Just dusted off the photos we took behind the scenes of Machine. We’ve gone to town on the descriptions this time so if you really want to know how we did what we did, head over to the Flickr set, make yourself a cuppa and get reading. You’ll find a few abandoned prototype ideas in there as well, and some actual blood.
We’ve finally dismantled the set for Fangoria, The Machine now <sad face>, but we did take lot’s of photos of it all before it got trashed <less sad face>. We now have a nice empty garage except for a large steampunk time machine sat in the corner. We’re open to offers, it has some very minor dinosaur related damage, and a few thousand years on the clock.
Hurray! We made a book of some (well, quite a lot) of our photos from our road trips across the states. It’s a bit of a precursor to the documentary film we’re still editing so we’ve given it the same name.
If you like it, you can go see the whole thing on Blurb’s site, and if you *really* like it, you can buy it from them as well.
O man, we totally visited Roswell, New Mexico. It was never one of those ‘I MUST GO THERE ONE DAY OR I WILL DIE WITH A SAD FACE’ kinda places, it just happened to be on the way between New York and California, so we popped in. And boy were we glad we did, it’s silly, and a bit serious/mental, and then silly again. Here’s some things:
First thing we did was Alien Zone, Areas 51 – a place with about 20 alien scenes that you’re encouraged to climb about and take silly photos.. SOLD.
Then we thought we should get the ‘real’ facts and checked out the International UFO Museum and Research Centre just up the road, it was closing for the night so we ran about and took photos instead of actually doing any reading or learning (we’re on holiday, why would we want to do a thing like that?).
And the next day we had to go and see what all the adverts we kept seeing around town for the Roswell Space Walk were all about, they boasted a Paisley-Horvak TVG9000 (no, me neither), how can you refuse? Luckily it was silly, quite silly.
We organised a tour with some random dude of the ACTUAL HANGER where an alien may or may not have had it’s bit’s cut out by sinister looking military types. We got to the car park next to the hanger and looked for a car with a large inflatable alien tied to roof (as arranged) but our tour was a no show, damn it, the truth is still out there.
Here’s many more photos of our time in Roswell:
You like aircraft right? You like lots or aircraft right? Then you’ll LOVE the aircraft boneyard we visited in Tucson, Arizona. You can get a coach tour around this massive military facility (we shot the video above through the coach window) and hear everything there is to know about the 4,400 or so planes, helicopters and missiles they have parked up there (most of which are ready to have their protective white coats stripped of and start flying and shooting things again), or like us, you can ignore most of what’s being said and take lots of photos:
To get an idea of the size of the place, check it out from God’s eye view:
View Larger Map
If you’re planning on taking a visit, pre-book your tour with the PIMA Air & Space Museum.
What does it look like to sit in the front of a car and drive across America in 15 minutes? A bit like this I guess.
This is a 3,920 mile road trip that takes in New York, New Jersey (via the Northlandz, world’s biggest model railway), Delaware, Maryland, West Virginia, Virginia (Mark Cline, one of life’s winners), Tennessee, Arkansas, Oklahoma, Texas, New Mexico, Arizona, California (quick Disneyland stop ‘natch) and Nevada (they have guns there).
It all started with a surprise sound track on a mysterious CD found in the hire car we picked up in New York, without this I don’t think the Boob would have survived (yes the Boob did all 3,920 miles of driving, what a trooper):
We’ve got more videos to come from the trip, and photos… so many photos, I’m not sure the Internet is big enough, we might need a new one.
We put on a little haunt for the Trick or Treaters again this year, it’s a bit toned down from our normal terrorising, but y’know, not toned down too much eh. By counting the number of sweets we had left at the end of the night we must have had about 150 happy haunters.
We’ve haunted the toilets at Poke again, we might have gone too dark this time. Apparently most of the girls have to use toilets on another floor… women eh?
This year we’ve experimented a bit and tried some new tricks, each of the 3 toilets we’ve haunted is possessed by the ghost of a different family member, the Nursery is haunted by ‘baby’ and in this one we’re using chromadepth 3D glasses with UV lit fluorescent paint to make the whole room appear to be in weird ass 3D, you really need to see it in the flesh. It’s a trick that’s pretty old hat in American haunts but we’d not seen it before over here (thanks to Dave for showing us that).
Mother’s room uses projection mapping to make it appear that the door is haunted. Take a seat and watch as the door opens again and again to reveal some bad things happening just outside the door, and sometimes in the door itself.
And Father’s room, well Father isn’t a very nice man at all. Look out for a cameo role in this room played by the latex face mask we had made for our film All The Time in The World.
More photos here.
We were in Las Vegas, what else would we do?
Mark Cline is awesome. We visited him a few years ago, when we were filming our (as yet unedited) documentury about roadside attractions, and when we found ourselves driving across the States again we had to call in and see what he’s up to. Mark runs 4 attractions in Virginia: Foam Henge (yes, life size, yes, made of foam), Professor Cline’s Monster Museum (a walk through horror maze with performances thrown in), Dinosaur Kingdom (massive dinosaurs fighting civil war soldiers in the forest) and now Hunt Big Foot with a Red Neck (new this year!). Mark built all of the attractions and, I’ll say it again, he is awesome.
