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

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.