If there’s one thing that stands out in my head about the days I spent on the sets of Hide & Creep, it’s the cold. I remember standing in the cemetary just outside of Montevallo, in particular, filming the scenes that feature the first meeting of Chuck, Chris, Michael, and the mysterious government agent F. These scenes, along with others, spotlight Michael naked (having lost his pants in what may or may not have been an alien abduction the night prior) — and we didn’t have any sort of budget on this film. No special effects, no body doubles — that’s really Michael Shelton naked on screen.

Here’s a behind the scenes factoid to keep in mind next time you watch the movie: it was around 20 degrees the day we shot those scenes. I was suffering from the peak of my peripheral neuropathy at the time (a side effect of my CIPD, peripheral neuropathy is the loss of sensation in your extremities – hands, feet, nose, etc.) — walking only with the aid of a cane, since I couldn’t feel when my feet had hit the ground and thus was prone to falling down a lot — and within an hour, I could feel (through two pairs of socks, heavy boots, and nerves that worked as well as George Lucas’ idea of prequels) the pain of the cold.

All this to say: don’t be too hard on Michael.

I had worked with Chance and Chuck before, doing the score for their short film The Seven Year Switch; they, in turn, were kind enough to kick start my filmmaking resume by providing invaluable assistance with the making of my first short, Goodnight Moon. And that’s the way the Birmingham film scene is — lots of people with varying abilities and degrees of experience, pitching in to help out other people of varying abilities and degrees of experience.

The Crewless Productions group — Chance Shirley, his wife Stacey, and Chuck Hartsell — had shot a couple of shorts prior to the undertaking of H&C, and so they knew what was coming; they’re not called Crewless for nothing, and that’s one of the reasons that working with them is so rewarding. Keep in mind that a big-budget film shoot is a unionized affair of specialties: everyone has their job, and their job only. Costumes, set, direction, camera. A small budget independent film, on the other hand, has no such room for titles, and it’s nice to see the director and producer doing the grunt work as much as anyone else.

My credit on H&C is for “Boom Operator” (guy who holds the microphone just out of frame) and “Sound Mixer” (which is misleading, since I didn’t actually do any mixing that I can recall); I also knew in advance that I would have a small role in the film, as Chance had written myself and my (now ex) wife Melissa into the script playing ever-so-slight-deviations of ourselves. Things change, of course; Melissa ended up getting one of the starring roles, and I play the complex bit part of Kenn, a guy who goes to a church for the first time in years to borrow money and curse a lot.

(Yeah, I know. Big stretch. And I still don’t pull it off very convincingly. Though I did get the best death in the entire movie, hands-down — I won’t spoil it for those who haven’t seen it, but I will say that if I had to choose a way to go, this would be on the list.)

Over the course of the months of shooting (mostly weekends only), I also played three different zombies, shot behind-the-scenes footage, handled props, helped recruit extras, cleaned up fake blood, recorded sound effects, cleaned up audio in post, and recorded the soundtrack for the film with the Exhibit(s). And everything I did, Chance did, too, and then some, as did Stacey, and Chuck, and everyone else involved with the film. It’s nice to be a part of creative ventures where no one is a diva, and everyone involved is ready and willing to do any job (no matter how mundane or banal) to get the best end result possible.

All the hard work paid off. Hide & Creep debuted to a huge crowd at the opening night of the 2004 Sidewalk Film Festival, and has since gotten DVD distribution (there’s something slightly surreal about pooping in to a Blockbuster in Chicago and seeing your movie on the shelf), made it to tens if not twenties of Netflix queues across the world, and gotten reviews that range from scathing (those people just don’t get it) to painfully flattering (those people got it — it being the cash I and others sent along with the review copies). None of us got rich off of the movie, but that was never the point (at least, not for most of us).

In the end, we helped Chance and Chuck and Stacey make their first feature film — and as a short filmmaker, I’ll be quick to point out that that’s a huge accomplishment, in and of itself. That the film is fun to watch, even after spending as much time as we all did reading and rereading subsequent drafts of the script, getting up at 4:30 AM (after playing gigs until 2 AM the night before) to drive fifty miles to backwoods Alabama locations in sometimes brutal cold, and watching edit after edit of the movie; that’s a miracle.

Not quite on par with coming back from the dead, but hey — at least none of us have a hunger for human flesh.

Not one that’s associated with being undead, at least.

Hide & Creep gets its world cable television premiere Thursday night on the SciFi channel at 7 PM, EST. That’s right — me and Starbuck, just two peas in a pod.