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Bringing the outdoors in - enlarge

The Thing at the Top of the Stairs - enlarge

2 November 2009 - What's Next
Now that we've largely recovered from the big wave of shooting, we're planning how to knock off the few remaining shots that we have. Originally we'd planned to get this footage while we were shooting in the studio, but due to some scenic and prop issues (see below), we had to push some stuff off our schedule. So now we're working to determine just where, when and how we'll get this footage. Because the equipment is expensive and rents by the week, we're trying to find a week where we can get to all the locations that we need, line up the cast and crew and get the remaining footage as efficiently as possible. Hopefully within the next 3-4 weeks we'll do our next (and hopefully final) round of shooting with cast members.

In addition to shooting on location, we also have to record some voice overs. Those of you familiar with our Dark Adventure Radio Theatre programs might have read about our sessions at Jamnation in Venice, CA. We'll be returning to Jamnation with the cast members who need to lay down some voice-only recordings. Hopefully we'll get that lined up in the next week or so.

One Down...
The HPLHS Volunteer Translator Corps has been hard at work and we congratulate Wilmar Taal of the Netherlands for completing the first translation of the movie. We've picked up Korean and Arabic recently, so the reach of our tentacles continues to grow. We also thank our friend José Beltra-Escavy and his colleagues at the European Patent Office. Thanks to José cajoling his colleagues there, we've been able to add several additional languages.

Too Many Notes
Work is underway on the music. Troy Sterling Nies was on-set to handle production sound. Now he's back in North Dakota and starting his work in composing the score for the film. It's a large task, but Troy tells us it was very inspirational to be on the set while the scenes were being shot. Being there gave him a number of ideas to play with as he composes the music.

Feed the Machine
With about 50 hours of HD footage on hand, we found we needed to beef up our video capturing and editing system. So now, we've got about 4Tb of storage space and we've been working away at logging and capturing the shot footage. Logging it helps the editor identify and organize all the many pieces of footage we've shot (Oh, this is Scene 23c - Medium shot). Capturing is the actual transfer of the footage off of the HDCam video tape and onto a hard drive. The lovely and talented David Robertson is editing the picture in Final Cut Pro. Just 42 more hours of footage to capture.

Hell on Wheels - Leman, Robertson & Branney

Hiding Microphones: where wardrobe and sound meet

A rare view of Wilmarth's office in color

24 October 2009 - Polyglot
Thanks for stepping up, translators! This week we've added Czech, Slovakian, Mandarin Chinese, Japanese, Turkish, Euskera and maybe Croatian. We really appreciate it. If you've volunteered to translate, we'll be sending you our Translator Agreement this week. Once we get that signed, we'll send over the script.

So, what's next? Well, we have three sequences of live action still to shoot. So, right now we're working out where, when and exactly how we'll shoot them. In the meantime we also have about 50 hours of HD video tape which needs to be digitized so we can start to edit the footage we've shot. Getting HD footage into the computer involves a high-end video capture card and renting a deck to hook to the computer, so just capturing the footage is an involved process. But not to worry, we have top men working on it. Who? Top men.

20 October 2009 - Studio Life
So, another chapter in the making of The Whisperer in Darkness is now complete. We have finished shooting in studio. Don't start bouncing up and down just yet though, we still have two sequences involving actors to shoot, plus plenty of miniatures, models and effects shots. We're not done by any stretch of the imagination. But we have surpassed another major milestone in finishing up our studio work.

Shooting in the studio proved every bit as challenging as shooting on location. We had plenty of noise issues (see below), but we also had the constant need to prep (design, build, paint, dress) every location in the studio, which meant wrangling plants, furniture, hay, rain (lots and lots of rain), animals, fog, actors and much more. Our stalwart crew was tough and resiliant and we somehow managed to work our way through our most challenging difficulities (see "Hiccups" below) and get the footage we needed. Hours were long, but no one cracked under the pressure

We did have to shuffle our schedule some, we did run hideously overbudget to get things done in time, but we now find ourselves quite close to being done with principal photography. The screenplay is 94 pages long. Out of that, about six pages remain to be shot. So we are indeed getting there. That said, there really is no need to write us and ask when you can see the movie. We have lots to do and will continue to update you as we continue through the production process.

Rain, Rain, Go Away...
We felt bad for our star, Matt Foyer, as we sprayed water at him for a week in New England. None of us - particularly not Matt - quite realized how much water would be flying indoors though as we returned to the studio. We setup our rain making equipment and day after day, it rained on Professor Wilmarth. Some days we dumped other things on his head too, but mostly it was lots of cold water. We really appreciate how tough Matt was in putting up with all of our precipitation. We also applaud many of the other performers in the film who endured extensive man-made precipitation. We really need to find the guys to wrote this and dunk them in a tank of very cold water.

In Translation
For those of you who have kindly offered to translate Whisperer into your tongue, a translation script will be headed your way soon. There is quite a bit of dialect in the movie and we want you to have as much time as possible to work with it. We continue to look for more people who would be willing to translate. We realize it's a big job, but those who undertake it will be showered with praise for sharing this movie with speakers of their native language. At the moment we have: Bulgarian, Castilian, Catalan, Danish, Finnish, French, German, Hungarian, Italian, Norwegian, Polish, Portuguese (Brazilian), Russian and Swedish. C'mon you Croatian, Israeli, Korean, Japanese, Navaho, Icelandic, Hawaiian, Euskera or Aleut fluent Lovecraft fans, this is our moment of need... What about Irish? Greek? We know you're out there...

Prof. Wilmarth in the Vermont rain

Glenn Alfonso applies makeup to Mr. Pavao

On location at Bellows Falls, Vermont

8 October 2009 - Home, Sweet Home
After the wilds of New England we were able to setup shop in our rented "sound" studio in Los Angeles. Our schedule has us filming three weeks in Los Angeles before we complete the portion of the film involving actors. Of that three weeks, two days were on locations in Pasadena, but the rest of it was slated to take place in the studio. As of now, we're in the middle of the second week and are bracing ourselves for a final push to the principal photography finish line.

Background
Our very first day of shooting in LA involved a group of background players. These stalwart volunteers came down to the set and met up with our lovely and talented cast members and we shot our first scenes in the studio. All was well, although a very vocal cricket decided to cast itself as an extra. Fortunately our background team seemed to have a knack for frightening it into silence as we shot our takes on the set.

We had an even bigger herd of background players join us for a shoot at Pasadena City College, where we booked a period-appropriate lecture hall. Another group of lovely volunteers donned their period attire and joined us for a fairly long scene in which they got to be an audience attending an event at Miskatonic. They did a super job and spurred our actors on to terrific performances that we hope you will enjoy.

Sound Off
After dealing with the challenges of recording sound on location in New England, we were rather looking forward to the relative ease of recording sound in our own sound stage. Apparently though, where we're shooting, the term sound stage is used to denote extra sound being added to our recording process. Between neighbors who sound like they're running some kind of blacksmith competition, a semi truck repair yard across the way and the fact that the studio sounds like it's on a flight path for the Burbank airport, our sound stage has been anything but quiet. Still, we slog onward through the noise to capture every nuance of sound for our first talkie.

Hiccups
In general, production has gone pretty smoothly for us. Naturally there have been a few minor incidents here and there, but generally, we've had nothing to complain about. Well, that was until we get back from New England. The plan was that our set crew would build out the numerous sets we'd be shooting on in the sound stage, including one particuarly complicated one which we would use for several days of filming. We returned to find that our very complicated set was about a third of the way done. It was over budget and our builders had to leave town. So, we sent them on their way, addressed the fundamental structural flaws in the plans made by our scenic architect and dispatched a new crew to make the place shootable. They've done a bang-up job for us and while we've had to reschedule the sequence of somethings, we're on target to shoot on the big set as intended. Unfortunately, a key prop for the show was also not completed on time. This week we find ourselves having to try and create an important and complicated prop at the last minute. We've rescheduled to buy as much time as we could, but in the end, some serious last-minute prop work will be required by the lovely and tireless (don't get me wrong here, they're tired) Art Dept. crew.

Live from Portland
This year we had to miss a favorite annual event: the HP Lovecraft Film Festival in Portland, Oregon. We were shooting and could not go. However, we were able to participate in a call-in discussion held at the festival where people in the audience could ask us questions about the production while we were actually on set shooting the movie. We were glad to be involved in the festival and appreciated the enthusiasm of the Lovecraft community for Whisperer.

Some cast and crew in front of the Miskatonic gates (click to enlarge)

Down on the river (click to enlarge)

Outside the Akeley farm (click to enlarge)

1 October 2009 - Location, Location, Location
OK, we're back from our adventure to New England. In the end, 17 of us made the trip to shoot footage in Massachussets, Vermont and New Hampshire. Over the course of six days, we shot at numerous outdoor locations to take advantage of access the story's real locations. Where we're not on the story's actual locations, we found first-rate local substitutes. Our hearty cast and crew endured long hours, long car rides, long shoots, and fleeting moments of sleep to capture the exterior footage we shot for Whisperer. We thank them for their suffering. We hope you will too.

Hail Miskatonic
As foretold, we shot at Mount Holyoke College in South Hadley, Mass. We thought the college would prove an excellent casting choice for Miskatonic and being there proved us right. We grabbed some great establishing shots of the campus and then shot a scene outside a ladies' dormitory, under the watchful eye of the dorm's residents and a drizzle of rain. We returned later in the week to shoot Miskatonic's main gates and an interior scene in one of the campus' beautifully appointed vintage classrooms.

Extra, Extra!
A couple of the New England shots required background players. We put out the call through various channels and were delighted to find terrific people who heeded our call. We shot with background players at Mount Holyoke College and at the Bellows Falls, VT train station. A group of talented and enthusiastic folks dressed up, turned up and played a great role in the film.

Field Work
Shooting in New England also involved plenty of work out in the field. And by that, we mean in the rivers, in the woods, and quite literally in the fields. Local folks told us plenty about the wet summer they'd had and how we should expect rain everywhere we went, but in the end we had to resort to making our own rain most of the time. In case any of you have forgotten, our crew can quickly point out that a barrel of water is very heavy. Many cast and crew members will also point out that the temperature of our our artificial rain water was unnaturally cold, especially if you've been drenched in it all night long. And after we're done, the rain rig has to be put away, the actors dried, the costumes packed up and a few scant hours later we have to pull up to the next location.

Back in Los Angeles
Most of the crew got back very late on Sunday. Our intrepid road warriors, Troy and Amanda, drove the FungiMobile back across the nation (an no, none of you appear to have seen it while it was on the road), logging over six thousand miles. We're now setup in Los Angeles, where most of us live, and filming began here today. We shot two indoor scenes today

We already miss the verdant, Mi-Go infested hills of New England. But it's great to be working in a studio and not having to deal with many of the issues that come with shooting on the road. Three full weeks of shooting still to go...

The Fungi-Mobile - can you find it?

18 September 2009 - On the Road
Today, we put our intrepid crew members, Troy Sterling Nies and Amanda Deibert into the Fungi-Mobile and they began the trek from Los Angeles to New England. The Fungi-Mobile carries the essential gear needed for making the movie: lights, costumes, and many cases of Diet Coke. There are several people on our crew willing to work without pay or sleep, but who cannot work without Diet Coke. Regardless, the FungiMobile is on the 3,000 road trip and we wish Troy and Amanda godspeed.

Find the Fungi Contest
We thought you might want to share in Albert Wilmarth's experience of searching for the elusive Fungi from Yuggoth, so we're announcing our Find the Fungi contest. Somewhere out on the roads of America is the HPLHS' specially branded bright yellow Fungi-Mobile. If you photograph it or can accurately tell us when and where you saw it, we'll give you our very special Fungi Prize Pack: an autographed Whisperer in Darkness poster, a DVD of the movie, a Whisperer t-shirt and we'll invite you to the Los Angeles premiere of the movie. Click here to send us your sightings. NOTE: it is imperative that you do not impede the progress of the Fungi-Mobile. If it does not arrive in New England by the time the rest of us arrive, well, we don't even want to consider that possibility.

Final Preparations
The past week has been a flurry of activity at the HPLHS as anything we wanted to take to New England really needed to be on the truck this morning. All kinds of props and signage were finalized so they could be packed up. We are mostly shooting exterior footage in New England, with the exception of one scene that takes place in Wilmarth's office at Miskatonic. There seems to be some excitement on campus that this college has been cast as Miskatonic. When you see it on screen, we think you'll share in that excitement.

Late summer is a very hot time of year in Los Angeles. Locals in the know tell us this is not the case wtih early fall in New England, particularly this year. We hear it's chilly there at night. It may rain. Lucky for us, we'll be shooting at night. In the cold. And the rain. But our cast and crew are looking forward to the experience of shooting The Whisperer in Darkeness on location in Lovecraft Country. In some instances, we're shooting directly on the actual locations listed in the story. We'll try to keep you updated on the production experience

A real Vermont intersection

Our beloved alma mater

Lonely farmhouses in the Vermont hills

5 September 2009 - To New England Again!
In late August Sean and David Robertson completed the final scouting trip to New England. We looked at all the locations where we'll be shooting, met with everyone we needed to meet, and generally did our best to ensure that everything's ready on the New England side of things when we arrive. We were once again hosted by Mat & Susan Jacobson, who receive the highest HPLHS praise for their hospitality. Mat also earned our admiration for his uncanny ability to remember rural dirt roads which he visited with Sean and Andrew two years ago.

Overall, we were delighted by how friendly and cooperative everyone we met was. We would come up to people and ask if we could film their house. Most people said, "Sure! Would you like to film our barn too?". This is a pleasant change from filming in Los Angeles where such requests are often met by a crusty look, thousands of dollars in location fees, and a demand for a multi-million dollar insurance policy. People were nice to us. We were glad to be there. We're renting to houses to accommodate our cast and crew, and both are situated on lovely properties brimming with rural New England scenery.

One of our key locations is Miskatonic University. We've found a lovely and cooperative New England college where we'll be filming. We think it's got the Miskatonic vibe and its period architecture will look great on-camera. Most of our other New England locations are outdoors, several of which are the actual locations Lovecraft describes in the story. While it's expensive for us to haul all our gear and crew back east, we think it's well worth it to be able to shoot in the legend haunted mountains of Vermont and among the ivy-clad walls of a prestigious New England college.

Hot
And while Sean and Dave were traipsing around New England, Andrew, Chris and others were toiling away 100+ degree heat as fires raged not far from our studio. The prop list is daunting for Whisperer and Chris and Andrew continue to work like maniacs to get everything done before the gear truck departs for New England in the middle of September. We've commissioned certain props from several specialists around the globe, and all are hard at work to ensure we make the deadline.

The cast is now fully in place and our Costume Designer, Jessica Dalager, is working on getting everyone fitted. Our makeup artist, Glenn Alfonso, is studying everyone's faces and cutting hair as needed. Andrew Hildner is drafting construction drawings for the Akeley house set - the most complicated of the sets which will be built for the production. Line Producer, John Younger, is working on logistics for vehicles and rented equipment, all while relocating his home from Tennessee to Los Angeles. Sound man, Troy Sterling Nies, is preparing to drive from North Dakota to LA, where he will get out of his car and get into our gear truck and drive it to New England with Production Assistant Amanda Deibert.

We're still looking for Background Players both in New England and Los Angeles. If you'd like to be in the movie, this is your last chance. Email us at whisperer@cthulhulives.org and we'll give you the dates in question. We also continue to look for translators.

Barry Lynch - Before

Barry Lynch - After

Dave Snyder and Someone's Brain

20 August 2009 - Happy Birthday, Howard
What better way to celebrate the old gentleman's birthday than by toiling to bring one of his stories to the silver screen? As we slave away on Whisperer the whole team at the HPLHS shares the goal of making Whisperer a film that even Howard would enjoy.

Casting the Cast Cast Member
The movie is now cast. The core cast of Whisperer features 19 actors. In the end, well over 5,000 actors submitted for roles. We sifted through all the submissions and called in roughly 100 actors to meet us in person and read from the script. Out of that group of actors, we chose the most experienced and those best suited to the roles. HPLHS fans may recognize a few faces, though there's plenty of new actors on board for the production. We thank everyone who submitted - we wish we could have hired you all. We're still signing on a few Background Players for shots in both New England and LA.

Veteran film, TV and stage actor Barry Lynch will be playing the role of Henry Akeley. Barry's no stranger to HPLHS projects, having performed in The Call of Cthulhu and several episodes of Dark Adventure Radio Theatre. Special effects in the movie required that we make a life cast of Barry's head. Our special effects makeup artist, Dave Snyder, did a full cast of his head and teeth. Click here to see a video of the lifecast being made. (iPod version here) Dave is a highly experienced professional makeup artist whose work includes (among other things) many of the corpses from HBO's Six Feet Under. From the life cast, Dave then makes a separate positive version of Barry's face which he then sculpts. After he sculpts it... well, we wont tell you exactly what we're up to, but we'll have a version of Henry Akeley that'll look really great and can do things that even Barry Lynch cannot do.

More Art and Props, or It Takes Brains
And while the makeup team is toiling away, other teams are hard at work too. We have a scenic designer drawing up the floorplans for the sets. We have our costume designer figuring out what all these people will wear. We have our in-house prop team making all kinds of weird stuff. We have talented friends near and far contributing additional props and artwork to help get everything ready. Leman and Lackey are toiling around the clock, inventing new ways to make things that mankind should not make. The things they are making or so secret, we dare not depict them here. At this point, there are nearly 50 people working on various aspects of the film.

Road Trip
Next week, Branney and Robertson hit the road and return to New England for a final visit to all of our locations. We'll figure out camera placements, logistics, where to hide all the mi-go - that sort of thing. We'll ensure that everything is in place so that when we show up in September with cast and crew we'll have a pretty good idea of what we'll be in for.

Climb Aboard
We can still use translators (see below) and Background Players in Los Angeles and New England. If you'd like to volunteer to be a part of this weird enterprise, shoot an email to whisperer@cthulhulives.org.

3 August 2009 - Art Department and Casting Calls
Pre-production is boldly striding forward. We've hired our second member of the production team. Chris Lackey (whom those of you who have seen the Special Features on the Call of Cthulhu DVD may remember as the guy who fell through the non-euclidean angle into the pit with the cougar) has joined our team once again. He's working with our own Andrew Leman on the very long list of strange and complicated items which need to be created for the production. There's brain cylinders, the black stone of the Mi-Go and things we dare not even tell you about, and our Art Department is hard at work trying to ensure they're all made in time for the cameras to start rolling. We've pulled in extra assistance for a few special items from craftsmen in various corners of the world to help us out with some specialty items. The things they are making look great and it's nice to have the HPLHS studio once again littered with alien technologies and body parts. Well, we often have that kind of stuff around our studio, but there's even more of it now.

We've continued to flesh out the production team. David Robertson, our Director of Photography for The Call of Cthulhu is back and will be providing his keen eye for shooting in black and white to Whisperer. We'll be shooting in HiDef on the Sony F900 camera. It's the same camera we used for shooting the Whisperer teaser. The most recent Star Wars films were shot on the same camera. We've also managed to talk Troy Sterling Nies into joining the Whisperer team. He'll be on-set capturing production sound and then he'll switch to composer mode, creating another lush period symphonic score. We're busy wrangling many more members to join our crew.

We have published our casting notice and are actively engage in assembling a cast of actors for Whisperer. We know there are a great many of you who would like to be in this movie. We were fortunate with Call of Cthulhu that we were able to hire professional actors and with this one, we are once again only casting it with professionals who have significant experience. In the first 12 hours that our casting notice was out, we received well over 4,000 submissions from actors wanting to be in this movie. If you are an actor, you can find the details of what we're looking for in the major actors' trade sites. If you don't have a lot of experience, we're still happy to try and include you as an extra. We need extras for scenes being shot in both New England and Los Angeles. If you can get yourself there, feel free to contact us at casting@cthulhulives.org and we'll do our best to see if we can get you on screen.

Beyond the casting, we now have a pretty firm production calendar. We'll start shooting in New England September 22nd. We'll be there a little less than a week and then we return to Los Angeles and shoot through October 17. At that point, we'll be all done with actors and full-sized sets. We'll move on to work with our Miniatures Unit and will film miniature and stop motion sequences through the fall. We'll start editing the movie at this point too, and hopefully sometime around the end of the year we'll have a rough cut of the movie. Then we move into adding music, some special effects and putting polish on it. If all goes well, we'll have Whisperer done in early 2010.