Debbie Rochon joins Jaime King on Scream Queens[ad#Google Adsense]
Being true to the horror genre is something we’ve worked very hard to do in every episode of Scream Queens. So you can imagine our hootin’ and hollerin’ when we learned one of the ultimate Scream Queens, Debbie Rochon, agreed to appear on our show, in an episode about “The Sexy Side of Horror.”
Welcome to Episode 4 of Scream Queens
Let’s get right down to it: this week’s challenge featured an amazing guest star, and offered a big-time prize. Debbie Rochon, named Scream Queen of the Decade, showed up to judge our ladies in a challenge with real-world stakes. It would be a photo shoot recreating classic horror archetypes. The prize? A photo spread in Fangoria Magazine!
Now, for any aspiring Scream Queen, appearing in Fangoria is a huge deal.
Debbie Rocked It
No, we’re not just kissing up to her, we swear. Debbie has years of experience and dozens of movies under her belt, and she was able to translate that into direction our actresses could follow. You saw them get better while working with Debbie.
Debbie directs Gabby to open up and scream
Time for more green goo! Debbie to the rescue
Even as she makes Sarah’s blood spatter look ferocious and realistic, Debbie still looks sexy. That’s a Scream Queen!
We wouldn’t be surprised to see Debbie do a lot of feature-film directing in the years to come. She knows her stuff.
Having Debbie and Jaime working in tandem on our set was awesome, and seeing Sarah win the spread in Fangoria was terrific.
Sarah had been having a bit of a hard time, and to see her get to shine was awesome. Sarah is one of the funniest, coolest people you’ll ever meet…and she does a wicked “Biagio impression.” (Apparently I can come across as hyper sometimes?)
Joke. Jaime. Debbie. Hockey Masks. Loving this horror fantasy!
Thanks, Tim Sullivan
Major props go to Tim Sullivan for helping us with this challenge. He made the phone calls to help us get this done…something, frankly, we didn’t think was possible.
Thanks, Fangoria
You have no idea what your participation meant to us. To be able to offer one of our ladies a spot in your pages was a personal highlight of our season. We are indebted.
And Then Caleb Emmerson Stopped By!
The man…the myth…the Caleb! Here with Debbie Rochon, Biagio, Joke, and Jaime King
Talk about a great day!
After the shoot, Debbie and horror writer/director Caleb Emmerson (Die You Zombie Bastards) gave us the dirt about working together on the Troma classic Toxic Avenger 4, explained why Debbie always pictures Caleb with poop on his face, and talked about their upcoming project, Caleb’s new film Frankie in Blunderland.
Caleb, as you may recall, wrote the trailer for season one’s “Reform School Zombie Squad” that won Clip of the Year on E!’s The Soup (though, in all fairness, James Gunn wrote the “vagina” line. James hates it when we don’t give him vagina credit.)
If you missed this gem, don’t deprive yourself! Take a walk down memory lane with us. This is from the first time the clip aired on The Soup. Caleb is sitting next to James Gunn.
L.L. Cool J: Ladies Love Cool John
Okay, let’s just call it like it is…there were a lot of cast members with crushes on John this season! So, when John had to teach the ladies to be seductive…by seducing him…some didn’t have to dig too deep.
I mean, Sierra didn’t even hide the fact that her heart yearned for John…
…and Sarah practically raped him with a Margarita.
Hands-off, ladies, John is happily married :-)
The Geekiest Scare Ever
If you watch the show, you know that every week there’s some sort of “scare” that happens when we deliver the scripts to our actresses.
Now, we can’t do the big “boo-jump-out-and-scare-you” scares every week, because the cast starts to look for them, and it gets predictable. So we try to mix it up with “scares” that are funny or just plain weird.
As this week was about the sexy side of horror, we came up with the (brilliant? stupid? awesome? ridiculous?) idea of having a geeky stripper. The message: sexy is an attitude. It comes from the inside. Sexy’s not about how your look. Sexy’s about how you feel.
Or maybe the message was just that random strippers are freaky.
Either way, the girls got some message:
Sexy’s on the inside, right?
Getting Tongue from Elvis
We’d pitched an idea to Vh1 about doing a director’s challenge where our ladies danced with a giant snake, ala Salma Hayek in From Dusk ‘Til Dawn:
When Vh1 asked if we could have some kind of reptilian tongue shoot out of her mouth, we lied and said, “Absolutely!”
Turns out, it was even harder than we’d anticipated. Shockingly (or not) you can’t just go buy a prop reptile tongue at any old prop shop. So creative panic ensued.
Our art-dude extraordinaire Elvis Strange (who built the cocoon to hold 10,000 maggots in episode 3) along with our Supervising Challenge Producer Matt Laesch, and the two of us started brainstorming solutions. After much trial and error, here’s where we were at the night before the shoot:
As you can tell from that clip, while the tongues looked great, we still had to get them to wiggle and hiss. We didn’t know how we were going to do it yet. Too bad, since we were shooting in about 13 hours.
We tried to place the burden on the actresses, but when the girls shook their heads to make the tongues wag, it was bad. They looked like they were having a seizure. Plus, when they opened their mouths, the tongues just rolled out and hung there.
Elvis did an amazing job with the almost zero-budget we gave him, making the molds, and creating the snake-like tongues, but even geniuses have a hard time getting around the laws of physics.
Enter Adobe After Effects
We decided to take a hybrid approach that would involve a partial CG solution. Since there was no budget for a Visual FX studio, it would take every ounce of After Effects skill I have (which is just barely enough.) Here’s what we decided the day of the shoot:
- Shoot the girls hissing with no tongue.
- Attach the tongue to fishing wire, and re-shoot the girls while we wiggled the tongue.
- In post, pick the best tongue action and rotoscope it out.
- Speed up the vibration and make the tongue unroll and “shoot out” in After Effects.
- Copy that same tongue on to each of the girls faces to save time.
This was way better than making a completely computer generated tongue since that would be REALLY hard. Plus, this way the lighting of the tongue was guaranteed to match the lighting in the scene…after all, it was filmed in the exact same space and lights. We’d just cheat it on to different girls.
Here’s a quick video breakdown of how it worked:
It’s not perfect, but the network was very happy, and given the budget we had to work with, and my limited abilities, we were happy, too. My advice: hire real Visual FX pros if at all possible, but don’t give up on a “money” shot just because you can’t afford it. Get creative and find some way to get it done.
Oh, and hire Elvis Strange.
Never Ask Your Actors to do Something…
…you wouldn’t do yourself. A motto it sometimes sucks to live by. Like this fine day.
We brought in a 50 pound albino boa constrictor, and both the girls and director Tim Sullivan would have to work with it.
So, as I talked about in this post, it was time for me to step up and do the initial testing. I was scared to death (but think I almost hid it well.)
Joke’s Walkthrough
Joke explains how the challenge will work
Because Scream Queens is a competition, it’s important to keep things as fair as possible. For legal purposes, each week Joke walks through the blocking for each scene to give the girls a basic idea of how things should work. That way the actresses all start from the same baseline. Of course, this week that put Joke on a catwalk in a strip joint. Man do I love my wife!
“Crawl on all fours like this…”
Tim Showed No Fear
Tim boldly grabbed the snake, and looked far more graceful than me. Way to go, Tim!
Funny story about this snake (whose name is Bruce.) He LOVED this stupid chair we brought in:
After every take, it was nearly a 20 minute chore for the wranglers to unwrap the snake from the wooden legs. Bruce the albino boa constrictor would tie himself in knots, setting us WAY behind schedule for a while there. So if you’re going to work with a snake, try not to block the scene so your wiggly friend ends up in what amounts to a jungle gym for reptiles.
The Girls Did Great!
“I can’t believe they went for this!”
By the way: YES, that is the same snake Britney Spears made famous. Just look at the side-by-side. Can you tell which one is me?
Actor Bru Muller
“After years of struggling, we’ve finally made it to this stripper pole.”
True confession: not too many years ago we made a living shooting and cutting actors’ demo reels. Bru was a regular, and he’ll tell you he was the pickiest client we ever had. In fact, we’d go so far as to add CG effects, new sound tracks, and duplicate his footage to give him more screen time. We even mapped the reflection of an explosion into his glasses once to make his part on Alias seem bigger.
It was kind of ridiculous in terms of doing an actor’s demo reel, but was actually priceless in my development as an editor. Somehow, thanks to Bru, I got to edit every style of film and TV ever made, all while working on his ever-evolving reel. It truly shaped my editing skills. And his reel wasn’t too bad, either.
Since then, Bru has gone on to act in all kinds of TV shows and Movies, across from A-List actors and on giant sets around the world…and in every tiny project we’ve ever begged him to appear in. Finally, after years of working together, it was great to book him on something that would air.
Bru, we told you we’d get you a paying gig some day.
We’ll Miss You, Allison
It’s safe to say Allison is going to do just fine.
This week, Allison Kyler got the axe. Incidentally, the next day she booked a huge TV commercial, so that was a nice parting gift.
Allison is a great actress, was TERRIFIC TV, and a total pleasure to work with. She had her bad week…and it was enough to get her sent home. Still, we look forward to working with her again down the line. She’s a team player, and any director would be lucky to have her on a professional set. Team Allison lives on!
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