I am annoyed. I am trying not to be annoyed, but nonetheless, I am annoyed. I’ve been making fake blood for this movie, but I was never totally pleased with how it was turning out. I thought I had something that would be decent, so that’s what I settled with and that’s what I brought with me yesterday to the movie location. I prepped my surfaces and put it on… and so long as it was a horizontal surface, it looked ok. However, on vertical surfaces it was way too pink because I couldn’t get it to stay thick enough. My brother asked the make-up guy what he thought I should do and he just said “oh, here, just use my blood”. Well, that was great because his blood was much better than mine (these really are odd sentences, when I stop to think about it!) but if I had known that was a possibility it certainly would have saved me hours of research, shopping and experimentation!! My brother wanted me to come back and do the clean up for the kitchen scene after they were done, and as they weren’t planning on finishing up until 3 or 4 in the morning, I said I would get up early and go over there to clean things up. The people who live in the house said they are up at 5:30, so I got up at 4:30, had breakfast and got over there at 5:45. The house was totally dark and there were no signs of life in the house. I humphed a bit but then went back to my car and listened to an audio lecture from Peter Kreeft (I just recently found out via Julie that he has quite a few up on his site for free and they are really neat!) for about 20 minutes then checked the house again. Still no signs of movement. I figured that since they were probably kept up late with all the activity in the house they might be sleeping in, so I went back home and headed back over there at a little before seven. Once I got over there their front door was open, but there was no sign of anyone… so I went in, saying “hello, I’m here” and peeked at the kitchen, where much to my surprise there was no blood anywhere - someone had already cleaned everything up. I was glad not to have to scrub the floor and peel up the contact paper and all… but still it would have been nice if someone could have told me that they were going to clean it all up! As an aside though, it was rather nice to be up so early in the morning… I really should do it more often. Strange as this probably sounds, but I think I prefer getting up at 4:30 rather than 6, as I’ve been trying (with some success, actually) to do. It seems like a rather insane thing to do, but yet there’s a real attraction to it… I’ll have to think about it some more. It will probably seem much less attractive when I’m really dragging at about 4 this afternoon!

I feel so superfluous in this movie endeavor… but yet I spent so much time on it because I was asked to do all these things that didn’t end up needing to get done! I guess that’s pretty common in this industry though - think of all the actors who have their bit parts cut in the editing room, or the special effects that get chopped at the last minute or all sorts of other little “injustices” that happen in every project. For an industry that has such a reputation for being such an ego saturated environment, it seems like you need to be pretty ego-less in order to survive it without seriously elevating your blood pressure and frustration levels!

Oh well, at least I am now done. I sorted out my props, and I can give those back to my brother sometime this weekend. I think I may have a couple of things I need to return, but that can be done next week. This has definitely been a very good lesson on why being able to say “no” is such an important skill.