Apocalyptic Christmas List

For those of you who, like me, are rushing about trying to finish your Christmas shopping, here are a few ideas for the survivors on your list. Enjoy, good luck, and Merry Christmas to all!

The Hollow Men - T. S. Elliot

Mistah Kurtz -- he dead.


  
      
           A penny for the Old Guy
      
  

          
               I
          

We are the hollow men
We are the stuffed men
Leaning together
Headpiece filled with straw. Alas!
Our dried voices, when
We whisper together
Are quiet and meaningless
As wind in dry grass
Or rats' feet over broken glass
In our dry cellar

Shape without form, shade without colour,
Paralysed force, gesture without motion;

Those who have crossed
With direct eyes, to death's other Kingdom
Remember us -- if at all -- not as lost
Violent souls, but only
As the hollow men
The stuffed men.

          
               II
          

Eyes I dare not meet in dreams
In death's dream kingdom
These do not appear:
There, the eyes are
Sunlight on a broken column
There, is a tree swinging
And voices are
In the wind's singing
More distant and more solemn
Than a fading star.

Let me be no nearer
In death's dream kingdom
Let me also wear
Such deliberate disguises
Rat's coat, crowskin, crossed staves
In a field
Behaving as the wind behaves
No nearer --

Not that final meeting
In the twilight kingdom

          
               III
          

This is the dead land
This is cactus land
Here the stone images
Are raised, here they receive
The supplication of a dead man's hand
Under the twinkle of a fading star.

Is it like this
In death's other kingdom
Waking alone
At the hour when we are
Trembling with tenderness
Lips that would kiss
Form prayers to broken stone.

          
               IV
          

The eyes are not here
There are no eyes here
In this valley of dying stars
In this hollow valley
This broken jaw of our lost kingdoms

In this last of meeting places
We grope together
And avoid speech
Gathered on this beach of the tumid river

Sightless, unless
The eyes reappear
As the perpetual star
Multifoliate rose
Of death's twilight kingdom
The hope only
Of empty men.

          
               V
          

Here we go round the prickly pear
Prickly pear prickly pear
Here we go round the prickly pear
At five o'clock in the morning.

Between the idea
And the reality
Between the motion
And the act
Falls the Shadow

                   For Thine is the Kingdom

Between the conception
And the creation
Between the emotion
And the response
Falls the Shadow


                   Life is very long

Between the desire
And the spasm
Between the potency
And the existence
Between the essence
And the descent
Falls the Shadow

                   For Thine is the Kingdom


For Thine is
Life is
For Thine is the

This is the way the world ends
This is the way the world ends
This is the way the world ends
Not with a bang but a whimper.

The End has Begun

The Apocalypse began a long time ago. Experiencing the end of the world and surviving the wastes that follow has been a mild obsession of mine for years, and to finally be exploring it now is a dream come true.

I started Film School in the Fall of 2007. A year later, I made my first short film, The Treasure of the Bandit King. It was a 7 minute long, black and white swashbuckling epic. The next semester I filmed my Production 2, The Breeder of Dire Events, a 15 minute long supervillain prison movie. Following the traditional Watkins career path, it was a year until I shot my Production 3, a Super 16mm romance. Then, in the summer of 2010, Falls the Shadow began.

In the Fall 2009 semester, I had written a short script with then intention of shooting it for my Production 3. It was a slightly more serious version of the boy-meets-girl story, set years after the zombie apocalypse. However, it was far too complex to shoot for that class, so I pushed it aside to save for Production4, my thesis film.

When the Spring 2010 semester was over and it was time to dive into Development of my 4, I began to look at that script again. It had always been my plan to shoot a feature film for my 4, and while I still enjoyed this script, it was not enough for a feature.

And so it was, that one evening, while my dad, Ron, and I were driving to Arkansas for a friend's graduation, we hammered out the three main story arcs of the film. Drawing from the short script, we have Noah, the Wanderer, aimlessly trekking the wastes until he meets Elena, a beautiful young woman who is full of life and joy. Then, we have Michael, an officer in the United States Army and a member of Special Forces who returns home to find his wife murdered and daughter kidnapped by a local group of Raiders. He sets off with Frank, his father - in - law to find his daughter. Finally, we have a Mother and Son, desperately trying to survive in the midst of the destroyed world. Their survival becomes much more complicated, however, when the son survives a bite from an Infected (our zombies) without becoming one himself.

The rest of the summer was spent developing the three arcs, creating New Richmond, the home of our Neo-Nazi/Confederate Raiders, and writing the first draft of the script.

So here we are now. It's the middle of December now. We have shot for two weekends, are picking up scenes we got snowed out of on this Saturday (stay tuned for blogs about the previous two weekends), and are finishing the preproducing for the rest of the shoot. It is unusual to be preproducing during production, but as I'm sure you'll find, there is very little usual about what we are doing here.

Thank you so much for reading. Keep checking back for more updates to the diary as we move into the next phase of production, and from there into post.