FULL STEAM AHEAD!

Hey folks. Matt here!

You may know that Freddie and I were on a European tour for our podcast, Dungeons & Daddies, for the past few weeks. That is done now. And so hell begins!

Well, hell for Freddie. It’s gonna be pretty chill for me. But for Freddie, it’s time to get into fighting shape. The truth is that he is far fitter than the man writing this post (me), as he does rock climbing where I paint miniatures and has been gaining upper body strength doing aerials while I’ve gained thumb dexterity getting 100% in Legend of Zelda: Echoes of Wisdom. 

But despite Freddie’s decent physical condition, he is far from where he needs to be for the action scene we have begun choreographing. In fact, since Freddie is actually on his last few days of vacation in London, and far from my personal being, I can safely say that he is weak!

Don’t take my word for it. Here are some assessments from Yung Lee, our action designer, after an hour of training while we were in London: “We’re far behind”, “His upper body is strong, but his core and legs are weak,” “He’s not gonna survive shooting days,” “We need to train starting now. Nonstop,” “I’m worried Freddie is gonna hate me the next couple months," “Matt, Freddie’s gonna hate us”...

Nah. He’s not gonna hate us. Freddie is ready to take on this challenge, so let’s break down what’s gonna start happening first thing next week, as this action scene moves towards reality. 

• TRAINING: Yung is flying from the UK and is living with us for the next two months. He will be doing FOUR HOURS of training with Freddie EVERY DAY. 

  You heard that right. Our boy is in it now. We will for sure have a video with Yung and Freddie breaking down the training regiment. But the tldr is: 1 hour stretching, 2 hours conditioning/muscle building, 1 hour choreography.

• SET LIGHTING: Because we are doing this action scene months before we shoot the rest of the film proper, we have to lock in a lot of aspects of the production. One of those is the overall look of the film. We have our cinematographer from We’re All Gonna Die, Bongani Mlambo, shooting this sequence. This week, he and I looked at the set and began discussing the lighting, the lenses, and the overall look we want for the film. 

  The next step will be shooting some lighting tests in the set.

• CASTING: Beyond Freddie and the stunt performers, we do have some roles we have to cast. The three Hobos and Don Chang. We’ve begun open casting for those roles, as well as reaching out to a few actors and friends we know that we think would work if they’re available. 

• COSTUME: We’ve actually been talking to our wonderful costume designer, Layne McGovern, for a few months now. Layne is one of our most beloved and reliable department heads we’ve ever worked with. She brought all of VGHS to life, as well as a variety of our projects, and has gone on to much success over at Disney TV. We still reach out to her for every project we do. We’ve worked out some of the basic ideas, and she is currently shopping for pieces (especially for the Hobos).

• ACTION CHOREO: The next step is for Yung, Freddie and I to go over the choreo in the actual physical set. While Yung and the team did amazing work with the first pass, things will change once Freddie and I can be with Yung in person, and just as importantly, in the set with a camera. Yung actually already re-edited the materials he had for a cleaner/tighter action scene. So we will walk through that video on our set, and see what ideas we can come up with.

  We will for sure do a sitdown with Yung and break down the next two months of action design.

That’s it for now. We got a lot going on, but also a lot has already happened. It should be abundantly clear how much of a team effort filmmaking is. Freddie and I were able to step away for a couple weeks to do a tour (that also helps finance the film) because we have a production team like Cherish, Ashim, and Olivia moving things forward, getting the set built, getting people in place, and so many other little jobs that make this all possible. 

I’m very excited for what we will be able to show the next few weeks. A whole lot less theoretical stuff and planning, and a whole lot more practical execution. 

Onwards!

Matt