DARK COMEDY ARMAGEDDON ROAD STARTS PRODUCTION WITH NATALIE GRACE, BRIAN MCCAIG & WILLIE AAMES
VANCOUVER, BC (May 13, 2024)— Opiate Pictures Inc. and Black Moon Media are pleased to announce that the twisted dark comedy feature ARMAGEDDON ROAD from writer/director Karen Lam has gone into production in B.C. The team has cast Natalie Grace (Fringe, The Chilling Adventures of Sabrina), Brian McCaig (Supernatural, Brain on Fire), Landon Liboiron (Hemlock Grove, Frontier), April Telek (Hell on Wheels) and Willie Aames (Bottle Monster, Eight is Enough) best known for his role as Buddy Lembeck on the 1980s sitcom Charles in Charge.A dark comedy set in Las Vegas in 1976, ARMAGEDDON ROAD follows a hapless ex-con who is hired by a mob boss to chauffeur his girlfriend for an evening. Unbeknownst to anyone, the girlfriend dies of a cocaine overdose and her body is taken over by one of the Horsemen of the Apocalypse (War) who charms the driver into taking her to what will be Armageddon in the Nevada desert. The team is working with acclaimed sculptor and miniaturist Gary Young whose credits include Monarch: Legacy of Monsters, The Predator and Godzilla. The filmmaking process is unique in that they are working with Gary to create miniature sets that they will be projecting on a volume wall at Lumostage in Delta, BC using cutting edge LED screens as well as old school, small scale modeling made famous by the original Star Wars movies in the 1970s. Bringing traditional model-making and filming into the futuristic stage is an entirely original and creative approach to filmmaking: instead of using stock background plates, all the footage for the volume wall was meticulously filmed by the team in Las Vegas, the Nevada desert and in the Interior of BC. And all the fantastic settings are not real sets at all, but miniature models designed and created by Gary Young, and will be filmed and projected onto the volume wall for the actors to work against, creating an entirely imaginary world that is both uncanny and yet grounded in hyper-reality.“This film combines traditional filmmaking techniques with cutting edge technology, much like the story itself. This is 1976, but seen through a 2024 lens,” says Lam. “Meeting Gary Young and working with miniatures reminds me of why we all wanted to be filmmakers in the first place. We are featuring the coolest hot rods from the 1960s and 70s, and we have period sets that are created on a 1/18 scale that we’ll be projecting into life sized versions. It’s a bit like falling in a real-life dollhouse.” She adds: “It’s really hard to play with model cars and not make vroom vroom noises.” Lam is a Vancouver-based filmmaker known for her work in horror and genre with feature film credits including Stained, Evangeline and The Curse of Willow Song. In television Lam has directed a true-crime documentary series for Investigation Discovery (US), and has written television scripts for SYFY and Netflix on the series Van Helsing and Ghost Wars.ARMAGEDDON ROAD is written, directed and produced by Lam, with Thomas Billingsley (The Curse of Willow Song) serving as DOP, and produced by Kate Kroll (Portraits from a Fire, What Comes Next).
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