Supply Places

I connected with a pro artist last night at work; she was selling Direct TV, I was selling Macs.  Neither bought anything...but she told me about a place to buy top quality art supplies for a great price.  Intuitively named, www.artsupplywarehouse.com offers discounts on the alumalite products I've been wanting to pick up for a while.  Based in Huntington Beach, their stock is supposed to be highly impressive. Huge aisles dedicated to single products: The pens go on forever just by themselves, not to mention the paper or brushes and ink.

Another great place is www.pinkhouse.com . Their site is ugly, but prices are unbeatable.  They offer a selection of harder-to-find products like Picco-tex and Expand-it.

The Faux Library

The Faux Library is a neat little prop shop that I found while wandering through back-alley North Hollywood.  Their deal is that they make and rent out normal looking books that are light as a feather. This is very valuable to set changers who have to move an entire bookshelf...set books up...take books down...move shelf...set books up...repeat ad absurdum.  Eats up a lot of valuable shooting time.

With faux books, you can cut out those middle steps. Set it up once, move the shelf, take them down when done.  Smart! I like the way they think.

They also make their own magazines covers and custom books covers that do not need licenses or releases to be shown onscreen, along with realistic covers for books that the public cannot get a hold of: CIA manuals, Top Secret Docs, etc.

Makeup FX Laboratories

Today I had to honor of touring my new favorite FX studio, MEL FX.  These are the guys who fabricated the eggs for the movie Aliens.

[melfx.com]

They also made the Borg suit for Seven of Nine in Star Trek Voyager:

I got to touch one of the original Borg suits, and see all the foam latex equipment, the vacuum forming area, the metal machining stuff and all manners of delightful past projects.  Check out their website for tons of pictures. Their project list is longer than my arm.

The owner was kind enough to sit down with me and talk about the business. I asked him lots of questions about how FX studios work and how a person starts in that kind of career.  30 minutes later [!!] he offered me an apprenticeship at the studio.  I almost fell out of my chair in excitement!  Accepted immediately.

So now I'm looking at juggling 3 part-time jobs. Wow.

Sockbaby 4!

Ronnie Cordova's father revealed...Doug Jones [Hellboy's Abe Sapien!] fights Burger...this installment is sure to please. 

Sockbaby!