Bad Copy

Brian Aloisio has allowed his kids to be roughed up at the local bike park for our Bad Fun video, and he exorcized some long-dormant Italian Catholic guilt while filming Backslilder. He’s also been an invaluable resource for Premiere and After Effects questions, and he’s a practicing audio engineer to boot. So we’re never short on things to talk about.

Unfortunately, Brian and his family were moving 3000 miles away to Salem, MA, the most Metal city in America.

Not to be confused with Detroit, the second most metal city in Amerca.

But they weren’t moving until the end of the school year and it was only February when we devised the third installment of our LSotM trilogy, a concept complete with a storyline, night vision, greenscreen bodysuits, and a real-life snowy forest.

What we did not foresee was two+ months of inclement weather that would prevent us from even accessing our shooting location, much less setting up camp and filming a 3-minutes Predator-style monster flick.

The weather eventually subsided in May (a month I recently heard referred to as “the 1000 days of May” by other parents since every night and weekend is stacked with end-of-year school obligations, end-of-season sports games, and every other calendar line item a family can encounter). And before we knew it Brian and his brood were frantically packing up and getting ready to move.

Finally, on the very night before Brian skipped town, I picked him up from his empty house and headed out into the forest. He had one brain cell and zero nerves remaining, and was basically sleepwalking in a way that someone who is moving his entire family cross-country in a few hours can be. Such is Brian’s work ethic and willingness to do something absurd.

But as you’ll see, we may as well have filmed this back in February for all the weather spared us. Snow would have been preferable to this situation. And we wouldn’t have had to worry about bears.

Thanks, Brian! May Salem be just as confounding as Ashland, and with more restaurants and better drivers.

Things got so adverse that we never even got to the green screen body suit monster-in-the-woods idea. We were too busy preventing equipment from getting washed away by the torrential rains, or getting separated from each other in the dark. And our arms and legs were tiring from constantly swatting away bugs and clumsily avoiding the rampant poison oak.

At one point we realized that we could lure the mosquitoes away from us if we kept the car dome light on and its doors open, but in our exhaustion we failed to see how that would impact our long, long drive home. (Our ride ended up resembling those money-grab wind tunnel booth games, but instead of cash floating around it was large bugs, and instead of a booth it was a 4000-pound moving vehicle perilously navigating dark forest roads.)

Once the rain eventually claimed one of our cameras we conceded that we weren’t doing anything The Revenant hadn’t already done, and we eventually abandoned our monster creeper storyline and just stuck with the band-playing-in-the-woods template. So pretend at some point during the recorder solo that a scary presence begins to haunt the production.

Boo.

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