Passing the Fifteen Minute Mark

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.