But wait, there’s MORE!: Up Uranus progress and “Nympho Nymph”

Remember my trans sci fi porn epic?  Well, yes, that’s still inching along.  In fact, this whole set with the tv sets was entirely for that project and nothing else..

Losing my studio was really going to put a damper on my plans to finally finish this movie, which I think now is pretty solidly going to be called “Up Uranus”.  All the principal photography with the flesh and blood actors isdone, and all that’s left is well, the special effects and all the space battle shots.  Not having a place to shoot that was going to kinda suck.

So in between photo shoots, I was trying to fill in the holes in the editing timeline with whatever effects shots I could swing.   I had one last background in my studio that had been painted for the movie, and I hasn’t painted over for newer projects.  So somewhere around April or so I did some shots of the USS Viberator landing on the surface of Uranus. And then a few months later (like June or July) there was some shots of testostrobots hitting buttons that was filmed while I had a few friends over that could help me.

Anyway, there were some robot head exploding shots that I really wanted to do.  But there was considerable risk doing- ahem- pyrotechnics indoors.  I sorta figured I wouldn’t get a chance to do them, but….  fast forward to September 1st.

I needed to have all my stuff out of the studio by the first, when they were going to change the locks.  Turned out, Sept 1st was a Sunday, so of course, no realtor was going to come by to change the locks.  Turned out, in fact, that no one came to change the locks until September 13th (!).  Geeeeez, I had like an extra two weeks in that building had I known.  Of course, everything was out of there by August 31st, so there was little I could still do in there, unless I moved all the lights and shit back in, for whatever little shoot I wanted to do.

I decided that on the evening of the 1st, I might as well have a go at my exploding heads shots.  I spent that day testing the charges.  They were gel caps filled with a tiny bit of gunpowder, and steel wool, with two pins poked through them hooked up to a car battery to ignite them.   Very low tech.  And if your’e wondering where I learned all this stuff, I have experience doing low tech effects for movies I made back in college, so that’s where it comes from.

I only really needed like two explosions from a few different angles, which I shot with two cameras simultaneously.  The tests determined that there was little danger of the robot heads catching fire, and so long as they were shot in slo-mo, the effect worked well enough.

I can’t show you the video here, but here’s still frames of the outdoor test and of the final effects shot.  In order to get a fireball, I filled the head full of balloons inflated with propane.  And yay, I didn’t light the studio building on fire.  I kept a fire extinguisher at hand just in case.

So, there were more bits and pieces of Up Uranus that I filmed over the summer, but I didn’t get photos of that stuff.  Oh, and this summer I also pulled the engine out of my ’98 VW and replaced the clutch (because I was losing my car-working-on-space) and tons of work to my house at the same time.

If you haven’t figured it out, for me to go on cam on a slow day and sit there and do nothing is not relaxing for me.  If it’s not a money making venture or progress on a project, it’s a complete waste of time.  So I wasn’t on cam as much as I should be.  Also, if you’re a wondered why I wasn’t on social media much, it because this year I’ve been too busy to post every little thing every day, and what happens is that you all will get social media avalanches like this instead.  It’s kind of feast or famine in my world.

And to top off my productivity binge in August/September, there was ONE more shoot I managed to squeeze in while I still had the studio space, called “Nympho Nymph”.  Actually, it was shot in the woods in the lot of the studio space, and this was shot on the 11th before the new owners took possession of the property.  Still, I ran the risk of someone popping by unannounced, but thankfully that didn’t happen.

This shoot came out okay.  Not great, but all right.  It was a hot hot day, so I was sweating quite a bit.  And shooting with natural light is always a challenge, because you really only get the perfect light for like a half an hour then it moves.  Plus shooting in the dirt you get dirt on your butt and wonderful unpleasantries like that.

In a perfect world I’d remount this shoot somewhere else, but it’s just an outfit made from bits and pieces of other outfits, and I was happy to get it done before all the leaves were gone.  Alas, no video of this shoot.  I’m not even certain I had enough non-x rated ones I could use for a Patreon update.  (and my patreon  being functional is another story for another blog post)

So, this brought me up to mid September, and the next month or so was just editing all those photo shoots so that I’d have a constant drip of new shoots over the autumn, as I then adjusted to tripping over boxes of stuff in my house and figuring out where the Hell I was going to shoot whatever would be next.

Which would be….