Avatar and Maggots: Together At Last On Scream Queens

When you’re making a TV show, there are days when every single thing goes totally wrong.

But sometimes, you get exactly what you want.

Welcome to Episode 3 of Scream Queens

After wanting to scratch our eyeballs out and die in pain rather than spend one more millisecond on episode 2 of Scream Queens, I was pretty much convinced our season was cursed. Turns out, only episode 2 was cursed (that was more than enough!)

Still, episode three was going to present a lot of challenges. What else would you expect when you’re working with the guys from Avatar and 10,000 maggots in the same hour of TV?

The Third Floor

Talk about geeking out! I’m still blown away that the same team who did previs on Avatar showed up to do a challenge with our Scream Queens. The Third Floor is one of the top previs companies in Hollywood. Here, CEO Chris Edwards talks about what they do, and where the name “The Third Floor” comes from (TEASER: It has to do with George Lucas and Skywalker Ranch)

Our first encounter with The Third Floor was at a Director’s Guild event called “Digital on a Dime” (funny, since there’s no way in heck to do this for a dime.) They did, however, put on an amazing demo.

A girl in a tricked-out, space age body suit walked onto stage. Projected behind her on a movie screen IN REAL TIME was her every move…except she was a giant monster stomping through a virtual environment. Whatever she did was perfectly mimicked by the beast on screen.

We immediately said, “That would be the coolest Scream Queens challenge ever!” That was long before we even knew if there’d be a season 2 of Scream Queens, so this challenge idea was well over a year in the making.

Would They Do It?

When season 2 of Scream Queens was finally picked up, we called friend and colleague David Conley (a VFX producer on projects like Terminator: Salvation and Cloverfield) to see if he could pull some strings and get The Third Floor to help out a reality TV show with no money. (David is the same guy who got us into Henson’s Digital Puppetry Studio for another geek-out fest.)

The Third Floor was very open to talking, and generously helped us pull off the most technological Scream Queens challenge ever.

Choosing a Character

We brainstormed a bunch of different characters our Scream Queens might become while wearing the suit. Monsters, sucubusses (succubi?) werewolves, demons…the discussions went on for WEEKS. In the end, we loved the idea of a puppet trapped in an eerie attic. The scenario provided many opportunities for cool acting choices.

In the scene, the puppet is brought to life by a lightning strike, escapes the box they’ve been in, only to realize they’re trapped in the attic. What to do? Crash though a window to possible escape (or certain death?), of course.

What’s a motion capture challenge without a little action?

Additionally, playing a puppet meant the ladies would need to really think about how to move, being made with all those joints, pieces and parts. Finally, since this challenge was about acting without words, all emotion had to come from their body language…not easy!

Expensive Clothing!

It’s a $100,000 + suit the girls had to wear. Needless to say, we only had one of them. (As a funny aside, due to an early miscommunication, we thought it was a $1,000,000 suit. Glad we never pitched it that way to the network!)

This meant about 45 minutes of downtime between each girl’s performance as the suit was removed from one actress, and then calibrated for the next.

In the end, the girls made some great choices. Allison Kyler looked particularly kick-ass in her scene, and while Jaime may not have agreed with her acting choice, there’s no denying that her performance gave us one of the shots of the season:

Allison strikes a pose

But it was Sierra, tapping into something great, who won the guaranteed callback.

Sierra really shined in her performance.

After more than a year of hoping, planning, and dreaming, we got to geek out over working with the guys who grew up at Skywalker Ranch, and pull off our biggest acting challenge yet. Happy, happy, joy joy.

Yes, we were feeling pretty pleased with ourselves!

John’s Class

He had to help the girls cry. Um, too easy?

The Scare

In an ep about acting without words, well, we had to go there…

Everyone’s scared of mimes, right?

The setup was this: The girls would stumble upon a gift box. The box would vibrate, hopefully scaring them. When they opened it (probably thinking there’d be something crazy in there) they’d find a phone with the message “Sometimes the deadliest killers are silent.” At this point, our Mime would have snuck up behind them.

When we tested it, the phone wouldn’t vibrate the box enough. So we made a fake bottom on the box, and put a remote controlled truck in it. When the girls approached the box, we “drove” the truck back and forth to make it shake. The girls JUMPED which was awesome, and then Mime terror reigned.

Maggots!

Karlie takes a maggot shower, courtesy us.

First off, all credit for this challenge turning out awesome goes to Joke. The original idea for this (since it was an episode about acting without relying on words) was to do a scene of a girl coming home, realizing her house had been broken into, the place trashed, and her friend dead. The whole time, the only thing she could say was “No” with each “No” conveying a different meaning.

Inspriation for this came from one of our favorite scenes of all time, right out of HBO’s The Wire.

WARNING: THIS IS NOT SAFE FOR WORK, FAMILY, OR SMALL CHILDREN, AS IT USES THE “F” WORD OVER AND OVER AGAIN AND CONTAINS NUDITY:

Pretty awesome scene, all about using one word to mean a whole lot of different things. However, as a reality TV challenge, it was feeling a little flat to us. And let’s face it, “No” is just not as cool as that “F” word.

With just a couple days to go before we shot the challenge, we started to worry. “What if it’s just totally lame?” we asked each other. We felt like we needed something more.

That’s when Joke said, “I got it! Let’s dump maggots on them!” (Do I have the coolest wife in the world or what?)

Can’t blame me for this one!

Now, the idea of working with Maggots came from an early brainstorm session we’d done with director Tim Sullivan. He’d said that every movie he’s ever made entailed the actors dealing with real maggots. We’d been looking for a challenge to work the little buggers into, and Joke’s idea seemed brilliant.

So, we brought in about 10,000, farm-raised, perfectly sterile maggots, and at the magic moment, dumped them on our ladies.

When the girls were acting, we had a dude on a ladder dumping them down. For the insert shot of the maggot “cocoon” awesome art dude Elvis Strange built a balloon inside of some cool, gross moldy looking stuff, and inflated it with an air pump until it exploded.

Major Props to Sarah

All the girls were freaked out by the bugs, but Sarah was especially panicked. Yet, despite that, she overcame her fear and did the scene. Her commentary on it was so hilarious, in fact, it got us our first mention of the season on E!’s The Soup, complete with video of Sarah.

Spooky House

The location we shot in was pretty scary…for real. A week earlier there’d been a drive-by shooting on the street, so the local police kept swinging by to make sure we were okay.

Your bullets don’t scare us, bad guys

The house itself was used in Rob Zombie’s Halloween, and right across the street was the house from People Under the Stairs…so kind of a perfect place to shoot horror.

In The End…

Karlie got the axe this week, leaving seven girls vying for a role in SAW 3D.

Sarah comforts Karlie after she gets the news.

From a TV producer’s perspective, less girls = more time for story, and more time for each girl to succeed (or fail.)

It’s very hard in the the early episodes of any reality TV show to balance introducing characters, challenges, and story lines. That said, we were really happy with how episode 3 turned out…our most ambitious episode to date. Well, until next week!

Rolling into episode four (in which a life-long dream of both mine and director Tim Sullivan’s was fulfilled…stay tuned!) the show hits a great stride that continues right through the big finale. So keep watching! Have your own questions? Ask us in the comments below, we’d love to hear from you.

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