Frankenstein vs the Wolfman Production Blog

FRANKENSTEIN VS THE WOLFMAN Available Now in 3D from YouTube

2011-09-12T16:41:00.004-05:00

Frankenstein vs the Wolfman 3D is now available via YouTube's 3D service. This allows the user to custom tailor the 3D experience for the capabilities of his or her display.

Just click the red '3D' button in the toolbar. Have red & blue glasses? We've got you covered. Got one of the new 3D HDTVs? Click "Change Viewing Method" and select Side By Side. YouTube's service works with a wide variety of 3D systems.

Check it out below:

FRANKENSTEIN VS THE WOLFMAN Now Compatible With New 3D Displays

2011-07-22T13:04:00.001-05:00

Own a 3D TV? Head over to Vimeo and you can download a side-by-side 3D formatted version of Frankenstein vs the Wolfman!

Frankenstein vs the Wolfman 3D from Colin Clarke on Vimeo.

FvTWM screening at On the Waterfront festival in Rockford, IL

2010-09-01T15:00:00.002-05:00

Frankenstein vs the Wolfman will be showing as part of Rockford, IL's On the Waterfront music festival. This year, the festival will be incorporating a film festival at the Sullivan Theater (the former New American Theater) at 118 N. Main Street. Frankenstein vs the Wolfman will play as part of a shorts block on Saturday, September 4th beginning at 5pm.

Click here to visit the OTW Film Festival on Facebook for a full list of selected films.

FvTWM Screening at Tri-City Independent/Fan Film Festival in Richland, WA

2010-07-25T10:12:00.005-05:00

FRANKENSTEIN VS THE WOLFMAN will be showing in 3-D as part of the Tri-City Independent/Fan Film Festival in Richland, Washington! The festival runs October 15th & 16th 2010.

The creation of TCIF3 is for the promotion of Independent and Fan Films, especially in the Science Fiction, Fantasy, Horror and Comic genres. We support the education of the general public in these areas by hosting film festivals, and bringing guest professionals to the community and into the local schools to educate and encourage future artists and artisans.

TCIF3 motto is “To spotlight short films made by fans with limited budgets but unlimited imagination!”

Visit the fest online at www.tcif3.com

Follow us on Twitter!

2010-05-03T20:28:00.002-05:00

I've belatedly joined the 21st century - stay up to date on Frankenstein vs the Wolfman screenings, follow the production on Raven's Hollow, and find out about upcoming projects and more fun stuff by following daredevilfilms on Twitter!

New Screening Announced: Polly Staffle Grindhouse Fest

2010-04-14T09:47:00.004-05:00

Frankenstein vs the Wolfman in 3D will be screening as part of the Polly Staffle Grindhouse Fest on May 16th at the Science Fiction Retail & Events Center in Las Vegas, Nevada!

The festival, which will take place May 13, 14, 15 and 16, is going to consist of four days of programming in the tradition of grindhouse theaters with double features each day, bookended by trailers and music videos.

Located at the northwest corner of the Commercial Center (right off Sahara on 2520 State State, Las Vegas, NV 89109), the Sci-Fi Center is a comic book and film geek’s paradise. Owned by William Powell, the store houses a true grindhouse movie theater dubbed “The Underground Screening Room” that showcases arthouse, horror, cult, science fiction, fantasy and independent cinema not usually available at traditional theaters in Sin City.

Frankenstein vs the Wolfman now on FilmNet.com!

2009-11-08T08:28:00.001-06:00

Frankenstein vs the Wolfman (2D version) is now available on FilmNet.com! Check it out!

FRANKENSTEIN VS THE WOLFMAN now available on TiVO (via OpenFilm)

2009-11-05T09:22:00.002-06:00

According to a courtesy email from OpenFilm, you should now be able to see FRANKENSTEIN VS THE WOLFMAN (2D or 3D versions), and my older films RAVEN and its sequel, RAVEN 2, on your TiVO!

Check it out and let me know how it is!

FvTWM Playing at Spooky Movie: Washington DC Int'l Horror Festival

2009-09-18T14:53:00.004-05:00

More news, fright fiends... Frankenstein vs the Wolfman (2D version) will be playing on October 25th as part of the Spooky Movie: The Washington D.C. International Horror Film Festival as part of a shorts block at 11am. Admission is FREE and open to ages 10 and up!

From the official website: "Before things get too crazy, bring the youngins on down for a fun filled hour of six short films (including three favorites from previous years of the Spooky Movie Film Festival), all at no cost! What better way to exploit that extra time you’ve gained from Daylight Savings than by sharing a wonderful program of animated spooky shorts, followed by a fascinating documentary, with your favorite little ghouls? Free admission!"

FvTWM Playing at 6th Annual Eerie Horror Film Festival

2009-09-18T09:44:00.003-05:00

Frankenstein vs the Wolfman will be playing in 3-D at this year's Eerie Horror Film Festival in Erie, PA at the Warner Theatre, Oct 8-11. If you're in the area, be sure to check it out! Celebrity guests include Alice Cooper, a Lost Boys reunion (minus the Haim), and a Phantasm reunion. Plus, there's plenty of indie horror flicks on display!

Screening Update - Paranoia Horror Convention and Film Festival on 3/14/09

2009-02-27T16:55:00.002-06:00

Frankenstein vs the Wolfman in 3D will be playing (in 3-D!) aboard the Queen Mary 2 in Long Beach, California, as part of the Paranoia Horror Convention and Film Festival on Saturday, March 14 at 10:00am.

Find out more details here - http://www.paranoiafest.com.

FvTWM now available on DVD!

2009-02-14T16:11:00.004-06:00

At long last, Frankenstein vs the Wolfman is now available on DVD!

The disc comes with the following features:

16:9 Anamorphic Widescreen5.1
Dolby Digital surround
English subtitles (on 2-D version of movie only)
Three versions of the movie:
- Standard 2-D version
- Anaglyphic 3-D version (2 pairs of red/blue 3-D glasses included)
- High Quality Field Sequential 3-D version (shutterglasses viewing system sold separately at razor3donline.com)
Director's commentary
Audio-Only Deleted scene
Alternate Main Title Sequence
Early Test Render Version of the full movie
Teaser trailer
Trailer
Raven & Raven 2 trailers
DVD-ROM Screenplay

The self published DVD+R disc is available by clicking here for $9.99 plus shipping and handling.

FvTWM on IMDB!

2009-02-10T07:31:00.001-06:00

Believe it or not, Frankenstein vs the Wolfman in 3-D has now been immortalized on the Internet Movie Database! The title page for my little film was offered due to a couple of film submissions I had made via their online festival submission partner, Withoutabox.

In other news, Andy C. printed up a couple of full sized 27"x40" movie posters of FvTWM over the weekend, one of which is now hanging in my basement along side company such as The Return of the Living Dead, Jaws 3-D, Friday the 13th Part 3 and that 80's heavy metal horror classic Trick or Treat! It's surreal to be able to see it in full sized glory on my wall...

A few words on the Friday the 13th Part 3: 3D Deluxe Edition DVD

2009-02-06T15:05:00.002-06:00

I just picked up the Friday the 13th Part 3: 3D Deluxe Edition, which has been a long time coming - something I've been waiting for since 1982 (I was too young to see the movie in a theater at the time.) I can only express my disappointment with the 3D transfer on the disc.

When the disc first started up, I was thrilled to finally see the "Ladies and Gentlemen: the first few minutes of the movie are not in 3-D but you will need to wear your special glasses anyway" screen prior to the movie, something not seen on any home video format before. But the thrill was short lived as Paramount, for some reason, decided against encoding the opening title sequence in 3D, one of the most memorable moments of the theatrical experience. I can only guess as to why this was omitted; maybe it has to do with the fact that the titles are bright red and would not code well in the red and blue anaglyphic process used for the disc. (In theaters, the film was presented in a full color, polarized process, a forerunner to today's Reel D system.)

The disc's version of the movie goes full 3D beginning with the scenes in the roadside convenience store. And it is here that the disc's biggest shortcoming becomes apparent. For proper 3D alignment, the right and left eye images should be lined up with each other from top to bottom so that your eyes can cross/adjust focus to focus. But the entire Friday the 13th Part 3 disc is mis-aligned, with (for example) the right eye image being slightly higher than the left. Your brain attempts to compensate by having your eyes try to bend the left eye image upwards and the right eye image downwards so they meet as a three dimensional object. This causes eye-strain and headaches in the viewer. The larger the screen the movie is viewed on, the more pronounced the effect.

Unfortunately, the entire movie is rendered this way - as if the telecine operator lined up the image by the top of the frame and not the side-by-side alignment of the 3D image pairs. This is in no way representative of the 3D effects that can be experienced on the recent Polar Express or Journey to the Center of the Earth discs, or even the low budget Night of the Living Dead 3D remake.

The best way to see Friday the 13th Part 3 3D at home remains to be via the bootleg copies of the Japanese VHD disc, which recreates the full color theatrical version by way of electronically controlled LCD shutter glasses.

My Bloody Valentine and Other News

2009-01-19T13:06:00.000-06:00

We were able to check out My Bloody Valentine 3D over the weekend, having to make the trip to a Regal theater in Crystal Lake, IL because Rockford, despite being the 3rd largest city in Illinois, still doesn't have a digital theater (thanks, Kerasotes!). I just recently caught up with the original MBV (unfortunately, not the just-released uncut version) and thought it was a decent entry in the '80's slasher cycle. The remake never aspires to be anything more than a continuation of that lineage, and with the added value of Real D 3D, makes for one of the most fun times had at the movies I've had in the past couple of months (this after suffering through the sheer awfulness of David Goyer's The Unborn). There are a couple of memorable scenes and 3D gags, including a pickaxe through the eye, a jaw ripped off and flung at the audience, a character aiming a shotgun over the viewing audience, and a lengthy nude chase scene through a motel room & parking lot.

In FVTWM news, I received an invitation out-of-the-blue from the IMDB to create a page for the movie on the famous online database; it's a bit of a shock to think that FVTWM will be immortalized forever within it's pages! Plus, we'll be screening in March at the Paranoia Horror Convention and Film Festival, which will take place aboard the haunted Queen Mary 2 luxury liner docked in Long Beach, CA!

I'm still working to arrange further screenings across the country as time & money permit. Plus, I haven't forgotten about those DVDs! Stay tuned...

Merry Scary Winter Horrorland

2008-12-04T12:12:00.001-06:00

If you're in the Sacramento, CA area this weekend, Frankenstein vs the Wolfman will be playing as part of the Merry Scary Winter Horrorland (an offshoot of the Sacramento Horror Festival) on Saturday, December 6th between 1-3pm.

You can find out more by visiting the official site here: http://www.sachorrorfilmfest.com/merry_scary.php

3-D on Blu Ray

2008-11-07T09:11:00.002-06:00

Just a heads up for 3-D enthusiasts: following the release of the Miley Cyrus concert in 3-D on Blu Ray, Warner Bros has stepped up and released their major theatrical films Journey to the Center of the Earth (via New Line) and The Polar Express on Blu Ray disc in 3-D.

I haven't checked out Journey to the Center of the Earth yet (although I'm told it uses a magenta/green anaglyph 3-D encode instead of the traditional red/blue - ostensably to make sure that you can only use the glasses included with the disc to view the movie), but I did pick up The Polar Express and gave it a spin last night.

Polar Express uses the tried and true red/blue method, but because of Blu Ray's VC1 codec the technology is more able to accurately reproduce the correct shades of red & blue than MPEG2 was. I've got a Samsung HDTV and found that by setting the TV's Picture setting to the vivid "Standard" setting, and then by turning off the DNIe (Digital Natural Image Enhancement) I was able to get what is possibly the cleanest 3-D effect I've ever been able to acheive at home, producing very little ghosting and sensational depth effects.

And, to top that off - I've just read that Paramount is set to release the 3-D holy grail: Friday the 13th Part 3: 3D Deluxe Edition on February 3rd, 2009.

First Screenings for Frankenstein vs the Wolfman!

2008-10-19T09:51:00.002-05:00

Regrettably, neither is in 3-D! You can catch Frankenstein vs the Wolfman at the Madison Horror Film Festival pre-party on Friday, October 24th at the Inferno nightclub in Madison, WI (details here: http://www.madisonhorror.com) or showing on the big screen at the Historic Beach Theater in St. Petersburg, FL as part of the Halloween Horror Picture Show on Sunday, October 26th. Click this link http://www.halloweenhorrorpictureshow.com for details.

We were a bit late to gain entry into this year's round of horror film festivals around the world, but we're already pursuing festivals for 2009. Stay tuned... Frankenstein vs the Wolfman in 3-D could be coming to a theatre near you!

FRANKENSTEIN VS THE WOLFMAN IS ONLINE NOW!

2008-09-12T10:30:00.002-05:00

The full movie is available either in 3-D or 2-D versions over at Openfilm.com!

Check it out and let me know what you think!

It's Alive! It's Ali-hi-hive!

2008-09-08T13:16:00.002-05:00

We're done.

Frankenstein vs the Wolfman is complete.

Andy C and I went into the studio on Saturday and worked only a few hours mastering the 5.1 soundtrack; with that work completed, we're finished. Frankenstein vs the Wolfman now exists as a movie, the culmination of work that began in December of 2004.

Andy Kalbfus' thunderous score blares, crashes and booms impressively out of a 5.1 home theater setup; our surround effects are (to my ear) subtle and not overdone.

I've spent the weekend testing the film on a number of different systems and displays - and the 3-D effects work better than hoped. If your television is calibrated correctly, you should have no problem perceiving the super-depth, putting my earlier fears to rest; on PC monitors (especially big widescreen units) it looks even more impressive.

My own opinion of the finished movie? I like it better (right now - this fluctuates month to month) than the two Raven movies. It has better characterization, a better story, and better overall production values. On the flip side, there are issues I'm painfully aware of - shortcuts I took in animation, a line of dialogue here, a sound effect there, and some niggling concerns with the placement of the 3-D 'window' - but overall, I'm proud of it.

So, what's next? I've got to mix the film down into a number of formats to distribute it - one for online submissions, one for festival submissions, one for an eventual DVD. Speaking of DVDs, the disc itself is already authored (with the exception of menu screen music, which I'll be putting in this week), and we'll be spending some time running off DVD-R copies for promotional hand outs. Andy C wants to actually get some discs professionally pressed, so I'll have to keep you posted on what the timeframe is on that. We're also hoping to have a local premiere in Rockford sometime within the next few months, followed by film festival screenings into the future (stay tuned to MySpace for a schedule).

Stay tuned!

The End of Mixing: Day 4 - Do We Have a Finished Film?

2008-09-01T22:28:00.003-05:00

It's the end of the Labor Day weekend and Andy C and I have been locked up together in a small room staring at computer screens for 80% of it. By the end of the day yesterday, we had a 2.0 stereo mix without any kind of directional panning - and last night we had our first test screening.

This morning, it was back to the studio for more tweaks between the sound effects, music & dialogue and then on to the 5.1 mix, which is something that neither Andy nor I have attempted before. And, since the studio isn't equipped with a 5.1 playback system there was a certain amount of guesswork to the process. Basically, we would watch segments of the movie and time out where certain effects would pan from one speaker to the other and go into Cool Edit and graphically move a "sound orb" to where the sound image should appear when listened to by someone in a 5.1 environment.

Only a short while ago we examined the fruits of our labor in the home theater, and to our astonishment the directional effects work! Crickets chirp from all corners of the room, wolves howl from the rear channels, characters run off screen and into the right and left speakers. However, I think we may have misjudged where to put a few certain effects and the music tracks for sure, as we lost a significant amount of volume with this latest mix. I think the problem might be caused by positioning the music in front of the viewer's listening position and into the front soundstage; it may be easy to correct.

So, sadly, we're not quite finished yet. My mission for the time being is to listen and re-listen, take notes and hopefully get together with Andy this weekend to finish it off.

Oh, and the concensus was that the 3-D works. Always a good thing!

In the Final Mix

2008-08-30T18:24:00.002-05:00

The day has finally arrived that Frankenstein vs the Wolfman has moved into the sound mixing phase. Andy C and I have taken some time off of work during the Labor Day holiday to lock ourselves away in the Darkhouse studio to crank out the final mix. As of this writing, we're at the conclusion of Day 2.

We've been rendering out all of Andy K's score MIDI data into separate instrument tracks for all of the 22 cues and then creating a spatial sound mix based on an orchestra seating chart. That's about where we stand right now - the "movie mix" of the score has been completed.

The next step is going to be mixing sound levels between the score and the dialogue & sound effects tracks, and after that we're moving on to the 5.1 mixing stage. This should be interesting as we don't have a 5.1 monitoring system at the studio, so we'll be panning effects using a visual interface and then mixing those down to be put on a DVD. With any luck, we should be at the 5.1 stage by Monday. And, after that - it's in the can!

FvTWM on Facebook!

2008-08-14T13:04:00.001-05:00

Yeah, it's an all out blitz. Visit Frankenstein vs the Wolfman on Facebook by clicking here and say hi!

FvTWM on MySpace!

2008-08-05T08:40:00.003-05:00

It's official - Frankenstein vs the Wolfman has landed on MySpace! Stop by and say hello!

Full Musical Score Heard!

2008-08-03T15:45:00.002-05:00

Yesterday marked a momentus occasion in the production history of Frankenstein vs the Wolfman, as I made my way to the Darkhouse recording studio to hear what Andy Kalbfus had deemed "the final version of the score" (meaning this would be the full symphonic render). I sat infront of a computer screen as Andy played back his score against the moving picture and I can honestly say my expectations were exceeded. We have a real, symphonic movie score! Andy worked on two counterpoint themes, one for the Frankenstein monster and the other for the Wolfman, and weaves them in and out of a big, lush, melodic, suspenseful, dramatic... ah, what other adjectives can I hurl at it? It was great. I can't wait for you to hear it. There were a couple of cues I was telling Andy Carlson he should either post on his Darkhouse MySpace page or mixdown for me so I can post them here... so we'll see what we can get out there for ya.

So, now that the music is done what's next? Andy C. has set aside some time for the three of us to meet over the Labor Day weekend and do the mixing for the dialogue, sound fx and music tracks. Then, we'll have to see about what we're going to do to release this sucker. Andy C. has talked about putting on a premiere party here in Rockford, IL and we'll be following that with online, DVD and film festival distribution.

Stay tuned...

Score Preview

2008-07-07T09:42:00.003-05:00

On Saturday, Andy C was kind enough to invite me over to the Darkhouse studio to listen to excerpts from Andy K's Frankenstein vs the Wolfman score. The scoring has been held up for a week or so due to a corrupted video file, and now that a new file has been delivered we can kick it back into gear again. The music that I heard was not synced to picture, so I had to use some imagination as I listened, but what I heard was vibrant, melodic and full sounding. I can't be more happy. Andy K went with my notes and delivered the spooky, the scary, the haunting and the melancholy sound that I had asked for. Since I haven't heard the score against the actual movie itself it's possible that some changes may be called for but I'm happy to report that we are well underway and closer to that magical date when the movie will be finished!

You can hear a sample of the score over at the Darkhouse myspace page. The clip is called Mr. Ridley Revisted.

Getting Closer

2008-07-02T10:13:00.003-05:00

The latest news from the haunted world of Frankenstein vs the Wolfman is that Andy K tells me that he's completed the musical score up to the film's final battle, which comprises the final 5 minutes of the movie! We're almost there! I've been trying to get into the studio to hear some of the new tracks but my wife and I are remodelling our kitchen and that's pretty much sucking away all of our time.

In other news, be sure to stop by OpenFilm - a new website offering premium video content in high quality and large viewing areas. My earlier flicks, Raven and Raven 2, are currently available for viewing (as well as two flavors of the Frankenstein vs the Wolfman trailer).

Something to report!

2008-06-12T12:12:00.001-05:00

I spoke with Andy K this week and he tells me that he feels he's halfway through the score at this point, and he's very excited about hearing his music coming back at him through a full symphony orchestra. Hopefully I'll get a chance to hear it this weekend or sometime very soon.

Not Dead!

2008-04-02T16:12:00.005-05:00

I know it's been forever and a day since the last blog post, be rest assured - Frankenstein vs the Wolfman is not dead! We've been waiting while Andy outfitted the Darkhouse Studios with the new EQWL Symphonic Gold program, which will give Andy Kalbfus' score the approximation of being performed by a full symphony orchestra. Andy number one tells me that the program was an 80GB install which took a significant amount of time.

But now, I believe it's all set up (a few instrument patches notwithstanding,) so the transcription of Andy K's score from 4-track recording to MIDI data can begin!

In other news, there was a recent photo that surfaced online (courtesy Entertainment Weekly) of makeup maestro Rick Baker's work on Universal's upcoming The Wolf Man, starring Benicio Del Toro & Anthony Hopkins.

3-D DLP TVs

2008-01-21T15:24:00.000-06:00

With 3-D in the 21st century finally making inroads into mainstream acceptance, it's nice to see some electronics manufacturers future-proofing their new TVs to display 3-D content.

Samsung and Mitsubishi have recently introduced HD DLP displays that have a port for an IR transmitter (for controlling 3-D shutter glasses) built in. You can read all about the technology here. The drawback is that field-sequential 3-D dvds won't work without a) playing them back from a PC over a DVI to HDMI connection, and b) play them through a special software program that will convert their field-sequential 3-D encoding into a new, checkerboard encoding pattern. You can read more on that by checking out the 3D DLP white-paper here. I was able to locate a program, called Stereoscopic Player, that seems to do the trick. Unfortunately, it's not freeware.

The upside to this is flicker free (60 Hz refresh rate for each eye) HD resolutions of 3D material (including video games when used with special drivers) on your HDTV.

The field sequential 3-D version of Frankenstein vs the Wolfman will be fully compatible with this technology. Now... where's our HD 3-D version of Beowulf?!

More Music and Effects Work

2008-01-19T09:32:00.001-06:00

Last week I was able to hear most of the Frankenstein vs the Wolfman score over at Andy Kalbfus' place. With only the final battle to go, we're reaching a place where we can almost say that the score has been written... next up comes the transcription of the 4-track recordings to EastWest Symphonic's orchestral MIDI.

In addition, I made a trip into the Darkhouse studio to mixdown the existing effects cues into 15 separate audio tracks, and Andy Carlson spent some time cleaning the tracks and punching up the audio quality.

Bear with us... things are still inching forward towards a completed movie!

Sound FX Recording

2007-12-11T15:26:00.000-06:00

Not much new to report on the movie progress, as we're still working on the musical score. I did, as promised, make it in to Andy's Darkhouse Productions recording studio to do a few extra sound effects for the movie, including ripping a broaster chicken limb from limb (to simulate bones cracking,) and recording children screaming. I posted a guest blog on the subject over at the Darkhouse MySpace page, which you can find here.

DVD Package Almost Complete

2007-11-16T14:30:00.001-06:00

Well, I've resolved the issue with the chapter skip button; turns out it was a problem with Encore itself and a quick update solved it. The DVD is basically locked down. I've made a test disc to make sure all of the navigational links work correctly and think it's shaping up pretty nice. We should have a bunch of cool features for you, including a commentary track, a deleted scene (audio only - since I never did any animation for the sequence), an alternate version of the main title sequence, an alternate version of the movie made up of quick Poser test-renders, the teaser trailer (2D and 3D), the trailer (2D and 3D), trailers for Raven and Raven 2, and a never before seen trailer (2D and 3D) for Raven 3-D, which was made from test footage.

All that's left to complete the package is the soundtrack.

Speaking of which, tomorrow I am due to pay a visit to the Darkhouse Studio to generate the final couple of sound fx and begin work on sweetening the fx and vocal tracks.

Stay tuned...

As Good As It's Gonna Get & DVD Authoring Problems

2007-11-10T23:52:00.000-06:00

I've settled on an anaglyph version of the movie that's going to have to do... it works reasonably well on my Panasonic HDTV and very well on my CRT monitor. This will be the one going out on the DVD.

And, speaking of the DVD...I'm using Adobe Encore to author the disc, but despite the playback preview offered up within the Encore program itself, when played back on a set-top DVD player the disc does not match Encore's file directory. In fact, many of my programmed commands seem to be completly ignored.

For instance, I've programmed the disc so that when a user clicks the special features menu a short intro plays, and when that ends the special features menu appears. If the intro is allowed to finish, the disc does as it's supposed to and launches the special features menu. However, if the user presses the chapter skip button the disc jumps ahead to another video file on the disc. If the user keeps pressing chapter skip, he can continue through all the video files on the disc without encountering the menu at all (which is the desired result when the chapter skip button is pressed.)

I'm reading the Adobe help logs and forums to see if there's a solution to this problem...

3-D Headaches Continue

2007-11-09T16:21:00.000-06:00

I've made multiple test discs now and tried them out on multiple NTSC monitors and none of them produce satisfactory results. I've been doing my research and determined that, as far as I can gather, there is no foolproof way to get perfect anaglyphic stereo reproduction on a television monitor. Two factors that figure into this are a) your NTSC television screen, and b) limitations of MPEG 2 video encoding.

From what I've read, MPEG 2 bleeds a bit of the green & blue channels into the red channel, resulting in a red channel that is not 100% red, and therefore it is impossible to reproduce the red that is needed to be cancelled out by the left eye of the 3-D glasses.

I am having better success playing the DVDs back on my HDTV display, which makes the ghosting more tolerable but still not a complete success. I am still frustrated that I cannot replicate the effect that I get with the Windows Media-encoded version that I stream from my PC to my Xbox 360.

What's more baffling is that on the same computer monitor, I had fine results watching the DVD using Cyberlink's Power DVD player and so-so results (more pronounced ghosting) via Windows Media Player's DVD player!

This raises all sorts of issues. I have prepared at least six different versions of the movie now, and testing suggests that there will never be one that works in all situations. I do have a version that works better on a computer monitor, or one that works marginally better on a TV set - which version do I put on the DVD? On a computer monitor, the effect is noticably better. There is still some ghosting, but it's within a tolerance range that I am willing to accept. Do I make the DVD for computer viewing and put a disclaimer on the front of the anaglyph version? I notice that the Spy Kids DVD has a similar disclaimer.

The field-sequential version remains unaffected and the preferred way to experience the movie in 3-D. The question remains about how this latest problem will affect theatrical exhibitions of the movie... if a theater can project the movie off of the Windows Media file, they'll get the best result. But can most of the film festivals take digital files? Will the DVD work better if projected?

Stay tuned.

The House of Cards Begins to Fall

2007-11-04T14:45:00.000-06:00

It looks like when I said that the MPEG-2 compression did not affect the red/blue 3-D effect, I was wrong. I've had time to make a test disc and try it out on my progressive scan 16x9 TV and two other standard def NTSC television sets, and in all three cases we have massive ghosting - so much so that the anaglyph movie is almost unwatchable.

How did this happen?

My original test movie was rendered out from After Effects via the Windows Media 10 codec, and streamed to my TV via the Xbox 360 - and it looked perfect. The best red/blue 3-D I've ever seen on a television. (This version, incidentally, will be made available for download - likely via BitTorrent.)

This new version is rendered out via After Effect's MPEG-2 compressor, and it appears that it has subtlely altered the shade of red. This MPEG shade is darker than it needs to be, so the red eye of the glasses can't filter it out properly, resulting in double images.

Yesterday, I went and rendered out another MPEG 2 compressed version. For this one, I cranked the Red Gamma of the left eye channel up from 1.5 to 2.0 (a significant difference.) When I tested it on my home TV, it actually did work much better. Not quite 100% ghost free, but acceptable. The downside is that all color information is completely lost. The movie is basically purple, and the red eye version is starting to get a bit washed out.

I've sent this disc home with Andy for testing on a standard TV, so we'll see how he says it works. In the mean time, I got to thinking that since the luminance of the red needs to be brighter, what would happen if I increased the Red Gain instead of the Red Gamma? So, I've rendered out yet another version! This one resets the gamma to 1.0 but boosts the red luminance, resulting in an extremely bright red. The image retains more of the original color information, so hopefully I'm on to something that will work.

Unfortunately, I'm out of DVD-Rs at the moment.

MPEG Videos Created + Subtitles!

2007-10-29T13:06:00.000-05:00

It's been a while since I've made an entry here but work continues! Andy's been hard at work on the score to FvTWM. I've heard a couple of demos of cues so far and I'm told it will sound even better once it's given the full orchestral treatment through East West.

In the meantime, I've made the DVD-ready MPEG 2 video files for the three versions of the movie: a 2D version, 23.976 frames per second, progressive 480p 16x9; an anaglyph 3-D version, 23.976 fps, progressive 480p 16x9; and a field sequential 3-D version, 29.97 fps, interlaced 480i 16x9. I haven't been able to test the field sequential version yet but the other two are working quite well.

Recently a new 3-D DVD hit the market, a remake called Night of the Living Dead 3D. The 3-D effects are better than some videos I've seen, but the producers solution to ghosting images (where you see double images even with the glasses on) is to keep the depth in the frame pretty shallow. Frankenstein vs the Wolfman sometimes uses "super-depth" in it's images so I had to work to find another solution.

I've outlined this process in a prior blog entry but I use the Night of the Living Dead 3D disc as an example: in each sequence of that movie, when you close your blue eye and look through the red lens, everything appears extremely dark. My solution was to boost the gamma of the red eye view so that the picture through the red lens appears as bright as that seen through the blue eye. This has served to lessen the effect of ghosting and produce a more satisfying anaglyphic 3-D experience.

I'm happy to report that the MPEG compression's color matrix did not have an adverse affect on how the red and blue colors are reproduced (unlike the YouTube video compression - which I believe is Shockwave Flash.)

Also, I've been working on subtitling the movie, using Adobe Encore. It's a pretty nice setup, allowing you to type your subtitles directly onto the monitor window. These subtitles will only be available on the 2D version of the movie (they ruin the 3-D effect on the 3-D versions) and can be chosen by selecting the subtitle track once the movie has started.

The Trailer Has Landed

2007-09-03T14:32:00.000-05:00

The moment we've all been waiting for has finally arrived - the brand spankin' new trailer for Frankenstein vs the Wolfman is live! You can download high quality Windows Media versions by visiting the Trailer page of the site; watch lower quality (either 2-D or 3-D) versions via YouTube below; or you can visit Veoh.com and download versions for your iPod.

Frankenstein vs the Wolfman trailer 2-D

Frankenstein vs the Wolfman trailer 3-D

New Composer + Vacation

2007-08-23T13:48:00.000-05:00

I've had to make a hard decision recently to replace Ryan Wummel, my longtime composer, on Frankenstein vs the Wolfman. Ryan started with me on my filmmaking hobby back in 1998 by doing songs for my vampire(?) opus Gothik, and then providing the scores for both Raven movies. As we were working on Frankenstein vs the Wolfman, it became apparent that the score would have to be a more "classical" orchestral score, which ended up being at odds with Ryan's background in Trance, Techno and loop-based music. Currently, Ryan is working on ads for Nike, if you can believe it, with a production outfit based out of Chicago.

I've tapped Andrew Kalbfus for FvTWM. Andy was recommended to me by my producer & brother-in-law, Andy Carlson - and thus, will hereto be known as Other Andy. We had a pretty good initial meeting in which we discussed what the music should do, influences and generally determined where the music was going to be present in the movie. Other Andy tells me he's always wanted to do a movie score... so now he gets his chance. He promises me that the music for the trailer will be done by the end of August.

Now that everything, sans the score, is virtually in place (a few sound fx remain to be recorded), I've been spending time watching movies and playing videogames. It's almost like a vacation from the rigors of animating. I've been playing Bioshock for the Xbox 360 this week, and it's very cool - taking place in an elaborate, Art Deco underwater city (circa 1960) with some of the most realistic water effects I've ever seen.

The Science of Screaming

2007-08-07T09:01:00.000-05:00

Leeta and Milo's ADR has been recorded... Grace and Amanda came over and spent some time whimpering, breathing heavily and shrieking into a microphone. Grace had some trouble screaming for us, so it sounds like we'll be using a scream double for Leeta.

In other news, the DVD cover is pretty much finalized. We'll be printing out a stack of them soon.

Audio Commentary Recorded

2007-07-30T15:43:00.000-05:00

I sat down in front of my little PC mic yesterday and recorded an audio commentary for the Frankenstein vs the Wolfman DVD. Hopefully it'll prove insightful to those of you who actually want a copy and choose to listen to it. I've been doing a bunch DVD programming, creating DVD menus and working on the DVD cover. I've had a couple of proofs done of the cover art and am making corrections to it (mostly in terms of highlighting certain items and brightening the image overall.)

Over the weekend I was also able to lay in Chuck's Wolfman vocals to the movie and they sound pretty good. I had to do a substantial amount of EQ-ing and applying some filters to make his natural tones sound more bestial and ragged, but now the Wolfman has a personality!

We're set to record some more ADR tomorrow - Grace Carreno is coming in to do some Leeta gasps and whimpers, while Amanda Pearson is coming in to do Milo, one of the other orphan heroes.

Special Features Intros Shot

2007-07-26T11:57:00.000-05:00

This week, a colleague from work came over and shot a couple of intros for the various DVD special features. We shot the video in my basement using a Panasonic DV cam and a pro light kit. Thanks to Brent for the assist!

I took another crack at the opening title, this time using 3D Invigorator. When checking my last attempt, the parallax gap between the left and right images was too far apart so everyone that I showed it to complained of seeing double images. We'll have to see if this new version works any better.

I am set to get the audio recordings of Chuck Reeder's wolfman performance this week and will cut them into the movie over the weekend.

Making the 3-D Composite Part II

2007-07-18T11:52:00.000-05:00

So, I made an anaglyph 3-D version of the movie, described in the process here and played the thing back on my TV. Although it works quite well on a computer monitor, it doesn't work so well on the television... what I end up seeing is a substantial lack of color and double images. Looking through the blue filter of the glasses yielded a clear, single image but looking through the red lens revealed the problem: not only is the picture significantly darker through the red lens, but the double images originate there.

Thinking that this is likely due to the fact that the red channel is so dark, and therefore not reproducing at the same color as the red lens of the glasses, I went back to After Effects and raised the red gamma of the left eye from 1.0 to 1.5 and re-rendered the movie.

This version worked significantly better. The biggest draw back is that now we're pretty much dealing with a black and white movie. If I would have planned better, I would have incorporated more purples, greens and yellows as they seem to retain their color even through the 3-D glasses. All other colors are drained down to a kind of purplish netherworld. However, the 3-D works! Ah, the tradeoff. Looking at the image on the TV without the glasses, the whole thing looks reddish and the red/left color appears really bright.

Some of the effects work well (a shovel handle during the opening credits protruded well into my viewing room,) whereas I could percieve more off-the-screen action when characters were reaching towards the audience when looked at on the computer monitor.

In other news, I completed the end credit sequence last night. The movie's final run time clocks in at 19:56.

DVD menus

2007-07-17T14:25:00.000-05:00

I'm still working on the DVD features... now I've moved on to the menus. I'm repurposing animation already done for the promotional campaign and retooling it - the main menu opens with some video previously featured in the teaser trailer (only color corrected to match the hues of the film, and the Monster's coat has been replaced with what he wears in the movie), then segues into a shot of the foggy woods. The menu options come flying up from the bottom of the screen (courtesy of 3D Invigorator) while electricity snakes over the logo above. I'm using claw marks as the highlight selection.

The Special Features menu is a shot of a graveyard that was used in the discarded opening title sequence. Unfortunately, although the old title sequence was rendered in 3-D, I seem to have lost the right eye sequence so you'll only be able to see this one flat. The trailer, the teaser trailer and the Raven 3-D trailer will all be viewable in either 2-D, anaglyphic 3-D or field sequential 3-D.

I've also been giving some thought to the eventual premiere of the movie. We'll likely do it somewhere here in Rockford, but I was trying to figure out if there was a way to project it in color (polarized) 3-D. The only methods I could work out were using two projectors and somehow synching up playback of the movie on two laptops (a method fraught with timing difficulties), or rigging up some kind of beamsplitter rig. I made something similar when I was a kid that involved projecting a side by side version of the movie toward a clipboard containing two mirrors held in place by bookends, glue and a hinge. The way the rig worked was you would project an inverted, mirror image of your movie at the mirrors with one image falling on one mirror and one in the other; one mirror would be on a hinge so you could fold the on screen pictures (which fall on a silver screen 45 degrees and across the room from your projector) on top of each other. You'd have to put some kind of polarizing filters on the mirrors or on the projector lens for this to work and you'd be unable to tilt the projector to get a good angle at the screen. Needless to say, this approach is also a minefield of problems - so maybe the old red/blue anaglyph approach is the way to go.

Making the 3-D Composite

2007-07-16T09:49:00.000-05:00

I'm using After Effects to do the final 3-D mix of the movie, so for those of you who are more video editing/technically oriented, here's an explanation of how I'm doing it:

1. Rendering out right eye/left eye versions of each scene from Poser. Each shot is saved in an AVI file format with a sequential, numeric labeling system - i.e. 0101, 0102, etc. The right and left eye files have identical names but are saved in separate folders, Right and Left.

2. Editing the left eye sequence in Premiere. The project file is saved as FvTWM_Left.pprj. Then, I rename the "Left" folder as "~eft", so when I reload the project in Premiere, it asks "where is the file 0101", etc. By pointing it to the "Right" folder, and since the clips have identical names, it loads up the right eye version of the movie with all the edits to the left eye version still intact. I saved this as FvTWM_Right.pprj.

3. In After Effects, I import both projects. Then, I use the Layer>Pre-Compose feature to flatten all the clips into one layer for each eye, giving me a Right layer and a Left layer.

4. Create a new comp in After Effects which contains both layers stacked on top of each other. To the Left layer, which is on top, I apply the Set Channels filter - taking the Green channel from the Left layer and combining it with the Green and Blue channels from the Right layer. Now, in a perfect world I should be taking the Red channel from the Left layer, but since I wasn't planning ahead when I made the animation, I made certain clothing and prop items red. In the red channel, these read as bright red, but when you look through the blue lens of the 3-D glasses, it reads as black. This produces a flickering effect, known as retinal rivalry.

To compensate for this, I'm extracting the Green channel from the Left layer, which alters the color of the scene and makes the reds appear dark in through both the red and blue lenses. Unfortunately, it also saps more of the color from the movie, so the anaglyph version of the movie looks a bit purplish. Yellows and greens retain their colors ok, but every other color becomes a muted version of itself.

The HQFS (high quality field sequential) version of the movie will be a bit easier to do in this regard, as it simply means applying After Effects' 3-D glasses filter to the Left layer and selecting Interlaced. However, there's another challenge to overcome there, as the movie must run at 29.97 frames per second for the interlaced effect to work, and the movie is rendered out at 24 frames per second. I'm assuming that I'll have to find a way to compensate for problems with audio sync.

Buried Treasures

2007-07-11T15:57:00.000-05:00

Last night I went back through the archives trying to dig up some stuff to prepare for the DVD and was surprised by some of the stuff I turned up. The first item consisted of audio takes for a scene that didn't make it into the movie, where two of our heroes, Milo and Eddie, consult a pawnbroker named William Henry Pratt (Boris Karloff's birth name) in their search for silver weaponry.

I was also able to recover just about all of the test renders that I did for the entire movie. These would be low-resolution Poser AVIs that I used to check the animation before setting the computer off on a multi-hour rendering mission. I strung them all together and came up with a rough version of nearly the entire movie which includes extra dialogue, alternate camera angles, and in some cases, new shots.

But the third I had nearly completely forgotten about. Way back in the day... and this would have been mid 2004 or earlier, when I was contemplating making Raven 3 as a 3-D movie, I did some full resolution test footage to see what Raven & Poizon would look like with higher resolution and a redesign (you can see stills from some of the footage here.) It turns out that I actually created a 40 second trailer! It sports a cloak wearing Poizon and a red-eyed, bat winged Raven... Ah, the movie that could have been.

I Bet He's Hoarse Today

2007-07-10T10:23:00.000-05:00

Chuck Reeder came over to the house last night, accompanied by Darkhouse recording engineers Andy Carlson and Rob Kalbfus, and howled his way towards sore vocal cords as he performed the Wolfman's howls and grunts. If the neighbors could hear us, I'm sure there were points when he thought we were killing him. We set up a laptop on the bar with the movie playing on it and recorded Chuck on a TASCAM multi-track recorder. We've used this setup for recording some of the other voices - despite the fact that Andy has his own recording stuido (he says he wants to keep the sound of the recordings consistent.) Once I get the edited wave files back I'll be equalizing and layering in real animal sounds to make the Wolfman sound like a real beast.

Also, last night I was able to lay in Tom Zack's grunts and groans during the Frankenstein Monster's final battle.

Re-designed Website Launch & New Blog

2007-07-08T16:31:00.000-05:00

With work on the movie entering post-production, I've had some time to move into some other areas - one of which includes the relaunched Frankenstein vs the Wolfman website and some general retinkering with the Daredevil Films home site. All of the old Production Log posts have been moved over to this new home here on Blogger (welcome Blogger visitors!)

The sound FX track has been completed to the best of my ability. Andy was over yesterday to take a listen to it to gauge how much work will need to be done on it at the Darkhouse studio in the coming weeks.

One of the problems I ran into in the effects track was my small sound effects library's inability to deal with the growls, grunts and roars produced by the Wolfman. I was mixing in bear, lion, tiger, wolf and dog sounds but realized after a scene or two that I could audibly hear repeated sounds. I decided that the Wolfman is going to need a fully vocalized performance, so Charles Reeder is coming in tomorrow to record his third vocal role in the movie as the snarling beast. We've got some other ADR tracks still to go, and then it's on to mixing.

I just recieved an email from Ryan with a link to a rough version of the score on his server somewhere in cyberspace, and the file is downloading to the computer as I write this. Aside from an early sample theme that he let me hear a couple of months ago, this will be the first chance I've had to hear what he's come up with. His last message stated that he had upgraded his home studio and that he was extremely exicted about the new orchestral plugins he's gotten a hold of. I can't wait to hear it.

The trailer is still coming soon: Andy also just bought some type of orchestral sounds for the studio and spent most of his time yesterday playing with it. Other Andy will be going in to learn how it works some time this week, so hopefully you'll be seeing the final trailer soon.

With the website re-designed and the effects track in place, the next things I'll be working on are the end credits and some DVD stuff... which will likely include the multiple versions of the opening title sequence, some test renders, an audio only version of a scene that was cut from the movie, and even possibly the test footage I did for Raven 3-D.

Sound Design

2007-07-03T14:02:00.000-05:00

The sound effects track is progressing faster than I initially thought, and is nearing completion. It may take another week. It's very cool to go back and watch the movie with sound after living with it as virtually a silent movie for the past three years. We're going to try and schedule some time with the voice cast to come back in and do some ADR in the coming week or two to add grunts, groans and other incidental vocals.

The effects track is really raw, so it'll probably take quite a bit of time to actually get into the Darkhouse production studio and "sweeten" the audio and do the final mix.

PRODUCTION IS FINISHED!

2007-06-27T14:01:00.000-05:00

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.

Last Scene?

2007-06-18T14:00:00.000-05:00

It's possible that I put together the final scene of the movie yesterday. We'll have to see how it plays. If it ends the film too abruptly, I'll have to manufacture a closing shot. This final sequence is 465 frames long; because just about every character that has appeared in the movie is present, it's rendering out at about 50 frames at a time before it crashes. Since I have to render a right-eye view also, we're actually talking about 930 frames that have to be produced. The movie should clock in around 19 minutes with end credits... More later...

Planning for Post

2007-05-14T14:00:00.000-05:00

With the end of the narrative within my sights, I've been working on Frankenstein vs the Wolfman at an accelerated pace. I'm genuinely excited by the prospect of working on it again, which is something I haven't felt since I started production. The time it takes to animate and render these things is so painfully slow, it is almost like watching paint dry.
As I mentioned in my previous post, I have basically abandoned the script at this point and am generating action beats as I go. The events do line up with what was outlined on the page, so I'm keeping the recorded dialogue intact.

If I can keep up this rate of production, I could be done with the animation in about two months.

With that in mind, I've begun to start planning for post production. I am having a screening tonight with the post-production team - Andy, Mitch and Other Andy - all of whom will be contributing to the sonic landscape of the film. We'll be spotting the film for sound effect placement and trying to find out how much of the sound fx can be found in sound effects libraries and how much will have to be recorded.

Last week we recorded some ADR with Tom Zack, who plays the Frankenstein Monster, due to the fact that he's leaving us to move to Arizona soon. The recording consisted mostly of pained grunts and groans that we'll be able to lay in during the action sequences.

Once the movie is finished, I'll have my work cut out for me. I need to cut and score a trailer to show off what the film looks like in motion. I'll need to color correct the footage and fine-tune the visual end of the film, then get the multiple versions prepared. And, I'll need to get cracking on DVD menus and special features. That's one area specifically that I haven't given much attention to yet, as there really isn't a whole lot of behind the scenes footage you can provide when you're working on an animated movie on your home computer.

Score Meeting; Plus, Nips and Tucks

2007-05-04T13:59:00.000-05:00

I had a chance to meet this past weekend with Ryan Wummel, who composed the scores for both Raven and Raven 2, about the job of scoring Frankenstein vs the Wolfman. Since we've been working together on these movies since my last misbegotten live action movie, Gothik, in 1998. In the intervening years since Raven 2 (for which Ryan won two film festival awards for "Best Score"), Ryan has gone back to school for music theory and music production in hopes of improving his sonic talents. He's also invested in some new equipment which ensures that his Frankenstein vs the Wolfman score will benefit from a fully synthesized orchestral sound.

In screening the 16 minutes or so of completed footage for it's first audience, I was made aware of a couple of small problems that needed to be corrected for the story to connect all the right dots. So, I spent some time re-doing a couple of shots, rendering new shots to clarify a plot point, and was also able to create a new sequence that continues the countdown to the day the movie will be finished.

One of the things that I am dealing with is the possibility that I'll have to throw out the final three pages of the script and improvise an ending; the scripted ending is proving to be too convoluted and technically difficult to pull off. To that end I'm using the existing audio tracks recorded by the performers but making some substitutions to shots, props and scenes. The movie will still end virtually the same way, but I'm just taking a slightly alternate route to get there.
Stay tuned...

The Light at the End

2007-03-31T13:54:00.000-05:00

I have just finished rendering a sequence that takes place in a bar called The Scabbard Inn, where our diminutive heroes go to investigate a possible wolfman suspect. With this sequence in place, we're now looking at a full narrative run of 16 minutes and 22 seconds. The only thing left is the "Final Battle" sequence between Frankenstein and the Wolfman. I actually started working on this project starting animation on that sequence first way back in December of 2004, so it's kind of fitting that this will be where it wraps up.

This final battle will be more complicated than those in either of the two Raven movies, involving more characters and more action beats. One of the glaring drawbacks I see when I look back at the Raven movies is how hurried their climaxes are. Even though they took forever to work on, when played back in realtime they go by in a flash. I'm hoping that I'll be able to correct that error with Frankenstein vs the Wolfman and actually deliver something that has a little more payoff.

I am starting to think about the audio end of the movie and am trying to gather sound effect libraries together and have preliminary dialogues about the direction of the music.

Today I came across a couple of items that may interest you that were buried deep within my computer - test renders from the proposed Raven 3-D project. Before I settled on doing Frankenstein vs the Wolfman, I initially was planning to do a third Raven movie - one that would wrap up all the loose plotlines from the first two shorts. In the end, those dangling plotlines dictated the story and I ended up not having enough interest in it to see it through. And, because it was the third movie in the series, I was planning to do it in 3-D. So, get out your 3-D specs, because here are a couple of test renders that I did to see what Raven 3-D might've looked like.

Passing the Fifteen Minute Mark

2007-03-04T13:53:00.000-06:00

Today, the running time on Frankenstein vs the Wolfman in 3-D is fifteen minutes, fifteen seconds. There are two major sequences left to do that will connect the first section of the movie to the second, leading right up to the still-unfinished final battle. I can begin to see the light at the end of the tunnel. With any luck, the movie might be finished this year. I expect it's running time will be about 25 minutes.

One of the things that I've discovered in the production process is how to correct mismatched footage that is produced when a Poser camera move produces a lens distortion in one of the left or right eye views. The scene I'm working on now had one such error in a shot where the camera dollys in on the Frankenstein monster; as we push in, the right eye view was distorted so that instead of the 3-D pair of images falling side by side, they were misregistered up and down.

I came up with a solution in After Effects that involved adjusting the scale of the right image so that it would match and overlay the left. This approach left a blank space in the top and bottom of the frame which shouldn't be noticable once viewed through 3-D glasses.

There was an earlier shot I had to correct as well, when our three heroes are talking with an inquisitive policeman; in this case, I had positioned the 3-D "window" incorrectly and had to slide the images together for better positioning within the 3-D frame. This resulted in some "windowboxing" on the sides of the shot, but it happens so fast you won't even see it--unless you're looking for it now that I've told you about it!

One of the next scenes I'll be doing invovles the inkeeper Mr. Talbot. Of course, his name is another nod to The Wolf Man. Initially, there was a scene that took place in a pawnbroker's shop, run by a man named William Henry Pratt - which is Boris Karloff's birth name. That scene (at this point in time, anyway) has unfortunately been dropped.

New Screenshot Added

2007-01-21T13:53:00.000-06:00

Finally, an update! A new image from the gypsy flashback sequence has been added to the gallery. The sequence finished rendering two days ago. I spent today going in and doing some color correction within Premiere and animating & rendering a short addition to a shot, originally finished months ago, that had been bugging me.

Also, I've discovered that my plan of attack for post production has been shot to hell due to someone's short sightedness (or my lack of understanding the software) at Adobe. It turns out that Premiere Pro shipped with some nifty color correction plug ins that After Effects 7 doesn't share - meaning that after I go and color correct my footage in Premiere, once I bring the entire project into After Effects, it loses my changes. I'm testing out the possibility of rendering the whole movie out from the Premiere timeline as one gigantic AVI file prior to importing it into After Effects to apply the 3-D effect

Happy New Year!

2007-01-17T13:52:00.000-06:00

It occurred to me recently that the original teaser trailer that I mocked up for Frankenstein vs the Wolfman announced that it would be finished in 2006. Ha! My work process basically limits me to working on it on Sundays, and now that the holidays are over I'm ready to move back into production. Actually, I've been working on it for the past couple of weeks, generating approximately 15 seconds worth of viable footage. This is a milestone actually, since this officially completes the "gypsy flashback sequence", and which was the connecting tissue between two large chunks of the narrative. All of the shots in this sequence have been memory intensive as they utilize many props and characters; in order to avoid crashes I've had to turn off bump mapping completely and disable texture mapping for background figures.

Memory Problems Plague Poser

2006-12-08T13:51:00.000-06:00

I have finally finished approximately 22 seconds of footage from the gypsy flashback scene after rendering since the first week of November. Yeah. At some point I installed a Windows XP update that severely compromised Poser's ability to render images. I've been rendering the footage as PSD files, but after the update, Poser somehow ran out of memory (on my system which has 1GB of RAM) while rendering a single frame. The workaround to this problem was to render out uncompressed AVI files, which for some reason Poser is able to handle. But... but... it can only go approx 70 frames before it would crash because of a memory issue. So, I've had to split these scenes into 50-60 frame increments and come back to the PC every 8 hours or so to shut down Poser, reopen the program and the file and pick up where I left off. Tedious. Hopefully, future sequences will be less memory intensive and will render faster.

It's Been Two Months!

2006-10-31T13:51:00.000-06:00

Yep... production has halted again due to the annual holiday hiatus (I'm speaking of course, of Halloween). We had visitors from another country over for a couple of weeks in September, plus my sister's wedding, then Halloween party preparations to consider -so work on the movie has been put on hold. Things are settling back down now, so hopefully I'll be able to get working on it again before the next holiday hiatus which occurs between Thanksgiving and New Year's! But take comfort in knowing that I have not abandoned it!

It's Always Gypsies to Blame for These Sorts of Things

2006-08-23T13:49:00.000-05:00

I've started work on the Gypsy Flashback Sequence, which was one of those eye-opening moments back during the conception of FRANKENSTEIN VS THE WOLFMAN that got me fired up about doing the movie in the first place.

I don't want you to go thinking that the whole movie is a homage to the Universal Monster movies - our Frankenstein and Wolfman characters share names with their more famous forefathers, but their origins and character are much different - but I did want to acknowledge a link. I wrote a short flashback sequence where we see the future Wolfman's fateful encounter with a band of gypsies and I thought, wouldn't this be a perfect place in the movie to do a short sequence in a style as close to the Universal classics as I can? The computer has finally finished rendering out the first 8 minute shot of this scene, a nice, atmospheric angle on a small gypsy caravan camped out in the foggy woods, and it looks pretty much like what I imagined it to be - in black and white, and 3-D to boot!

It's not all I wanted (nothing ever is) due to the limits of my poor, overworked PC's computing power. The resultant file had so many highly detailed character and object files loaded that it would lock up during the render. I finally had to forego shadows, then even bump maps (thankfully, the characters are seen from a distance)! To compensate for the lack of detail, I used only one global light dialed way down low to simulate moonlight. It doesn't look half bad to my eye - not feature quality, by any means, but decent enough for my purposes here. I don't have a screen capture for you yet, but will post something from this sequence soon.

Voice Recordings Complete; Revisions Made to Footage

2006-08-16T13:48:00.000-05:00

The final voice recordings have been delivered, so now we have the dialogue for the full movie in house. I've been taking the last couple of weeks to go back and fix some niggling visual errors that have been bugging me in the initial batch of footage.

The scene in question takes place out in front of an inn at dusk, with the inn's windows lit from inside by lamplight. In the original footage, it appears as if each pane of the window had been painted bright yellow. The fixed footage makes it appear as if the entire window is lit from within by a warm glow. In order to acheive the effect I wasted time with another screwup; I painted all the windows green in order to greenscreen them out and lay the glow effect behind them; this produced very ragged jags around the figures that passed in front of the windows and had to be re-done. The second attempt involved removing the back of the model so I would have a nice alpha channel to work with. Needless to say, that method produced the best result.

I'm anxious to get back to work on animation but work and other domestic issues are taking center stage; in September, my sister is getting married. In addition, a number of family members are flying in from over seas, so it's sure to be a month full of activity.

Once I do get back to FRANKENSTEIN VS THE WOLFMAN, I'm thinking of working on a scene from late in the movie that I've been looking forward to since I conceived of the project - a black and white origin-of-the-Wolfman sequence that's been planned to be done in black and white.

Spot Checking for Audio Effects

2006-07-14T13:47:00.000-05:00

Movie status: a couple of weeks ago we sat down and went through the finished segment of the movie with a fine toothed comb and made a comprehensive list of what audio effects will be needed for the movie. I made a list a couple of pages long, so this should be an interesting process. Andy and Rob want to record all new foley and effects work instead of relying on library sounds. We're due to begin that in a couple of weeks.

In other 3-D movie news, we skipped out on the Superman Returns Imax 3D Experience due to the fact that only 20 minutes of the movie were rendered in 3-D; next week, however, signals the release of Monster House in "Real-D" digital 3-D, so we'll be making a trip into Schaumberg to see that in a digital cinema. Also, Night of the Living Dead 3D will be getting a nationwide release this fall to 1500 theaters - which means it may actually play in here in Rockford!

And, Frankenstein vs the Wolfman got a mention in this month's issue of 3rd Dimension Graphics, an online Poser eZine.

3-D With After Effects

2006-06-07T13:46:00.000-05:00

It's been hectic around the household lately as I've started a new position at work, one that has finally moved me from 10 years of graveyard shift 180 degrees to a normal daytime office schedule. I'm still adjusting to the change and am not getting the best night's sleep.
As such, I'm on pause with the movie after having completed the first act, and have been making demo discs as a rehersal for the final post-production phase.

When I started the project, I was planning on using a freeware program called Stereo Movie Maker to convert the left/right movies into final anaglyph and interlaced 3-D; however, I discovered last weekend that not only does Stereo Movie Maker use the old Video for Windows API, which imposes a 2GB limitation on files, but it also has a habit of converting my footage rendered at 1.2 pixel resolution (for 16:9 widescreen) to .09 pixel resolution DV. I end up with a 720x480 image that is taller than wider, and everyone is stretched out.

I have also encountered a bug in Premiere that renders black for about half of the movie when using the Huffyuv 2.1.1 codec (upgrading to 2.2.0 only made matters worse). I was forced to use a frameserver to output the left and right movies from the Premiere timeline, and then bring those files into After Effects and apply the "3-D Glasses" filter, thus compressing the movie 3x - once on the raw Poser data>editable clips, once from Premiere>conformed movie and then again from After Effects>DVD/Windows Media/etc.
However, with the help of one of the production guys at work I found an even better method: importing the Premiere project directly into After Effects, selecting all the layers and using the Pre-Compose command to flatten them into a virtual movie clip, then doing the same with the right eye version. After I bring them both into the After Effects timeline, I can apply the 3-D conversion without re-compressing the video. Now, we go from raw Poser data>Huffyuv clips>final output (DVD).

I've also discovered that the 3-D Glasses plugin for After Effects is virutally useless - no matter how much I tweak it, I cannot get the colors to the right phase of red and blue to be filtered out by the anaglyph glasses, either on the PC or on a TV screen. I wanted to use Stereo Movie Maker initially because it uses a special algorthm to produce a "half color" anaglyph which reduces retinal rivalry caused when a character wears red or blue clothing. Retinal rivalry refers to the phenomena that occurs when the red lens of the glasses makes red objects appear "white" and the blue lens sees them as "black". The half color method converts the left eye to grayscale and then siphons off the red channel, allowing red colored objects to be perceived as grey.

Without Stereo Movie Maker, I'm forced to use another After Effects plugin called Set Channels, which allows you to use the red channel from the left eye and superimpose it with the green and blue channels (creating a cyan channel) of the right. By using telling the plugin to use the green or blue channel from the left eye to extract the red from, instead of the actual red channel, it produce something closer to the half color anaglyph. The result is much easier on the eyes and works best on a PC monitor, and relatively well on a television set.
And, not satisfied with the opening title sequence yet again, I created a new version in which the main title actually shoots out at you. It's more impressive than the previous design, in which the titles started out a bit off the screen and slowly zoomed out. These new ones start right at the 2-D plane of the movie screen and zip out at you in about half a second. It's much more dramatic.

Halfway Point?

2006-05-31T13:45:00.000-05:00

Added the Poster (credits not final) and some wallpapers to the active Poster page of the site for all of you FRANKENSTEIN VS THE WOLFMAN enthusiasts who'd like to have the boys staring back at you from your computer screen.

I've just completed that pesky sequence of shots that links up two batches of completed footage, marking the completion of about 7 1/2 minutes worth of narrative on FRANKENSTEIN VS THE WOLFMAN. The spooky thing about watching it back is just how fast the story moves. In my head, I guess I envisioned it having a slower pace. Instead, I've made FRANKENSTEIN VS THE WOLFMAN: THE ACTION MOVIE. It's pretty much BANG right out of the gate, in a race towards the finish line.

There are about a total of 12 minutes of finished sequences. These finished 8 minutes constitute about 10 pages of the script, which is 27 pages in total. I'm still going to bet the movie will come in at 20 minutes in length when it's done.

Adobe Premiere is rendering out the Left Eye view right now for distribution to my partners in crime. In the meantime, check out this site I discovered for an open source CG movie - the program used to create it and all the project files are available free. Visit Elephant's Dream.

Final Voice Recordings Completed

2006-05-18T13:44:00.000-05:00

This past Monday we went into the new Darkhouse Productions studio (visit Darkhouseonline.com) and recorded the final three vocal performances for the movie. Darkhouse is a company co-founded by our producer, Andy Carlson, which specializes in audio recording, mixing and mastering for bands and vocal talent.

In other news, Lipsync's Mimic is becoming more of a curse than a blessing. It's voice recognition ability is fairly simple and rarely gets the lip movements to match the spoken word. For this latest scene I ended up becoming so frustrated with it that I went back to the old Raven / Raven 2 way of manually doing the lip sync using Poser's phoneme library. Time consuming, yes... but for this instance it produced more accurate results.

Full Speed Ahead

2006-05-08T13:43:00.000-05:00

Despite the lack of updates to the Production Journal, animation on the movie is progressing at a good clip. There are two short sequences left to do that will act as a bridge between two lengthy sections of the film; once they are completed I will have a uninterrupted seven minutes that I can farm out to my music and sound guys for their analysis. It's exciting to see the movie's narrative start to emerge.

Co-producer/post audio supervisor/casting director Andy has scheduled a recording session for the final three voice parts this Thursday. Once I've got them, I'm anxious to begin work on a flashback sequence that I intend to model on the aesthetic of the Universal films.

More as it happens...

Restructuring the Workflow

2006-04-05T13:42:00.000-05:00

Still working on the aforementioned animation sequence; its looking pretty good. There's a special effect involved now, a lit torch weilded by the Monster. I'm using Panopticum Fire in After Effects and tackling it by producing the shots in layers.

The couple of days ago I decided that the storage space issue needed to be resolved before things went too much farther. I've been producing by taking the PSD frame files from Poser and converting them into uncompressed AVIs. These resultant files are huge, and add to that the fact that I'm producing four versions of the movie (left eye, right eye, anaglyph, interlaced). I am working with an 80GB storage drive and the space available was no longer efficient.

So, I did some investigation and decided to recompress the footage with a lossless video codec - in this case Huffyuv. In the process, I took a look at the completed footage and did some more tweaking. I've never been happy with the look of the opening scene of the film, as it looks very Poser-ish. It takes place during broad daylight and there's no room for any mood lighting. Everything is very bright and sterile.

But not anymore. I went back and color corrected the hell out of not only the opening scene, but also a couple of other sequences later in the film, brining them more in line with the lighting schemes present in surrounding scenes.

Now that I have the left and right eye video files at a more manageable level, I've been re-evaluating the post-production 3D process as well. My original idea was to produce four different versions of each shot, but give them all the same name and store them in seperate folders. I would edit the left eye version in Premiere Pro, then export the finished movie directly to DVD compliant MPEG 2. Following that, I would load the anaglyph version - since the clips bear the same name, all the edits would be kept intact - and render that out, and so on.

After doing some tests with some After Effects plugins (including one made just for this purpose, called 3D Glasses), my new strategy is to have only two versions of the movie on my HD at any given time, the right and left eye versions. Once the edit is finished, I'll create full Huffyuv encoded right & left streams and combine them in After Effects. From there I can produce both anaglyph and interlaced composite MPEG 2 files for DVD distribution.
I'm also leaning towards Windows Media 9 for all video downloads and trailers that will eventually be available from this site.

The biggest downside I've seen this week is my inability to get an anaglyph version of the movie that will work well on NTSC television sets. All test versions produced work extremely well on a computer monitor, but end up producing a substantial amount of ghosting when played back on a TV. Hopefully, the anaglyph will test well on a front projection system. But right now it seems like the optimal way to see the movie in 3D on your TV is via the field sequential shutterglass version, and on your computer via the anaglyph version.

I'm Not Dead

2006-03-22T13:41:00.000-06:00

Yep, lo and behold, I am still alive. I took a break for the December holidays and couldn't work myself up to come back to the painstaking process of animation. But now, at long last, I hope to make a return to the project.

I wish I could report more, but truth is I'm still working on that same chase sequence. Our heroine, Leeta, has been cornered in a sinkhole by the Wolfman and is about to meet the Frankenstein Monster and his Golden Retreiver, Yip. Action scenes, as I'm sure I've stated before, are my bete noir. They require multiple setups, each only seconds long, and take forever. I'm much more comfortable laying out lengthy dialogue sequences, where the focus is mostly on camera placement and character staging.

Andy has been working 'round the clock building a storefront recording studio, the first tentpole in the Darkhouse Productions umbrella. As such, he's been unable to get time to edit down the remaining character voice tracks. Unfortunately, two supporting characters who appear in numerous scenes are included in that batch... which forces me to work on the action sequences.

Thankfully, along with Spring comes the start of festival submission season - and although I have nothing ready for prime-time this year, I need to get cracking on this sucker in order to have something ready for next year!

Stay tuned ...

Missed Anniversary

2005-12-06T13:40:00.000-06:00

Well, I was looking back on this log and discovered that I had missed the one year anniversary of the start of production, which would have been December 4th. I wish I could report more progress in that time, but I can't say that I've been working non-stop for the entire period either.

The timeline on the movie now stands at 9min 11sec of completed footage, and I'm still expecting it to clock in around 20-25 min in length when completed. I'm still working on the first chase sequence in the film, the one that introduces us to the Wolfman. There was a moment that called for a splash of water, and I am still not comfortable around post production particle effects (and I have no idea how to pull them off within Poser). Instead, I opted to use a bunch of minature 3D balls, made translucent and shiny, to replicate the effect. It's not great, but it works.

In 3-D movie news, there's a remake of Night of the Living Dead in 3-D on the horizon. You can visit the website here at nightofthelivingdead3d.com, where they've posted a 3-D photo gallery you can view with your red/blue 3-D glasses. As the project was filmed using a system developed by Dimension 3, the red lens of the glasses has to be over the right eye in order for the effect to work.

Universal Pictures Homage

2005-11-27T13:38:00.000-06:00

Hope all of you U.S. visitors had a Happy Thanksgiving. I indulged in so many left-over Thanksgiving dinners over the past couple of days I fear I will never be able to eat again.
I've only recently been able to see the complete series of Universal Frankenstein movies. I had only really seen the original and the Bride of Frankenstein. Last year I picked up the Frankenstein Legacy Collection DVD set and finally sat down to watch all of them. They kind of go to seed from Ghost of Frankenstein on, but Son of Frankenstein, with it's great Expressionist sets and long shadows, is visually a neat experience.

One of the things I love about those movies (and this applies to the Wolf Man movies as well) is the use of gargantuan indoor stages to create outdoor environments. To see it produces a surreal effect, as if the movies take place in some kind of Gothic fantasy land and not necessarily our reality. I used to think this was done on purpose by the filmmakers, but I recently came across an interview with James Whale, in which he proclaimed a realistic interpretation of the story, and that it took place in the modern (1931) world!

Intentional or not, the effect is something that I was hoping to design into Frankenstein vs the Wolfman as a bit of homage to those classic films. Again, the movie I'm making is not a sequel or in any way related to the Universal films (the characters of the Frankenstein Monster and The Wolfman are quite different than those established by Boris Karloff and Lon Chaney, Jr), but I thought it would be nice to acknowledge the inspiration.

I've just completed a couple of quick shots that mirror a moment in Bride of Frankenstein - Leeta, being chased by the Wolfman, runs through an artificial forest of tree trunks, with a large cyclorama of a cloudy sky serving as the backdrop - just like Karloff all those years ago.

Returning to Work

2005-11-14T13:36:00.000-06:00

Ok, I'm lying. I haven't returned to work... but I plan to return to work.

I haven't done anything on the movie for the past 3 months. I consider this time a vacation - some time away to get some perspective on how things are going. I've rewatched the existing footage multiple times in that period, and screened it for friends. I expected to be happier with the results than I have been, and I've been trying to get a lock on the problem.
My biggest complaint lies in the visual look of the film. It's very bland. Part of this is due to the constraints of working with 3D. You are restricted in how much you move the camera, and especially on how you angle the camera. Tilt shots are difficult, if not impossible, because they throw off the vertical registration of the stereo image.

The second hurdle is the lighting, again dictated by the 3D process. I'm trying to design the movie towards whichever format the most people are going to see it in. We know that the field sequential 3D version is probably going to be seen by the smallest group, so that leaves either the red/blue anaglyph 3D version or the 2D version as the one which will get the most exposure. If most people's experience with the 3D version will be anaglyph, then I find I have to over-light my scenes in order for everything to show up in detail all the way back into the frame.

By over-lighting everything, I'm losing the moody, shadowy look I had on RAVEN 2. Even the night scenes here are brightly lit.

There's also an issue with the speed of the action. When animating, I find it difficult to accurately judge how the speed of something will look when the clip is finished. I've been spending some time going through the assembly edit doing some fine cutting, and have changed the speed of some slow action in the fight scenes to make things a bit more natural and exciting. However, since we're eventually going to be dealing with an interlaced version of the film, I'm concerned that those clips that have been sped up will contain flickering artifacts in the field sequential version.

So, I'm warming myself up for a return to production (hopefully by this weekend) by designing a new main title sequence. The old one was kind of dull, so this new one takes the basic concept and spices it up a bit.

I also took the opportunity to back up a bunch of the raw video files that were sitting on my crowded hard drive, in order to free up more production space. I'm filling a small stack of DVD-Rs with the stuff.

More as it happens...

Egads!

2005-08-08T13:35:00.000-05:00

For the past three weeks, I've been slaving over a 30 second sequence in which the Monster leads the little girl Leeta through his graveyard home. The full sequence consists of three shots; due to errors in the right eye (I miscalcuated the axis of seperation, making one image higher than the other, and not side by side as necessary), I've had to go back and re-render the whole thing.

But now - finally - it's in the can. You can see it here (the high poly gravestones are the culprits for the long render times).

Also, we recorded the voice of Milo, the third of our trio of children, this week.

En Fuego

2005-07-18T13:33:00.000-05:00

Added two more finished frames to the Gallery section. Have spent this last month doing a lot of overtime, but still managed to get quite a bit done on the movie. There is now close to 7 minutes worth of footage completed.

The current scene I'm working on takes place in the Frankenstein Monster's lair - a cemetery. It took a couple of days to build the cemetery itself, painstakingly positioning each of the headstones individually. There's a special effect involved in this scene which requires some special planning in the rendering process. The Monster is carrying a lit torch, and in order to create this effect, I am using an After Effects plugin from Panopticum, called Fire. By supplying an alpha image of the object you want to burn (i.e. the head of the torch), the plugin creates a fairly good flame simulation.

However, since the torch passes behind a number of objects, each shot involving the torch has become a composite shot. The background elements, including the Monster and the other figures are rendered seperately from the foreground objects (gates, trees, etc). The flame plugin is applied to the top of the torch (also rendered seperately), and then sandwiched in between the foreground and background layers. The still I've uploaded to the gallery shows the lit torch, but in the full scene, the gates start off closed in the foreground.

I also wanted a nice, horror movie graveyard fog for the scene. Initially, I tried a fog object I found on the internet which used multiple foggy planes all ganged together to create a sense of depth; this proved too time consuming to be practical (I used it in the first scene of the movie, however - that shot of the Monster emerging from the mist demonstrates the effect).
For the graveyard, I opted to go the cheaper, faster route - simply applying a photo of Photoshop-generated clouds to a flat plane hovering above the ground, partially transparent. While this works ok (see the graveyard image for details), I'm trying something else in future shots. Currently, I'm using a Wave Plane (a water simulation that can morph and ripple) with the clouds photo applied. This way, the fog actually rolls and boils.

Lipsynching

2005-06-18T13:32:00.000-05:00

On the last two RAVEN movies, synching the character's lips to the recorded words was a labor intensive, painstaking chore. For FRANKENSTEIN VS THE WOLFMAN, I'm using an impressive Poser add on, called Mimic. Mimic can be fed a recorded line of dialogue, and automatically interprets the sound file and generates lip movement. As an added bonus, it also generates facial expressions! This has created much more expressive characters than I've had in the previous two movies, and has greatly reduced the amount of time required to set up individual scenes.

I'm working on the first indoor sequence in the movie, which takes place in a sewer. The soon-to-be Wolfman is spilling his origin story to a captive, soon-to-be meal. This sequence will be done in two parts; sundown and moonlight, separated by a flashback scene. The moonlight part of the sequence will involve the central Wolfman transformation, so I'm amped to start working on that - possibly as soon as tomorrow.

Finally Added the Characters Page to the Site

2005-06-11T13:31:00.000-05:00

Yep - by clicking on over to the brand new character's page here you can check out the who's who of characters from the movie, and the people who play them. It's not a complete list, as more characters have yet to be recorded and modeled, but we're underway.

I've been following my own advice - last weekend I animated about 30 seconds worth of stuff, and the computer has spent the bulk of the week rendering it out. It's not done yet, but I hope to get around to working on a new scene this Sunday. I have finally finished off the first sequence of the movie, which is also the first full beginning-to-end completed scene. Yaaay! Only 34 more to go!

How to Make 3-D Movies With Poser

2005-06-03T13:30:00.000-05:00

I'm really getting derelict in my duties of updating this webspace. The job situation mentioned in my last post has been rectified (I survived the cuts, and am keeping my employment), but my hours have changed. This has cut down on the amount of time a day I can spend working on the movie. My new strategy is to animate as much stuff as I can on weekends when I have free time, and then let the computer do the work during the week. I am one shot away from having the first complete sequence finished for the movie.

Now, the question has become - how do you make a 3-D movie using Poser? The whole concept here is to photograph your subject from two perspectives, separated by the distance between your eyes (approx 2 1/2 inches). To do this, I put a reference object in the scene (namely a simple ball) and tell the camera to always Point At it. Where the ball is positioned will be the screen plane of the shot - anything coming between the ball and the camera will appear to come out of the screen, anything that falls behind it will appear to receed into the screen. The ball is hidden in the final render by simply turning it off. The final render of this shot becomes the Left Eye view. Then, I rotate the camera on the Y axis 2 degrees to the right, and re-render the scene. This is the Right Eye view.

This technique works best when the camera is facing the object straight ahead. When the camera is tilted to look up or down at an object, the Y axis becomes useless, and I have to manually track the camera to approximate the perspective shift. This has resulted in a couple of errors so far, which has resulted in too much parallax (the seperation between the final images when put together in 3-D). Too much parallax, or worse, a misregistered image (when the Right Eye image is slightly higher or lower than the Left Eye) can cause some serious eyestrain in the viewer. So, some of these shots had to be fixed by adjusting the Right Eye image later in post processing. There are two shots so far in this first sequence that will have slight black bars on the side of the frame, because I had to slide the images together to correct a problem with depth (objects that were supposed to be at the screen plane were too far in front of it).

The two final images, if they were rendered without problems, are combined in a program called Stereo Movie Maker to make both an anaglyph and field sequential version of the shot.

Voice Recording

2005-04-27T13:16:00.000-05:00

It's been busy around here. There's a bit of a transition going on at my job (which could leave me out of one), so that's been on my mind lately. We rounded up a new group of voices and recorded them last week; we're now left with one major role to cast, and one or two supporting roles. Here's the cast list to date: Grace Carreno, Tom Zack, Charles Reeder, Meghan Campbell, Andrew Carlson, and Elaine Clarke. One of these days I'll actually get around to posting the cast photos!

I went and designed much of the main title sequence after having an inspiration one night; I actually started trying to ape some of the typeface and graphics of the old 1930's movie trailers, but settled on something that looks like a 3-D version of something you'd see on late night Chiller Theater. The depth works great, and I'm happy.

I'm currently working on that opening sequence - another shot that has to be split into multiple layers to render without overloading the computer. This is taking longer than anticipated, but at least we're moving forward.

Steady As She Goes

2005-04-12T13:15:00.000-05:00

Hit a bit of a setback, as the 20 second shot I was talking about in my last post had to be scrapped after a week's worth of work. It turns out I didn't calculate the axis of depth correctly for the 3D and both right and left eye views had to be trashed. This after rendering out six layers of elements per eye! The shot is now complete, and correctly registered, but talk about trying a man's faith.

I have moved on to other shots in the sequence, but progress is slow. I've abandoned the idea of animating everything and then coming back to render it later, in favor of setting up the animation and then rendering out the dual eye versions. This takes between 2-3 days per shot, and maybe more time will be required later, as the scenes become more complex. I'm doing this to check the final 3D version to make sure everything is correctly registered.

Going Forward...

2005-03-23T13:14:00.000-06:00

I have been able to achieve an acceptable level of production from Poser, so I guess that means we're back in business. I've also had to re-evaluate a couple of positions within the last week.

First, since Poser absolutely refuses to produce the opening shot of the movie, I've had to chop it into layers to get it done. Basically I'm doing it in passes - on this pass, we render only the ground; on the next, the kids walking; on the following, the trees, etc. The shot in question is an overhead tracking shot that follows the three children from our story to a grisly scene in the woods. It will consist of at least five seperate layers. Once each layer is rendered, I'll composite them together in After Effects. I did this sort of thing a lot with the final sequences of RAVEN 2.

At this point, the one minute sequence which I animated back in January - and have been rendering out ever since - is done. I'm using this as my test sequence, and have prepared a DVD with the three versions of it for study. Although my wife says that my character animation has improved since the RAVEN days, the overall look of the footage is taking some getting used to. The desaturated color scheme is more severe than it appeared on my PC monitor. In order to accomodate the 3D, I overlit everything - and on TV it looks almost too bright (especially since the scene in question takes place by moonlight).

Due to the nature of interlaced TV fields, the field sequential 3D version displays more noticable jagged lines on objects than I was anticipating. The anaglyph version requires significant tweaking of the TV's color settings to achieve a tolerable effect (it does work, but the depth effects are not as pronounced as the field sequential version, and ghosting is a fact of life). Maybe this could be remedied by including a couple of setup screens on the eventual DVD.

And, the streaking title sequence will probably not make it to the final film. The style is just not in keeping with the tone of the movie. Maybe I can use it in the trailer...

I keep looking at the thin script sitting on my desk and wondering why I wanted to make this movie so complicated. It's scope, in both the number of principal characters and its locations, are much more ambitious than the two RAVEN films. At this point, nearly four months after starting the project, it feels like I'm standing at the base of a mountain, looking up at the summit - and it's beginning to dawn on me just how much work is going to be required to pull this off. I'm toying with the idea of taking another pass at the script and paring it down, striking most of the peripheral characters and making it more of a three character piece: the little girl Leeta, the Frankenstein Monster, and the Wolfman.

We'll see what happens. The computer's time for this week, and maybe some of next week, will be taken up with rendering out right and left pairs of each layer of this first shot. More as it happens...

Production in Jeopardy

2005-03-20T13:13:00.000-06:00

It has now been three months since any real animation work has been done on "Frankenstein vs the Wolfman". And now we've hit a snag that may cause the whole project to collapse.
I upgraded my computer to an AMD 64-bit 3000+ processor and brought the system RAM up to 1GB. You would think with the added power, things would work smoothly.
You would be wrong.

Poser is a tempermental program. Although it supports animation, it's really designed for making still images. I've come to this realization because for the past 2 weeks, I've been trying to get it to render out more than 40 frames at a time without crashing with "Out of Memory" errors. This is despite the fact that it's only using a fraction of the total memory on my machine (both the physical and the virtual memory combined). Forty frames is just a hair under 2 seconds worth of animation, and it would take a lifetime to complete this movie at that speed.

Funny, but with 512MB on my previous machine, I could get Poser to output between 100-140 frames before giving up the ghost. Was it too much to expect that additional RAM would allow me to render more, and not less? The upswing is that it renders faster, but it hardly seems an even trade.

I'm not defeated yet. There are a couple of ideas I have for tweaking some of the system settings, hopefully to coax the program into better behavior. But, if I can't get results better than 40 some frames before a crash, then I'll be shutting down the movie.

Stay tuned...

Casting Underway

2005-03-12T13:12:00.000-06:00

Last week was a pretty productive week. Andy arranged to have about half of the voice talent come in to the studio and perform their lines; once casting & recording are complete, I'll post cast names and character photos to the Characters page. We've only have 2 leads and a few secondary characters yet to fill. This gives me enough material to begin animating characters.

Unfortunately, this week has been slowed to a stand-still. I've been trying to work on some animation, but my PC resisted. The current file that I'm working on takes up 726MB of system memory, draining the system resources and slowing the computer to a crawl.

So, as seems to happen each time I make a movie, we had to upgrade the computer. The new beast chugs along quite nicely, and is rendering a test frame from the troublesome scene as I write this.

Main Title Animation

2005-02-24T13:10:00.000-06:00

What makes a memorable 3D title sequence? I've been looking at some of the title sequences created for 3D movies of the past in search of inspiration. In the 1950's, the titles didn't actually shoot at you - instead, they appeared as static three dimensional block lettering, hanging just infront of the screen.

During the 80's 3D wave, a company called Celestial Mechanix dreamed up the memorable 3D title sequences that streak toward the camera in JAWS 3-D, FRIDAY THE 13th PART 3, METALSTORM and THE MAN WHO WASN'T THERE. I was reading an interview with them in an old Cinefantastique magazine that revealed their method of composition was to start the title at the screen instead of (dimensionally) behind it, and then to have it zoom towards the audience, with the streaks going back to the screen plane as a reference. Apparently, without that reference, your eye has trouble determining just how far off the screen the titles appear.

I have also examined the titles to SPACEHUNTER, (done by R/Greenberg associates, most famous for the SUPERMAN titles and the inviso-Predator effect), AMITYVILLE 3-D, and TREASURE OF THE FOUR CROWNS, most of which start behind the screen before zooming toward the audience. Only SPACEHUNTER's title graphic makes use of the streaks, and in direct comparison, Celestial Mechanix's philosophy seems to be the simplest and most direct, producing the best results. (As a comparison with modern 3D titles - Robert Rodriguez's SPY KIDS 3-D title graphic starts behind the screen and streaks up to but not past it.)

After searching around (with no luck) for an After Effects plug-in that would create the streaking title sequence, I decided the best way to go about it would be to just create 3D object text in Bryce and animate the title graphic extending toward the camera on the Z axis, producing a long streak. The background of the sequence is a CGI cloud shot that I generated in Photoshop and After Effects, and composited in position of depth a few inches (or feet, depending of the size of your display) behind the screen. The inital credits - "Daredevil Films presents", etc - actually appear on the screen plane, but seem to hang in 3D space due to the fact that the clouds appear so far behind them. Then, the composited title logo materializes and shoots out toward you, and the dimensional effect is pretty dramatic.
The sequence runs about 20 seconds in total. It may not be the most original thing in the world, but hopefully it serves as a homage to those great 3D title sequences of the 1980's.

New Entry and Minor Site Update

2005-02-16T13:09:00.000-06:00

Posted field-sequential 3D versions of the two gallery photos for those of you with LCD shutter glasses for your PC (again, if you're into 3D TV, field-sequential systems are the way to go- Razor3D has a single pair (wired) for $39.95).

I just discovered the first legitimate, feature length field-sequential 3D DVD is now available - it's Full Moon's THE CREEPS, which I caught theatrically in a one-night only 3D showing a couple of years back. The movie itself is the same kind of B-movie stuff Full Moon has been cranking out for years (they're the compnay that brought you the Puppetmaster & Demonic Toys movies), but the picture quality is better than the bootleg features available on eBay. Hopefully, if this disc sells well, it may convince other studios to release field sequential versions of their library titles.

We are currently recording voices for Frankenstein vs the Wolfman; as of this writing we've got one part in the can, with others scheduled to be recorded in the following weeks. I haven't really been doing any new animation while I wait for the voice work, but our home PCs are hard at work cranking out final renders for the completed scenes.

Also, I've done a test with Lipsinc's Mimic software, which is a program that analyzes sound files & automatically generates Poser lip and expression data: I fed the Frankenstein Monster a line and have seen him talk for the first time. The surprise discovery was how much life the program gave to the facial features while the character talks - much more than just simply matching lip movements to words. Very cool.

Ok, Here's the Plan

2005-01-26T13:08:00.000-06:00

While working on some new shots, I've been rendering out the right eye version of the first couple of shots that were produced; I now have my first seconds of final 3D video. The 3D in motion works as well as my test frames suggested. I did make a sizeable goof in one 75 frame shot (about 3 seconds worth), which now needs to be re-rendered for both left and right eyes to correct the perspective problem.

Anyway, the plan... I'm trying to figure out how this thing is going to look in its final DVD incarnation, so planning has to be undertaken at this stage to ensure the best quality result. I'm producing all the images at 852x480, then importing the resultant right and left eye versions into a freeware program called Stereo Movie Maker. The program creates 3 AVI files for each shot - a 2D version (made from the left eye video file), an anaglyph 3D version, and an interlaced 3D version. This will probably cause me storage headaches down the road, as about 15 seconds worth of footage equals about a 400MB uncompressed AVI, per version.
Then, I take the 2D version into Adobe Premiere and edit it. The goal is to go straight from the Premiere timeline to a DVD-ready MPEG2 file without any intermediary steps, which would cause compression loss. To acheive this (since I'm using Premiere 6), I'm evaluating a program from Videotools called Premiere Video Server, which allows you to use an encoder, such as TMPGEnc, to produce a final video stream directly from Premiere. I did a test using Cinema Craft's MPEG Encoder, but was unsatisfied with the results, and have opted for the freeware TMPGEnc for the quality of its video output.

The 852x480 16x9 image is smashed into a 720x480 anamorphic frame, which is then decoded back to a 16x9 image by your DVD player. I haven't burned a test file for playback yet, but looking at it on a computer monitor displays no edge problems associated with most video scaling operations.

Once I have the 2D version finished, I can then have Premiere replace all the 2D clips with their 3D counterparts, while retaining all my edit decisions. The encoding process can then be repeated for each subsequent version of the movie.

So, there you have it. The initial tests of this process have gone well, so we're off to the races. For those of you interested in current stats, there is 1:14 of finished animation; 39 seconds of that is final, rendered 2D animation; and 17 seconds of that exists in 3D.

Website Update

2005-01-22T13:07:00.000-06:00

Back to work on movie. Taking a breather here to do some website reprogramming. Upgraded the Synopsis & Trailer pages, and added a working Photo Gallery. Posted two finished movie stilsl in both 2D and 3D.

Reworked the poster, which uses virtually the same artwork as seen on the main page of this site. Since the robe the Monster is pictured wearing broke repeatedly when I was trying to pose it, its been changed to Daz's Morphing Trenchcoat for Michael, which looks and works a lot better. Hopefully, you'll be seeing it soon...

First Slowdown

2005-01-20T13:07:00.000-06:00

I've been procrastinating about getting back to work on this sucker. For the past week, I keep circling the computer. It dares me to sit down at it and do some work. I had been working on a sequence that's come to be known as Scene #29, which is the opening of the final battle sequence. After completion a chain-of-events, I'm stuck now dreaming up how to handle the next section of the scene. I have in mind what needs to happen, but working on the same set, with the same characters lends it a feeling of deja vu.

I've come to realize that to keep my interest high on a project, there needs to be something new interjected into it at regular intervals. That can be as simple as the introduction of a new character, or something more complex, such as a change of scenery. In all the movies I've done so far, the fight scenes are the most challenging because they have to be done in short cuts and multiple setups, all featuring wild motions. For those of you who saw the terrible climactic fights in the two RAVEN movies, rest assured that the footage here is looking much improved. There's a better sense of fluid movement and physics, which hopefully will serve to make it a little more realistic and exciting.

Andy tells me that the basement recording studio is coming along. Prior to this, he, and his cohort Rob, had a mobil setup that allowed them to bring facilities to the talent. Now, with dedicated space available, they hope to make something more permanent. Once the equipment is all wired in, we can begin recording the actors.

I've been generating some headshots of the movie's characters, both in 2D and 3D, for eventual posting on the Characters page. I'm still holding out to see if we can get photos of the actors playing the parts to post along side them.

Happy New Year

2005-01-12T13:06:00.000-06:00

The holidays broke my forward momentum on the project, and I'm still trying to get back on track. I'm using my PC to do the animation, and my wife's computer to render it out. Unfortunately, the scene I'm rendering is so memory intensive that it keeps clogging up the system around frame 195 or so (about 3 days worth of work), and has to be restarted. I have set it to render out only to frame 190, after which I will render out the remainder of the 278 frames as a seperate file.

At some point here I have to do an encoding test to see what this will look like on DVD. I'm rendering the frames out at 852x480 widescreen, but DVD only accepts 720x480. The idea being that the widescreen aspect can be squeezed anamorphically into the DVD compliant frame size. We'll see if that holds water after I have a minute or so of completed footage to test it.

We still haven't done any recording. Hopefully, that will come together soon. I will post more artwork and the script to the website once the bulk of the voice recording is in the can.

Why 3-D?

2004-12-27T13:04:00.000-06:00

I have been obsessed with 3-D since childhood. Be it movies, comic books, ViewMasters, you name it. As a kid, with colored pencils, I would even make my own anaglyph perspective drawings. I actually missed the 3-D movie revival in 1982-83, and didn't see my first theatrical 3-D movie until the (now hard to find) sci-fi animated cartoon, STARCHASER: THE LEGEND OF ORIN, in 1985. That was the same year that a late night horror movie host sent us to the neighborhood 7-11 to get glasses for the special showing of the low-budget Canadian horror film, THE MASK (I still have them!). I tried to track down everything I could find that was 3-D related, including buying a Super 8mm camera attachment from Spondon Film in England, which allowed you to make anaglyph movies in-camera.

In case you're wondering what anaglyph is, it refers to 3-D images viewed using red and blue colored glasses. Theatrical movies, including all of the 80's features, use polarized glasses for a full color experience. Unfortunately, the polarizing system is fairly complicated to use. It requires a special projector lens, and some calibration - plus a highly reflective silver screen for best results. Recent big screen 3-D ventures (including FREDDY'S DEAD and SPY KIDS 3-D) have been distributed anaglyph - which is done in the lab, and requires no special modification to the projector.

As technology improved, the home marketplace saw the rise of a superior full-color 3-D system, known as field sequential 3-D. Field sequential systems use electronic shutterglasses to blink the right and left eyes alternately on and off so the viewer sees a full 3-D image. Although I believe it was primarily developed for the medial industry, the system was exploited by the Japanese in the late 80's, with a laserdisc format known as VHD, to release full-color 3-D versions of the early 80's 3-D movie wave. Titles such as FRIDAY THE 13TH PART 3, JAWS 3-D, SPACEHUNTER: ADVENTURES IN THE FORBIDDEN ZONE, HOUSE OF WAX, etc, all found their way to this format, and have now turned up on DVD on eBay. Aside from catching a revival showing of one of these films in a theater, this is the best way to see them. Recent IMAX shorts, such as HAUNTED CASTLE and ENOUNTER IN THE 3RD DIMENSION, have turned up for sale domestically in this format. You can get more information on the system by visiting http://www.razor3d.com, who sells an affordable set.

Anyway... since I believe that every movie should be made in 3-D, I did some digging. What kind of 3-D could be produced with home made CGI? More specifically, could it be done in Poser? Well, low and behold, it can. I won't get into the technical specifics of that now (we'll wait for a slow news week), but basically what you're doing is rendering the movie twice, once for the left eye, and then again, 2-degrees to the right. These two versions can be combined in post-production to make field sequential 3-D, anaglyphic 3-D, or any other 3-D format that will eventually be dreamed up. And, the upside is (for all exhibition considerations), you have a perfectly acceptable 2-D version of your movie as well.

Before I started working on the movie (actually before I even started on the script), I made the FRANKENSTEIN VS THE WOLFMAN teaser trailer that you can find elsewhere on this website. I even have a field sequential version, in living color, and it rocks. So, the future bodes well. I have seen and studied a lot of 3-D movies, and it's resulted in a lot of theoretical knowledge. I've always wanted to make a 3-D movie - so here's my chance. Besides, 3-D is on the cusp of another resurgence. The 3-D POLAR EXPRESS is the highest grossing IMAX film to date. Robert Rodriguez is apparently doing another 3-D kids movie, THE ADVENTURES OF SHARK BOY AND LAVA GIRL, and James Cameron (who is currently making 3-D underwater IMAX movies) plans to return to the big screen with the 3-D sci-fi epic BATTLE ANGEL.

When I get the photo gallery up and running, I'll post anaglyph versions in addition to the 2D screencaps, so you can see how it looks.

So - Why Frankenstein vs the Wolfman?

2004-12-18T13:03:00.000-06:00

After RAVEN 2, I was developing a number of projects, none of which seemed to be coming together. The two rules I have, when working on filmmaking projects, is a) don't repeat yourself, and b) cross another genre off the to-do list. The first RAVEN satisfied my desire to do a superhero/dark avenger/Goth action movie; with the second I was able to do a gritty, satanic private detective thriller. I wrote a script for Raven 3, but felt I was mandated to tie up loose plot threads, which ultimately wasn't very interesting. I then wrote a 3-part crime story anthology (one piece was actually backstory on Lucas Foster), but after the initial writing, I lost interest in that one as well.

One idea that had been floating around in the back of my brain for a while centered on three orphaned pickpockets, in a non-specific, Dickensian time period. These three kids teamed up with a aging Ernest Hemingway-type to combat a supernatural Jack the Ripper. The story also featured a secondary character - a reanimated man with no past, who was tasked with collecting and burying the city's plague and murder victims. Over the course of the story, he went from being a suspect to an asset, possessing a natural condition that rendered him immune to the villain's power. I could see the characters clearly, but I could never get the story to work. The group needed a better nemesis.

The current trend of horror movie team-ups gave me an idea... what if the reanimated fellow in the story actually was the Frankenstein monster? Naturally his antagoinst would be the Wolfman. My proposed story would follow the same basic outline as the orphan idea. Except, I would make the monster the one the kids partner with, and have the writer be the Wolfman. By creating new backstories, I felt energized - further distancing the characters from those made famous by Universal studios. This idea caught fire. I have been a horror movie addict for my entire life, and although the two Raven movies have horror elements, I haven't yet made a movie squarely set within the genre. I had visions of skeletal woods, full moons, and crumbling graveyards and knew this was the one I wanted to do.

As of now, I'm working on some preliminary animation. I don't consider myself to be in full production mode yet; that'll come after the voices are recorded. This is kind of a head start. I'm working on a scene that comes late in the movie, the final battle between the Monster and the Wolfman, which has little dialogue. I plan to make a major update to the site after we get the voices done, in early 2005. I'll be posting cast and character info, the full script, the poster, and the first images from the movie. Stay tuned!

Test Renders and Preparation

2004-12-14T13:01:00.000-06:00

The screenplay is finished, at least a version that I'm happy with, and can hand out. Andy is functioning as casting director, and tells me that he's found people to fill all the roles. The whole casting process is more difficult on this movie due to the need for English accents. I'm still skeptical as to what we'll eventually be able to get, but I'm hopeful.

I'm trying to map out a plan of attack for production. With the first two Raven movies, I would animate one shot, and then render it before moving on to the next. That consumed an awful lot of time, and basically locked up my computer for hours (sometimes days) at a time. In the interest of efficiency, I think this time around I'm going to animate the entire movie in one go, and then begin the rendering process. Since I have to make virtually two movies (one for the right eye and one for the left), I plan to render out one version completely, then as the second one renders, edit and score the first.

The only thing slowing me down is the extra time needed to position the 3D camera. I hope that as I get back in the swing of things that will become easier. The test renders are looking good. I'm making analgyphs (red/blue) to check the depth of the images on my computer, and the 3D is working as well as expected. If only there was some kind of Poser plug in that would allow you to see it in 3D as you worked...

Production Begins

2004-12-14T12:59:00.000-06:00

Hello, this is Colin Clarke and I'll be using this space to update you on the progress of my new movie, FRANKENSTEIN VS THE WOLFMAN. As of this writing, the second draft of the screenplay is complete, and is currently undergoing extensive revisions. It's being written with the help of Marc Packard, who also collaborated on the script to the original RAVEN.
The character models for most of the main cast have been designed, dressed and finalized. Once again, like RAVEN and RAVEN 2, I'm using Curious Lab's Poser 4 to make the movie. Why Poser? Because I don't know jack about 3D modeling and animation, that's why. I'm faking my way through it with this fantastic program that makes 3D animation something within the reach of people who know little about it. Seriously. Poser comes with its own "people" models, and more high-resolution characters can be purchased or downloaded from stores and databases online. The Frankenstein character I'm using is from Daz3D, and the Wolfman is a model created by Sixus1, and is available from Renderosity. Other places you should visit for clothing and prop needs: Poserworld and PoserOnline.

Voice casting is underway, with the help of Andy Carlson, who under the banner of Darkhouse Productions, is hip deep in a bunch of projects of his own - including producing local bands, developing screenplays, role-playing games, commercial artwork, you name it. Hopefully, we'll be able to get some headshots of the actors playing each part, and post them along with the character they'll be playing in the Characters section of this site.I have talked to Ryan Wummel, who composed the music for both RAVEN and RAVEN 2 about scoring this one, and he's agreed.

The purpose of this log is to document, as well as possible, the making of this short movie - from concept to execution. I expect that the whole process of making the movie may take between one-and-a-half and two years, with a target runtime of 20 minutes. In that time, I will try to make regular updates on this site of images, audio clips, video clips, and other stuff. Thanks for visiting, and check back soon!