Guerrilla Productions presents
Innsmouth Legacy
H. P. Lovecraft is best known for his approaches to cosmic horror, of mankind seeing itself in a perspective that humbles it to the point of insanity. I believe that there is a profound horror also in the intimacy of the supernatural. It is my hope that Innsmouth Legacy conveys that. It is the story of a woman desperate to escape the curse that haunts her family. It is not a direct adaptation of Lovecraft's story The Shadow Over Innsmouth, but takes place one generation after that tale, borrowing elements from the story.
Innsmouth Legacy is now available on our new DVD: The Cosmic Horror Fun-Pak, which contains this and many other short movies by Guerrilla Productions, most of which are not available anywhere else!
Cast
 |  |  |  |  |  |
Emily Hayes
"Katherine" | Sheri Hinshaw
"Katherine"
voiceover | Mad Martian
"Craig" | Hannah Wyatt
"Jennifer" &
"Young
Katherine" | David J.
Gembala
"Wedding
Officiant" | Scott Fink
"Best Man" |
Our Loyal Extras as Wedding Guests:
Sally Abel, Angel Kelly Caldwell, Erik Chevalier, Constance A. Crain, Anne Daughtry, Marti Dell, Maura DelVecchio-Kanuri, Devin Van Domelin, Michaellola Durch, Lauren Edwards, Kurt Ehrler, Andrew Finley, Catherine Fuller, Michelle Godin, Chris Hanson, Michael Harbour, Susan James, Gayle Koszegi, Lev Koszegi, Jeremie Landers, Aaron Lucchesi, Terry Lopata, Matthew Martin, Christopher Martinsen, Andrew Migliore, Kala Mulcahy, Andrew J. Nicoll, Michael Pearce, Travis Peters, Rachel Reynolds, Cameron Rhyne, Ben Ryan, Beth Ryan, Jessica Ryan, Tavis Sarmento, Michael Sisler, Adrienne Smith, Steve Smith, Dwight Stone, Griffin Stone, Mary Harbour Swallow, Richard Temple, Helki Watson, Danyelle E. Webb, Kate Webb
Crew
Production Diary
07-25-2007: In a glorious victory for the People's Republic Of Bad Scariness, Innsmouth Legacy has won Third Place in the Horror Division at the Conestoga Film Festival.
02-19-2007: Innsmouth Legacy is accepted by A Night of Horror for their 2007 lineup. This is Innsmouth Legacy's international debut!
11-01-2006: Innsmouth Legacy is accepted by the Blue November Micro Film Fest in Tulsa, Oklahoma! Hooray!- 12-31-2004: The DVDs and paper assets arrive for The Cosmic Horror Fun-Pak. These are cool!
12-07-2004: Innsmouth Legacy enjoys a fine showing at Gore-o-Rama A-Go-Go 2: Season's Bleedings film festival in Portland.- 10-04-2004: Data submitted to the Internet Movie Database. Please go and show us a little love at the IMDB!
10-01-2004: We premiere at the H. P. Lovecraft Film Festival. Folks seem to love it! There is a showing once each day this weekend and each showing has a full theatre. Yay!- 09-13-2004: Done! Total time 10 minutes, 'cause there was a little preliminary music, but this puppy's done! Yay! Mental note: music takes a long time.
- 07-13-2004: Finished the edits. 9:32. Not bad! Made a DVD to send out to our wonderful composer. Gadzooks, I hope she's not too busy!
- 07-12-2004: Last shoot. Three of us went back out to Gleneden Beach for one last shoot, the trickey shoot-from-out-in-the-water shoot. Hoo, was that ever a hassle. Key issue with the camera water-bag: when set for autofocus, the camera seems to prefer focusing on the water droplets on the lens instead of the scene outside the camera bag. Ugh. Well, I managed to grab a few shots and that was a good thing. One of them was even a land-based zoom and that came out surprisingly smooth. This camera is notorious for having a wiki-wiki zoom, but I kept it steady for the shots I took.
- 07-10-2004: Finished the darn credits. Why did that have to be such a pain? Embarking on the wonder and joy of color correcting... Movie time is 9:22. A little longer than I had originally planned, but not egregiously so. Besides, there were a couple of neat images we caught that I hadn't planned to get, so it adds up. Plus, there are still two scenes we have to shoot Monday afternoon. I've given them some room in the timeline, but I'll bet they'll go longer. Spooky story, though. Very spooky.
- 07-09-2004: Finished a very rough cut. A few pieces seem slow. Started the credit sequence, just so I don't have to fiddle with it anymore.
- 07-04-2004: Edited for many hours. Fireworks outside kept throwing off my timing.
- 07-03-2004: Edited for many hours. Some of these shots are actually tricky, such as Mike looking down at the ring. In the script and in the storyboards, it seemed so easy to describe! Ah well, after an hour or so, I got it pretty much right where I wanted to see it. This is beautiful. Also, I saw the first two passes at the poster from Greg. It looks pretty cool, too! I'm still being a picky bastard about it, so it'll probably be a little while before I post it to the web page.
- 70-02-2004: How annoying! My scanner's broken. Or maybe the SCSI card. I don't know. Shitskies!
- 06-29-2004: Finished digitizing and logging all the video from Sunday's shoot. I'm still really happy with this! The missing video (see "camera bag, goddamn") is near the end, so I can probably start building the timeline.
- 06-28-2004: The camera bag shows up. An hour later, I receive an e-mail from the vendor saying they're having trouble finding the tracking number. Seeing as how I ordered it on a Monday to be shipped 2-day, and wrote them on Thursday saying it hadn't arrived yet and what was the tracking information, I'm pretty disappointed with Aiko Trading Company. Yeah, we have the bag now, but it's a lot more effort to reshoot than it would have been to shoot it then.
- 06-27-2004: Third shoot. First of all, we're annoyed that the underwater camera bag didn't show up in time. It was supposed to be here by Friday, maybe even Thursday. Oh bother. That means we'll have to go back out to the coast to catch those last two shots. On the other hand, we get to take another trip to the coast!
We got a late start shooting because Eric blew out a tire in Longview, but we seemed to catch back up pretty quickly, probably by speeding while we drove out to the coast. The morning shoot was in our house. All our actors were great, and the crew worked diligently, and we had a good time and got some really beautiful footage.
Crystal's makeup work on Emily was amazing! Emily radiated! Plus, she had webbed fingers. Hm, would special effects makeup on fingers qualify as "special digital effects"? Er, anyway, the webbing was awesome and flexible and looked -- even in real life -- as if it had grown there. Very, very cool!
After our shoot at the house, we had a quick lunch and hauled ass to Gleneden Beach, where we shot the remaining scenes (well, except for the ones requiring the water bag). The weather was absolutely beautiful. Not only did all our shots come out well, but we managed to grab a bunch of totally bonus extra shots of just stunning beauty. One of the sequences we shot was part of the sunset, with the sun coming out from behind one layer of clouds, and then ducking back behind another, but in the meantime, sending out a beautiful starburst of rays.
After the last cast-shoot, Eric and I went closer to the ocean to shoot a few minutes of wave action. During that time, Mike had us shoot an "alternate ending" for the movie, which I presume he'll put up on his website. When we returned inland, we discovered that Emily and Mick had carved "Innsmouth" in the sandy cliff. So naturally, we had to grab a group shot under those letters. I really wonder how many people will stumble across the word "Innsmouth" carved in the sandy cliffs of Gleneden Beach and know the reference. Hey, if you see it, let us know!
Leopoldo, our AD, took still pictures like a madman. Here's a really good one he took: Sinister-to-dexter: Emily Hayes ("Katherine"), Mad Martian (in the blue shirt, "Craig"), Eric Morgret (Director of Photography), Katrina Martin (Producer), Leopoldo Marino (Assistant Director), Greg Higgins (Production Assistant), Edward Martin III (Director), and Mick McCuen (Stage Hand).
- 06-23-2004: I made up an initial opening title sequence. Looks pretty good.
- 06-21-2004: Met with Andrew today to take a couple pictures of his rings for the poster.
- 06-17-2004: Sheri records her voiceover. This was fun. As we passed each time through the script, we found places where it could be tweaked a little here and there, tightened up. That was handy. By the time we did our last take of the evening, she was sounding seriously chiller! This is going to be so cool when it's done!
- 06-16-2004: Second shooting! If I thought the first shooting went well, I just had no idea what "well" was like. This was great! We shot every scene we wanted to shoot, plus several "bonus" scenes that were really great. This was our first shoot with actors and everyone was just terrific. We had so many church guest extras that we had to stack 'em in at the back of the church! Near as I can tell, everyone had a good time at the shoot.
After this, we went to try for the Union Station shoot, fully expecting to be turned away. But our stalwart Location Coordinator, combined with our equally stalwart Producer, not only talked 'em into letting us film in the station, but also letting us film in a few other really key locations, such as on the platform, on the bridge overlooking the platform, etc. That was awesome! They even left the lights on a little longer for us!
Then, after that, we journeyed yet again to another location, this time the EXT INNSMOUTH CHURCH set, which was a church-converted-into-a-house. We arrived, I finally met the owner, who was a great guy, very nice, and lent us more fishing net to add a little bit to the decor! It took us about 30 minutes to hack at the industrial fishing net and drape it all over the front of the house, but I think we did a pretty good job. What do you think? The Innsmouth Symbol didn't quite work in this situation, because we had to leave the doors open (so there was no easy place to hang it). But overall, it was just marvelous. Took another ten minutes to shoot some things, then another twenty minutes to clean up, and everybody headed home -- around midnight! Our Assistant Director Leopoldo took these pictures. I had to bring the levels up a bit, 'cause we were shooting at night, but he did some neat framing there. Plus, he took some really unflattering pictures of me a couple of times. You think I'll post those? No way!
- 06-13-2004: Final fitting on the wedding dress and went over the storyboards with Emily. New picture of her for the cast listing.
- 06-06-2004: Went out with Emily and we found costumes for the Union Station shoot. Really good stuff, too! Lovin' those thrift stores.
6-5-2004: Finished the Innsmouth Church prop. That looks pretty cool. Here's a picture of it.- 06-01-2004: Ugh, trying to figure out a shooting schedule with so many dependencies is such a pain. Does it get better when everybody's paid?
- 05-29-2004: First shoot! The shoot went like clockwork! The only dicey moment was when we wanted a flock of gulls to perform on cue and the weather was so crappy that there were no gulls. I decided what-the-hell and started tossing out bread anyway and suddenly (do they have cell phones?!) a flock of gulls appeared and descended, performing exactly as the Director ordered. Not only did we get all the shots we planned for, they came out better than we expected in very creepy and unexpected ways. We also grabbed a few shots that were specifically cool to that location and will add to the finished movie. Splendid! Even the weather cooperated by being especially pissy and rainy and stormy -- which is what I originally wanted for these scenes, but seemed damnded unlikely in the middle of the summer.
- 05-28-2004: My Mom informs me that she has acquired a whole bunch of fishing net from Newport. Wow -- Moms are great!
- 05-25-2004: Okay, final casting for the main players is done. Emily looks to be likely to do a great job as Katherine and she was very excited about the script.
05-21-2004: Started on the symbol that appears on the front door of the Innsmouth Church. I'm building it entirely out of wicker. It symbolizes the basic fish-nature of that which is worshipped by the people of Innsmouth. It also symbolizes the eternal cycle of life in Innsmouth. The fact that the fish are eating each other, however, symbolizes the natural horror of that eternal life -- peaceless, ceaseless, hungry, and eternal.
05-20-2004: Finished the Vox Piscea. Wow, this looks really cool. Here's some of the detail.- 05-16-2004: We've cast Jennifer. Yay! This was a key bit of casting. Now to find an actress for Katherine who looks sufficiently like Jennifer...
- 05-15-2004: Fishing net for set dressing has been an interesting hunt. We were about to buy a bunch at a costuming/party supply shop when a fellow came by, saw what we were doing, and suggested we get ahold of some netting from commercial fishermen. Looks like we have calls to make...
- 05-13-2004: Almost done with the texturing of the Vox Piscea. What a pain. Literally. I made scales until my thumb was numb.
- 05-11-2004: Went location-hunting this evening. Looked at a couple of churches. If we can get permits for these, we have the churches we need. They looked great!
- 05-10-2004: Posted a casting call on a website.
- 04-25-2004: The Vox Piscea is turning out even cooler than I had hoped, but yikes, is it a lot of work! My thumb is killing me. I think I'm going to shoot a lot of images of this process so that I can eventually post a photographic "how-to".
- 04-24-2004: Talked with a makeup artist, who has expressed an interest in doing our makeup effects. She did some very nice work for a movie I've seen recently and I think we would be lucky if she did this with us. Also talked to a fellow who is interested in playing the male lead. I think he would do a bang-up job! I've sent him a copy of the script to read to se if he's still interested.
- 04-22-2004: Started building the Vox Piscea, a prop for the movie.
- 03-10-2004: Okay, we have the house and the beach set all nailed down. Now to find a church or two...
- 01-26-2004: Finished the storyboards! Wow, these are creeeeeepy.
- 01-20-2004: We may have one of our primary sets all taken care of. Still a few details to work out. Seems a co-worker knows a friend who has a vacation house in the town where we want to shoot!
- 01-17-2004: Met with Eric Morgret, Kelly Young and Rick Tillman at Rustycon to talk about the project, go over a few of the storyboards, and host a panel on low-budget filmmaking. Very fun!
- 01-07-2004: Traded a few e-mails with someone who is interested in being Katherine's voice. I know she does good voice work, so I'm heading over and we're going to do a recording session of the script and see how it goes. Also, made a "Wanna Help?" page for this project, 'cause we're gonna need it!
- 01-06-2004: The storyboards are looking very nice. Not all fancy and detailed, but revealing some very disturbing imagery. I like how this one's coming together -- it's like the next step up from The Testament of Tom Jacoby. More complicated, that's for sure! We're going to need much more extensive sets for this.
- 01-04-2004: Contacted by a fella who wants to be our DP for IL. He's sending me a sample of the last thing he worked on. Was also contacted by a fella who wanted to audition for the part of Craig. I explained that it's a silent part, but he's all gung-ho. I had another fella in mind, too, so maybe between the two of them, I'll get one actor. Then again, I think all but one of the original actors for The Testament of Tom Jacoby bailed, so maybe that's just par for the course.
- 11-01-2003: If I had any doubts, I think they're dissipated -- Katrina's excited about the script and wants to produce it.
- 10-16-2003: First pass on the script complete. Short and sweet! I like this -- it has a growing sense of urgency and horror, yet manages to shoot further into tragedy and despair. Tragedy and despair -- yay! Plus, it's really short! Also, added this web page to the lineup.
