Gravois location for zombie uranium mill

Paul Casey as scientist in the uranium mine.
So we recently shot the big zombie uranium mine scene for our movie Go South for Animal Index. We are making a fable of the Los Alamos story, based on a poem by Stefene Russell. Given that it's a fable based on a poem, we are at liberty to be as representational as we wish, or not.

Our plan, at this point, is to mine something that looks like raw uranium (which we have done, mining sand) and then mill it into something that looks like yellowcake uranium, and then mill that into something that looks like plutonium.

These latter two processes in reality were vast technical enterprises that involved, among other things, creating a fission facility the size of an entire city in Oak Ridge, Tennessee. We can always fall back on archival footage for that, and we may do so, but my first idea is to have our zombies play with food to create cornbread (yellowcake) and plum pulp (plutonium).

First, we need to have our zombies wheel the wheelbarrows of uranium (sand) they wheeled out of the mine to the location we will use for the mill. I have been looking for a location like this, which I just found on an alley behind Gravois.

The alley has a lot of other interesting textures to choose from.

I like this exterior.

There is a leafy green stretch, which is good, since we have our zombies walking past green at our Atomic Cowboy location.

Always good to have fences, since we need to suggest military encirclement.

Some kind of weird plutonium purple is poking out of this inage for no rational reason, other than to volunteer for the part.

This could suggest military workforce housing, if we want to imagine our mill that compressed upon domestic spaces.



This building has promise as an exterior for the scientists' housing.

I discovered this alley because it's behind the carpentry shop of Paul Casey, who is playing our lead scientist. We could have the zombies dump the mined uranium at the shop garage, if we can live with its hominess.

Shoot tight, and it gets less homy.

This barbed wire gate is probably a better dropoff point. We'd post a soldier, the general and Casey here.

Another look. If we use our prop shop to shoot the bomb shop, which looks likely, we have brick there. Making movies in St Louis, we need to get used to brick.

Another angle at the gate front. Casey has wheels we can use to move the Dumpster.

Wider shot. If we go for the gate front, we probably dont want the garage in the shot.

Casey is an old theater prop guy, and he has an actual mill we can use if we want to use a literal mill. That wasn't what I had in mind, but options are good.

Upstairs in his carpentry shop he has a small table with a great look for the zombie uranium mill table. There also is a larger table that doesn't look as cool.

Clean out this room and we can shoot the scene up here when the weather cools. This would be a lot easier than shooting at Mad Art, which was the previous plan. Casey said if we shoot at night there is a creepy light outside these windows.

A detail of the room. That red is so wrong it's right. Mostly, the scene would be shot in closeups of zombies and uranium (food), though.

Love these lights.



There is a desk for the pencil pusher zombie cataloguing product.


And a plutonium blue zombie lounger for the breakroom. Forgot to ask Casey if we can smoke up there! Our zombies must smoke!