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ADAMSTAR PICTURES
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The making of JUDGMENT DAY
The following are excerpts from Mark’s book TRULY INDEPENDENT FILMMAKING; On December 23, 1990, I drove with my parents to Charleston, South Carolina for the day. It was my first year in Graduate School at the Savannah College of Art and Design, and they came to visit me from Kansas City for the Christmas Holiday. None of us had ever been to Charleston before, so we stopped at the visitor's center to look for the usual tourist information. I came across a brochure for a place called Patriots Point, where five large ships were permanently docked as museum pieces. I had always loved visiting big ships like these, and since I was from Kansas, there aren't a lot of ships larger than a river barge to see. At Patriots Point there were five ships: the USS YORKTOWN aircraft carrier, USS CLAGAMORE submarine, USS LAFFEY destroyer, USS INGHAM coast guard cutter, and the Nuclear Merchant Ship SAVANNAH. As my parents drove to visit a nearby plantation, I spent the afternoon exploring these ships and setting my imagination in motion.
For more information about Patriots Point visit their website at http://www.patriotspoint.org I fell in love with Patriots Point. It was a filmmaker's dream-come-true! Within an hour of walking through the aircraft carrier alone, I was formulating a possible script and shooting strategy for a short film using these vessels. With each new ship I explored, all new locations and storylines appeared. The last ship I examined was the SAVANNAH, and from her bridge overlooking the main deck I knew this was too good of an opportunity to pass up. At dinner that night, and driving home to Savannah, Georgia, I put together the storyline that would remain through several revisions until it's final form for my Thesis project. By February of 1992, I was ready to begin shooting JUDGMENT DAY (1992). “(The most memorable day of shooting was) the day everyone kept tripping! (Laughs) I don’t know what those things were called on the ship but there were things that blended in (to the flight deck), seeing that everything was painted gray, and a lot of people tripped a lot of times. But aside from that, probably the first day (of shooting was the most memorable) just because it was so new and not knowing what to expect. We were on this huge ship, and it was a real ship, and there’s an actual submarine! It was just - WOW! It was overwhelming.” – Nicole Kansas
I didn’t want to use the name of the carrier, USS YORKTOWN, because I felt it was so famous from World War II, and many people might think it’s no longer in service. So I came up with a fictional name; USS TRUMAN, named after the President who ended World War II and his Presidential Library is in Independence, Missouri. I had also considered using the name USS REAGAN, since this story takes place in the future (I envisioned early 21st Century). Several years later I found out that the next two aircraft carriers being built were, in fact, the USS HARRY S. TRUMAN, CVN-75 and the USS RONALD REAGAN, CVN-76.
“The only thing I got a little bit tired of – and OK, it’s a girl thing – was, ‘Do I have to wear that outfit again?’ But of course I had to because of the time frame of the film. It was the same two or three days. So it became ‘The Uniform’. But then again it was easy, too, because I knew what I had to wear and I didn’t have to worry about it. I still have the sweater! (Laughs)” – Nicole Kansas Shooting went smoothly, and we luckily never had problems with the weather or equipment failure. I shot all six days at Patriots Point and loved every minute of it, even if that meant a total of 24 hours of driving back and forth to the location. Growing up in Kansas City, I never imagined being able to shoot on a real aircraft carrier, let alone a small fleet of ships docked at Patriots Point. The people in charge were very helpful and accommodating for such a small student project as mine, if we had been a professional shoot it would have cost us $5,000 a day. The one thing we couldn’t do was interfere with the tours of the ships, so there were delays while we waited for the visitors to make their way out of my field of view. It was strange to have, for the first time, an actual crew helping me with the shoots. I learned how important good audio recording was from the experience of shooting my earliest films where I just used the microphone on the video camera. On JUDGMENT DAY I had a boom operator and recording engineer for the important location shoots as well as someone able to hold the reflector. Since this was a low-budget film everyone, including the actors, would help out behind-the-scenes and never complained. “I
was an undergraduate student without a car, so a change of scenery was always
welcome (during the four hour drive to and from
“The one thing I can remember is that Everette was one of the sweetest guys, and the one scene where he gets kind of angry with Rob and he has to shove him – we almost had to goat him into becoming gruff and more angry. And he kept apologizing for it, too! That was funny. Rob (Steedman) was a nut. He was funny. Everyone was funny. I think as a team everyone worked really well together. The crew was wonderful. Everybody was terrific.” – Nicole Kansas Click here to see more photos of Patriots Point in the Photo Gallery The most exhausting series of shoots happened when I rented a fog machine for several scenes, and decided to shoot these in one long weekend. Friday night Rob and I shot the footage of the LOX Drone underwater in a dry shoot set up in his apartment. A ‘dry shoot’ refers to filming underwater sequences with no water involved, but in a simulated environment usually using fog to reproduce the haze found ‘20,000 leagues under the sea’. We shot late into the night and then drove up for the last day of shooting at Patriots Point on Saturday. Sunday afternoon we shot again in Rob’s apartment recreating the doorway of the Savannah Control Room, broke for dinner, then shot until about four in the morning at the Indian Street Building.
We had quite a scare when we were setting up in the building. It was dark and the SCAD security guard had left the front door open. A Savannah Police Department patrol car spotted the open door and assumed someone had broken into the building, possibly drug dealers. They entered the building with guns drawn and made us stand against the wall. Apparently they saw us holding special stands for our lights, called C-Stands, and thought they looked like rifles. It took a while for us to convince them we were students, there for a film shoot. They had to search all of our equipment and cars to make sure we were telling the truth. It was quite a moment to turn and see police officers standing behind you with guns drawn. This delayed us for about 2 hours, and Rob and Rick were very understanding about the delayed shoot. We filmed all of the Apparition scenes with Rick and the Fog Machine in the big, open space of the converted warehouse, and ended with the destruction of the sphere sequence. I couldn’t actually blow it up, since it wouldn’t have exploded in flames underwater. But I just needed a quick shot of it coming apart with a bright light flaring out from inside of it. I used a heavy fishing weight on the end of a string to act as a pendulum, and it would swing, hitting and sending debris of the shattered globe toward the camera. A bright light would be placed directly behind the globe, so when it broke the light would flare into the lens creating an expanding source of light resembling an explosion. I bought two globes to break, and of course the second one was the best footage. During the process I didn’t see the pendulum and it struck me on my lip, creating a nice cut and making me rather groggy for a couple of minutes. I should have been more careful with safety precautions, but it was late and we were student filmmakers after all. “The one thing (I didn’t expect) was how everything was done out of sequence. That got a little bit confusing. Since I didn’t have any prior video or film experience…to have it cut up and done out of order kind of threw me for a little bit of a loop. After having been through it, it makes sense. You have to take advantage of whatever situation comes up when you’re filming or whatever schedules will allow. That was something new to me.” – Nicole Kansas
JUDGMENT DAY is one of my favorite films because of the shooting experience I enjoyed and the final outcome with the finished product. It won a 2nd place award at the 1993 KAN Film Festival in Kansas City, and everyone seemed to be very impressed with the film. The one thing that I think viewers struggled with was the vagueness to the story. In the light of films such as 2001 and CLOSE ENCOUNTERS, I didn’t want to explain who the aliens are and why they are doing this; I wanted the audience to fill in the blanks with their own imagination. But I may have made it a little too vague, and everyone wondered; how is John the father of this New World without Susan? Doesn’t ‘Adam’ need his ‘Eve”? I didn’t see it as literal as that, John wouldn’t physically start procreating this next step in Man’s evolution. All of the people on the Earth who disappeared weren’t necessarily dead - just removed. So this alien force may have the power to physically create this next step in Man’s evolution, and return the human race with the improvements provided by John’s example. Ironically John would probably remain as he was, and suddenly find himself the “missing link” to the advanced race. But this might have been too confusing even if I did explain it in the film. “I think there’s a general kind of tone or something that goes through your films. And it has to do with a kind of – there’s a slight supernatural kind of phenomenon involved in it. And a slight ‘out-of-this-world’ element working in there, an unknown, usually. And I think JUDGMENT DAY was a good film. I don’t know - it may have been one of your better ones. I like the setting. I love the fact that you went up to Charleston and shot on that ship. And even the actors were pretty darn good in that. And the special effects worked really well, too. Yeah, I think that was a really good film. You had a steadicam that you could use, and you had enough people around you to draw upon. I think that’s always a problem for you, is to just have the number of people you need. (The vagueness to the story) was a little bit of the old TWILIGHT ZONE approach and some of the Hitchcock approaches – that they would leave you to fill in the blanks and expect that the viewer would do it better than they could. They just set up the scenario and let you finish it off. I don’t think that’s a bad way to do it, either. It’s kind of like when you listen to radio, and you fill in the visual part of it. I think there’s something valuable to that. As a matter of fact, I don’t think that TV equals radio in that respect. They get too literal on the TV sometimes. Boy, when you’d hear the background noises on a radio show, God, you’d fill in all of the blanks and it would be a scary or as beautiful as you could imagine. It helps to use the viewer’s mind.” – Don Adams “That
was a hard project, because we were planning the wedding and you were trying to
finish school. You were so far away and I heard, I think, more of your
frustrations about that movie than probably the good things before I actually
saw it. So I think I’ve tend to scrutinize it more because I heard how the
day-to-day shoots went and what went wrong or how tired you were or anything
else. It’s a Sci-Fi picture, I mean. It’s not one of my favorites. It’s a
great accomplishment, you know. You got it finished. It was a big project.
Everybody said you wouldn’t get it finished and you got it finished, and you
did well. But it doesn’t have any – it’s dark and it doesn’t have any
humor in it. It’s this ‘dark mystery’. And I didn’t know the people, and
I wasn’t heavily involved in it so I always felt I was watching that from the
outside in instead of from the inside out.” – Tracy Adams “(When
I saw JUDGMENT DAY for the first time I thought) ‘Do I really look and sound
like that?’ (Laughs) It was strange to finally see it right there in front of
you, from the perspective of having been a part of (the filming). I thought the
final edit ended up being really well done. I thought my performance was not
quite so well done, and I’m still sorry for that. But I liked the end product,
I thought it turned out really well. (Watching it) 12 years later I’m actually
still wanting to blush a little. Aside from ripping my own performance to
shreds, I was just pleasantly surprised at how watch-able it was, and how
cleanly edited and put together it was. It made me feel really good…it was a
good project.” – Nicole Kansas
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