PRODUCTION IS FINISHED!

This past weekend I completed the last shot in Frankenstein vs the Wolfman. There were a couple of memory issues that cropped up in Poser that eliminated a couple of planned shots from the movie (a shot which would have brought just about every character in the movie together,) which resulted in some downscaling - but work was finished and the movie is now in the can. To be at the end of almost three years worth of work feels like a weight has been lifted off my shoulders.

I've screened the final cut and am generally happy with it. The animation is an improvement over Raven2 (although it's still a long way from feature quality - which speaks to both my skills as an "animator" and to the amount of work demanded of one person to produce a film by themselves.) There's less action than the Raven movies, but there's more character development. Characters actually have some conversations rather than always rattling off details that will speed them on to the next plot point.

I spent the remainder of the weekend preparing graphics for and cutting together a trailer. Every once and a while during production I was tinkering around with a trailer... I ended up abandoning two different versions in favor of this one, which introduces us to our main antagonists, sets up a bit of plot, and then shows a rapid fire sequence of clips from the film. Using after effects I was able to come up with some cool looking title elements. The trailer runs about 1:05 or so, and is currently in the process of getting scored - a job I've handed off to Other Andy, not Brother-In-Law Andy, who is recording an album called Demontree with Darkhouse. You should hopefully be seeing it here in a couple of weeks. Oh yeah, and I prepared a 3-D version of it, too!

The last time I spoke with Ryan he said he had 10 minutes worth of score completed. I packaged the final film version off to him in the mail on Monday, so we'll see where we go from here.

My next enterprise is the sound effects track. I sat down to work on it last night and burned up a good five hours to get about 30 seconds worth of effects. A lot of the effects need to be edited, equalized, and otherwise manipulated to be considered finished; Brother-in-Law Andy will be supervising the final mix once I get the tracks laid out, and overseeing recording of new effects to cover any gaps. We'll be calling in the actors soon to do the remainder of the ADR work.

After that, I plan to work on the DVD features and updating this site to bring it in line for the release. I'm considering methods of release right now, including 2D and 3D film festival versions, downloadable or Torrent DVD/XBOX360/PSP/iPOD-ready versions, DVD, etc, etc. We'll see which ones pan out.