so we can easily put whatever video we want to on there. I'm delighted by how well the glossiness of the black matches that of the original machine. It's going to be a fun detail (and it's always a blast making fake little graphics for stuff like that). 

Next I just gotta design a new front plate. I'm really excited. I want to do something that's a mix between the Rotten Dragon and Dr. Lemur's designs:

Quick note: Do you know how hard it is to mount a pipe to something? Like, "Here's a pipe. We want to it stick out of this flat surface". it can be tricky! Especially when you have to figure out like 5 different solutions. 

The shoot itself went great. It was also ludicrous. There were only 3 of us, and we wanted all 3 on camera at once, but all of us ended up being secured into some fairly intense facial accessories, connected by a tube, so we had to move together as a team as we got the camera set up and framed and hit record, so we could all shuffle over into place and act out the shot, and then shuffle back over and stop the recording. 

One of the things I got in the Amazing Prospect Van (more about that later!) was this old TV. We hooked a  Roku stick into an HDMI-RCA converter, then an RCA-to-coax/antenna converter, so we're able to use voice commands to play YouTube or Netflix or whatever we want on it. 

We ended the day using it to watch weird old Don Bluth films (and Teletubbies- because Nate had never seen it and I had some lingering questions about the internal logic of their apeshit world (like, it has... I'm telling you, it has just enough rules to make you think there's something "else" going on- like a nightmare Truman Show scenario.))

It also very much matches the interior of our 1980 mobile home, so I think it lives in the living room now (we basically just watch 90s sitcoms anyways, so it works out well.)

I don't do that much writing, actually, so I think writing these things out has been really good for getting that muscle warmed up, and learning things.  Such as 1.) I use a lot of parentheticals and 2.) when I do, I have no idea where to put the period.