A Diary?!
I know when I get to the end of this project, I'm not going to believe I did it. So, here's the proof. Another thing -- just in case someone else decides that they're not able to make a feature movie, this at least lets them know that it's possible.
December 29, 2003, 2003
Finally. Finally, we've shipped every DVD out that's been ordered. We've shipped all the comp copies out (except five I can't track), too. Engineering is finally only a bit cluttered, as opposed to looking like a freakin' hurricane hit it. Finally, I feel like I can slow down a bit. Well, until the various solicitations come out, that is...
December 3, 2003, 2003
The paper assets are done and trying to wing their way to us. A little annoying that UPS won't just leave 'em. Trying to plan the days I'm heading to SF for the autograph session with Cyoakha and Jason.
December 2, 2003, 2003
Added the rest of our crew to the Internet Movie Database listing. I wish they would include all the characters. Have to figure out how to do something with that.
November 25, 2003, 2003
I ended up driving down to McMinnville for the final master on the DVD. That was a late night. Now, everything's off to the various printers and replicators. Yay! We're slowly making VHS copies and collecting and cleaning up DVD and VHS cases. Our case supply is a good thing! Thank you, Sheyenne! I need coffee and doughnuts, stat.
November 18, 2003, 2003
Found one last typo in the interior pages. Fixed that and sent yet another CD off to the printer. Geez, you would think I should just set up an FTP site! Received the sample DVD today. Looks pretty good. The only two problems with it was that it was in the wrong aspect ratio (which might be unfixable) and that the last chapter cut in after instead of before the credits. But it's cool. I'm listening to the music-only track right now! Orders are coming in pretty steady. This is very nice, too. Set up a business account at the bank and then at the last minute, realized that we had set up a business checking account, which is gonna cost me moola. Not gonna have that going on, thank you very much!
November 17, 2003, 2003
Our listing on The Internet Movie Database is lookin' pretty cool. They still don't have the cast up, but I'll wait a while and see how that goes.
November 15, 2003, 2003
Still sick. Received a note from the printer: a lot of the text on the documents I sent was too close to the cutlines, meaning chances were good that they would get cut off. So, three crazy hours later, I had all three documents revised and mailed off. Oy!
November 10, 2003, 2003
Sick today. Bleah. Managed to put together the various assets and packages to send out to the vendor. Turns out the DVD guy is just down the road about half an hour, so maybe he'll let me come by and QC the final design. That would be really cool! It's pretty cool seeing those boxes all lined up, ready to send out. Orders coming in. This is good.
November 9, 2003, 2003
It seems Adobe Encore doesn't work with any operating systems without an "X" in it. Oooh, that makes me grumbly. Tried running ReelDVD's demo, but I can't learn it fast enough. I've been coordinating with a vendor on the DVD production. Got the Paypal button to function online. This is nice, because it allows people to pay us a different way.
November 6, 2003, 2003
The slide show looks really very cool. Better than I expected! I'm wrapping up the last pieces now, building the last asset files. DVD-Lab can't lay a multiple-audio-track down on the DVD without also adding a duplicate of the video (and the disk can't hold that much), so I've decided it's time to try Adobe Encore DVD. Built and uploaded the preorder form. Now I've gotta get the damn thing wrapped up! Also did a lot of updates to the website this evening.
November 4, 2003, 2003
Started making a "Making of..." slideshow for the DVD. I think this'll be cool.
November 3, 2003, 2003
I have achieved re-animation! Heh. There was one scene in the movie that was just bugging the hell out of me because four of the five seconds of it were cut out and replaced by impenetrable blackness. Because of the lost data problem (see "Ass, Friggin' Pain in the"), I lost all the development files and thought that redoing this would be a severe killer. But Jason redrew the image, e-mailed it to me, and I was able to get the piece reanimated. It looks amazingly cooler than my first attempt! It is soooooo tempting to make "just one more" pass on the animation. It is. But I know if I start down this path, it'll be at least another year before I'm done. Ugh. Jason's very interested in recording a commentary track. Yeah, we could do that, but it'll require different mastering software -- mine doesn't allow me to have one video source and multiple audio sources on the same DVD. Am investigating. It might be cool to get Jason, myself, and Cyoakha together to do a voiceover. Heck, I wonder if Toren could be talked into, say, flying down to San Francisco for a day of recording...
November 1, 2003, 2003
I think we're pretty good on the DVD wraparound cover design. We received permission for the last two quotes and unless some new ones come in from cool sources, I think we can call that design done. I've also finished the design and layout of the insert booklet for the DVD (well, it's hardly a "booklet") and that looks really nice, too. I wanted to be sure and get all the cast and crew listed.
October 30, 2003
Starting to make the music-only track. Isolating it was easy enough, now I have to go through and re-adjust the crossfades and levels and such. Ah, found out what that damn pixellation was when Carter is tricked by the Merchant. Man, how annoying. At least it's fixed.
October 27, 2003
Our first sales! We sold two copies of the movie at the Witches Ball. I dutifully added them to the P&L spreadsheet. All day today, Cyoakha and I worked on remastering the sound for the movie. We tweaked everything, sound effects, music, and voices. The results are really neat -- much better than I had hoped. Burnt a new DVD-R and watched it and sure enough, it sounded great. We discovered one odd thing -- sometime between now and "then", something happened to one of the master cat-meow mixes (heh). It was repitched to a much lower freq, so instead of miaowing, the cats were sounding like they were all really, really stoned. Tried to fix that, but ended up sprinkling more cat sounds into those sections.
October 25, 2003
Wow. A stack of ten DVDs, neatly packaged and ready to go. They look very cool. If I saw this on a shelf, I think I would be very tempted to buy it. At the last minute decided to not go with coloring in the artwork. Although the DVD design is in color (and it's a cool leathery-looking cover!), any artwork that's depicted that's from the movie is still in black and white. These look very attractive!
October 21, 2003
Decided we're going to sell a few copies of the DVD-R at the Witches Ball. Also, preparing copies for film festivals. Who knows? Found some nice reviews of the movie online.
October 20, 2003
Submitted the movie to the Internet Movie Database. Ugh, what a tedious process!
October 15, 2003
Discussions with Jason about the cover design. I really like the "old weathered book" look and hope it plays as cool as I'm thinking it'll play. Talking with Cyoakha about doing another polish of the music levels (they're a little dodgy). She wants to test it in a theater, but I think we're going to end up focusing more on home theater.
October 14, 2003
I start collecting quotes to reproduce the DVD. The clock is running now to produce profit as soon as possible. Besides, people liked it and I want to have the DVD ready by, maybe Christmas. Perhaps that's asking too much, but, well, there it is.
October 12, 2003
Last night of the Festival. We have a 9:45 showing upstairs, but I screw it up because I had Andrew set the projector too dark. This results in artifacts and junk in the video. I was trying to make sure that final sunrise effect is visible, but I went too far. Sure, we could change it midstream, the projectionist tells me, but that would throw the menu up and distract the audience. I cringe. The darker quality makes the whole thing pixellate more than ever. Ugh.
October 11, 2003
The matinee show on Saturday. We're in the big theater. I'm still nervous, just not nearly-incapactitated as I was before. This is, like, a 400-person theater. It keeps seeming to be nearly empty, which worries me. There is a minimum number of people required for a good time, a sort of critical mass of density and we don't reach it until just a few minutes before the show. In fact, we nearly fill this theater! I intro the movie, tell people to stick around for the cute animation at the end, and watch with them. This is a bigger theater and a better projector and it looks really nice! There is still some weird pixellation during an early series of scenes. I was hoping those were artifacts of a les-than-stellar projector, but no, they're in the DVD. People cheer when the title comes up. People laugh at the right times and clap at the right times. It's awesome. I'm still sweaty and nervous, but really jazzed, too. A gal from the Ashland Film Festival comes up right afterwards and asks about showing this in her film festival, to which I enthusiastically nod. The release party afterwards is good. For a brief time, we pretty much populate the entire tavern. That's nice! I pay our bill at the close of the party and tip almost 50% because The Moon and Sixpence was really, really cool about this! Turns out there isn't a 9ish showing of this as I thought there would be. That's disappointing, but if I'd looked over the schedule before, I would have seen it. Just had it stuck in my head. The concert later that evening is still good, though sparesely populated. Cyoakha ends up doing impromptu lyrics from audience callouts, which is funny.
October 10, 2003
The Premiere! I am absolutely a basketcase before the showing. I am slicked with sweat and nervous as hell. I don't think I've ever been this nervous, not even when asking girls out on dates. I talk with Bryan Moore and John Strysik, both of whom assure me this is not unusual and that it happens with every movie. We show in one of the smaller upper theaters at the Hollywood Theater. The room is packed, including people lining the walls. I introduce the movie. At first, I'm convinced we have the wrong DVD in the player, and we trade with the backup. The response is really tremendous. People laugh at the right spots. People sit through and watch the whole thing (no vacant theater syndrome yet!). People clap and cheer at the end. After the show, there are only a few questions. I urge everybody to hurry down and listen to Cyoakha's concert, but when I get down there, there's only, like, five people there.
October 5, 2003
Started working on the DVD case. The movie's big, so I wonder if I'll be able to compress it enough such that I can get the other things on the same DVD. I guess if I don't care how long the compression takes, I can do it at medium datarate. Just found out we've got four slots in the film festival. Yahoo! Of course, it's gonna kill me, but at least it'll be done. Whew!
October 3, 2003
Still not perfect, but not bad. The music is there, but not overwhelming the voices. I think after the film festival, I'll ask Cyoakha to come by some night and we'll do another remix with her actually present. Then again, maybe the best trick might be to remove all rubberband effects and bring all music volumes back to 100% and then mix 'em into a single musical track. Hm, a voice track, a music track, and a SFX track. I can see how that might be useful...
September 30, 2003
Better. Still not perfect. Bought a new friggin' DVD player to see if I can get any damn consistency in sound.
September 26, 2003
I'm really not happy with how the audio levels sound different when I play it in Premiere versus the computer based DVD player versus the DVD player downstairs. Ugh. Just finished remixing the music and a little of the SFX. Raised the levels of some of the voices, too, but only a very few as they started to distort.
September 21, 2003
Pow! Finished laying in the music score. Still missing a few key sound effects and the end credits. Maybe I can get those done by tomorrow night? As a test, I set the thing to export an MPEG file from the timeline. Took three hours. I'm a happy monkey! I'm still missing a crapload of development files, but at least the finished movie will get done!
September 19, 2003
Picked up the Production computer. The OS is now all happy and updated. Unfortunately, the instructions were garbled and rather than attempt to recover the data from the 200G hard drive, they reformatted the 200G hard drive. This seems just profoundly stupid to me! I am tempted to schedule beatings all 'round.
September 17, 2003
Music, music, music! Made it to 42 minutes in the timeline. There's a pocket of missing music here. I've told Cyoakha and I expect she'll hit it after the main score is complete. But if not, I'll have to patch it with older music, which is do-able. Did the last render-stills-to-Quicktime piece. I'm actually surprised how small it ended up. I hope I didn't pooch one or more of the settings. At this point, when I transfer it (if!) to the new computer, I can use the latest version of Premiere, rather than keeping the old version loaded. That'll be nicer, although I don't look forward to that whole learning-curve-under-pressure thing.
September 16, 2003
Started updating the OS myself. I am very annoyed -- this has gone on for way too long -- this machine should have been quoted within two days max of Burning Man, and delivered within two more days. So, because of this "minor" fuckup, I may have lost two years of Development files. Fire. Yes, a cleansing by fire. Tempting... Cyoakha, on the other hand, is still rolling music out. Yay for her!
September 15, 2003
A day after it arrives, 30 hours after copying 120G of Dev files, the new computer's hard drive crunches. Turns out the OS can't support more than 130G or so. What the hell?! They put a 200G drive in there. Why they didn't bother updating the OS (which is free, but "difficult") or why they didn't bother telling me my OS wouldn't support my hardware (when they're the ones putting it together!) is completely beyond me. Cyoakha still sending music.
September 14, 2003
New computer arrived today. Started copying files to it. Cyoakha's FTPing music as fast as she can. Yay!
September 11, 2003
Sent out a press release. Very nice -- lots of people responded.
September 9, 2003
Found a venue for the Release Party, bought pants for my Premiere outfit, sent out a newsletter, and traded a couple of notes with Cyoakha. I'm panicking. Is this real? We're trying to get a final render box, but the vendor is just screwing around and it's been seven days so far and he hasn't even sent us a freakin' quote. Lord knows how long it'll take to build the damn thing.
August 18, 2003
Cyoakha and I have set up a marvellous little FTP system. She completes a few minutes of music, then uploads the tracks, I download 'em, and delete 'em, and tell her she's good to go on the site again. Works out great because this allows for immediate feedback and she's very specific about where she wants the tracks to start and stop. I've decided that after I return in September, I'm going to pop for a new box. I want to be able to render large video files, large MPEGS, and work without messing up the same computer we use for all our other stuff. After I make the couple of sample VHS tapes, of course...
August 17, 2003
Finished the foley. That was quite cool. There are still a few outlier sounds I have to figure out and add, such as the Shantak cries, but those are things I know I can solve after Burning Man.
August 11, 2003
70 minutes into the foley. Haven't lost anymore video tracks, but then, how would I know without looking through the entire timeline again? Prebuilding larger WAV files are helping progress, as was the recording session a few days ago when we recorded huge stretches of all kinds of different sounds. Talked more with Katrina about possible venues for the release party. Settled on a design motif for the DVD box. I know, it's a silly thing, but it's a little rewarding thing, like dessert. Still gotta cram at the sounds, though.
August 10, 2003
62 minutes into the foley. I realized today that I'm going nuts. Everyone else seemed to have realized it before me, but are sweet enough to not say anything. These past few minutes have been pretty straightforward because the scenes are simple: Temple of Leng, some weird piping, etc. Panicking because the end is approaching. I want to be done with this because that give Cyoakha time to finish scoring before Burning Man. Still so much to do! For no readily apparent reason, the timeline (and the OS) lost "track" of one of the video-placement files. I had to rebuild it from scratch, losing me an hour. Grumble...
August 8, 2003
60 minutes into the foley. Getting bogged, not good. On the other hand, because of the effort to get Cyoakha her advanced copies against which to score, I've become much better at using the new DVD design software. I've set up a first-cut of the Dream-Quest DVD, with multiple menu levels and everything. It's kinda' cool. A skeleton still, and I really need to figure out how to make my MPEGs smaller in order to cram all the stuff I want to cram onto that DVD, but still cool as beans. Had to stop work for a while to do some more recording of various sound effects, including the wingflaps of Shantaks and nightgaunts, which are very critical to the rest of the movie.
August 5, 2003
Ah, this is tasty. I was finally able to make a good DVD (DVD-R, actually). I called it "The H. P. Lovecraft Cosmic Horror Fun-Pak". It included the last two trailers for Dream-Quest, plus Call of Cthulhu plus The Testament of Tom Jacoby. Fun!
August 3, 2003
Halfway done with the sound effects (52 minutes, actually a little more than halfway). The transformation is everything I'd hoped it would be plus more!
July 16, 2003
Started putting Sound Effects in. A slow start -- only a couple of minutes done in a short evening, but the effect is tremendous. It's very exciting to hear an ambience and the occasional sound behind the animation and the voiceovers. It just completely transforms the thing. Producer quote, upon seeing the first two minutes with sound effects installed: "Wow. Oh, wow."
July 13, 2003
Mailed all of Jason's artwork back. Feels good to say "Yup, that part is completely done."
July 11, 2003
Finished the edits and am outputting 6-minute Quicktimes (anybody have a volunteer NT2K machine...?) Bummer for me, I ran out of room at 3am on the secondary hard drive. Ooooh, rats. Well, I'm just going to have to start parcelling files off onto the archive drive. One of my animators sent in an endpiece to the movie, a fully-animated Randolph Carter. It's so damn cool!
July 7, 2003
Going through the timeline and patching in a few timing issues. There are spots where I really needed a longer fade-to-black, or a bit of black just to help the passage of time along. Cruising quickly on that. Tried building preview files, but wasn't that a waste of time. Premiere seems to want to shitcan the preview files every time and I really don't like the idea of rebuilding 661 preview files each time I want to make a copy of the freakin' movie. I know, the problem here is that I'm not building this to an NTSF drive, where I can make a 60G Quicktime file...
July 4, 2003
Yay! Finished the final animation! 98 minutes' worth! Can I feel the rooty-tootyness of this? Yes, I can!
May 26, 2003
73 minutes. Still a tad behind. But cruisin', cruisin'... I'm sick of snow and sick of spears. I could live a happy life without ever animating either of those things again. Still noodling details with the Distributor on a different "starter" project.
Aril 27, 2003
60 minutes. Lost some time at Norwescon, but it was good to interact and make a goofy little parody of Survivor. Had a Distributor contact me. Intriguing...
March 29, 2003
45 minutes so far...
March 25, 2003
Added a lot of new pictures to the Picture Gallery.
March 24, 2003
About 40 minutes into the frame-by-frame of the timeline. Learning some After Effects. Making pieces of the animation look really nice! Helpers getting thin. I sent out another all-call, but only received a couple of nibbles. We're closer to a Production Box, as well as finally having all the software for it (we try to be legal here). Added the Support Tiers in the Wanna Help section.
February 15, 2003
About 27 minutes into the frame-by-frame of the timeline. This is progress, but it just seems so agonizingly slow. I wasted a whole friggin' day trying to write a DVD again. very annoying. How come everybody on the planet can do this except me?!
December 25, 2002
Merry Christmas. Still working on the frame-by-frame. Current location in the timeline is 8 minutes, 20 seconds. Must go faster...!
November 14, 2002
Been doing the frame-by-frame animation. Just finished the revised opening title sequence and it looks really good, considering I'm just some schmoe and not an ILM junky. Crap, this is a lot of work...
November 5, 2002
Finally! Seems like it's been two weeks since I first tried making preview files for the rough cut. Days and days of work without fruit makes Edward a very unhappy fella. However, I finally found a solution that works and makes for a happy Edward and a happy Katrina-Producer. I made a series of 10-minute full-size Quicktime files. Each one was just a tad under 2G. Then, then they were all done, I made a new Premiere project and tossed 'em all in a big conga line. It took about ten minutes to build the entire movie "preview", and voila -- I was able to print-to-tape. This only supports my crazy-ass idea that I'll be rebuilding nearly the entire movie into short AVIs and similarly conga-lining them. It just seems a helluva lot smarter. We tried bringing in a brand new freshy-bon dual Pentium with Win2K Pro running on it and it chewed easily into making preview files -- until it blew up sometime around 90 minutes. We weren't able to get the project restarted and once when we came close, we realized that it had lost all the preview files it had spent the past three days building. So, all very frustrating, and as of this moment, I now have a working Leica reel/rough cut. I'm going to make a bunch, so I don't have to do this again!
October 27, 2002
Damn file size issues. The render crapped out after 2.5G. So, I'm going to lower the video stream data rate to 2500 and see how that goes. The Witches Ball went great and Cyoakha played many songs from the Dream-Quest soundtrack. Yay! I wish I could have stuck around longer and introduced myself to the rest of the band (which is relatively new to me), but it seemed as if Saturday night's dinner carried with it an unwelcome microscopic guest and I've been laid out sick the past couple of days. Yuck!
October 25, 2002
The preview sequence is taking waaaay too long. I did a few experiments with exporting as a MPG and it seemed to work out okay, so I'll set that up. I probably won't get it done in time for the Witches Ball, but at least it can render while I'm away.
October 23, 2002
After a 24-hour block of work during the weekend and at least 4-6 hours a day through today, I've finished the Leica reel (think "rough cut") of the movie and have set it to produce previews. It does this annoying hang-every-few minutes thing, which means it must be baysat, but at least it's progress.
October 19, 2002
Holy smokes! It turns out the Witches ball is a week earlier than we expected. I was hoping to get a copy of the Leica reel to Cyoakha at the Witches Ball (if you like in the Oregon area this is a great thing to watch!) but that means I've just lost a week from my schedule. Jinkies, what a great thing -- having a fire under my ass...
October 16, 2002
How fun! We recently returned from the H. P. Lovecraft Film Festival, where we screened the new teaser for the first time. The response was very good and lots of people are intrigued and want to see the whole thing. This is, of course, what a teaser is supposed to do! We had these great "Kadath or bust!" t-shirts and were handing out all kinds of groovy swag including zoog-shaped cookies, Dream-Quest post cards, 11x17 posters, and t-shirts. One of the funnest parts was running into a few filmmakers who told me "Yeah, when you said you were adapting Dream-Quest last year, we were enthusiastic, but didn't actually expect to see it progressing so quickly. Cool!" Met Stuart Gordon (this is the second time, but he might not remember) and S. T. Joshi and just had a grand time. And every morning, before I left, I made sure to put at least an hour into the movie. It was tempting to sleep in, slack around the house, and then toodle in to the Film Festival, but it just felt really important to get the reel done.
September 27, 2002
Two nice breakthroughs. First, we've acquired an LCD monitor. Since acquiring it, I now animate until I am tired, rather than until my eyes are watering. That's nice. Also, I finished playing catch-up with the old scans. The zip-a-tone is a real pain in the ass. I know it's annoying to remove from the physical art and digitally don't EVEN get me started on pulling it, but it's going to moire during a pan or zoom and it's just going to look ugly. It's going to stick out in the movie like a hardcore pornography clip in the middle of Bambi.
September 25, 2002
Holy missing work, Batman! I just found out that I somehow magically skipped a huge chunk of image processing for issue #3 of the Leica reel. How annoying -- it'll probably take me a week or more to catch back up. Grumble, grumble, grumble...
September 21, 2002
Still working on the Leica reel. I've found a few tricks to get Premiere to handle large numbers of files well. The best one so far has been to not run preview files. I use the alt-timeline feature to preview my transitions and such. When I restarted Premiere, it asked me about those missing preview files and I told it to just skip the damn things. Ever since, cursor response has dramatically improved. I'm cruising pretty quick now -- about 40 minutes into the Leica reel. I've rebuilt the trailer to reflect the new release date, but I haven't gotten 'round to uploading it yet. I'm handing my Producer a hammer and saying "Please use this". Been slowed down also because I acquired a job again. Money's good, but missing eight hours every day is not so good.
July 16, 2002
Still working on the Leica reel. Trying to get Premiere to handle such a huge number of files is proving to be a bit of a problem. I've recently learned a few tricks, however, that might make things move a little more easily. But still, I know a lot of ways to make Adobe Premiere blue-screen... It's frustrating to have the project slug so suddenly.
June 12, 2002
Funny, it doesn't seem like five days have gone by. It seems more like a month! I've been wrestling with the new IBM DVD-RAM drive. It should have been a no-brainer, but putting it into a Compaq Presario with an ATI video adapter has just about snapped my will to continue. Well, not really. But it was a huge pain in the neck. But it's in and it seems to function and I was able to one-by-one stamp out all the resultant device conflicts that rippled throughout my system afterward. I should start each day by pointing my finger at the box and saying "Play nice or I'll feed you to a shoggoth!"
We have a lot of new animator helpers, which has turned out to be quite a wonderful thing! We are so lucky to find people interested in helping. A few have had to bail, but even they've been apologetic. How the heck am I going to keep track of everybody and their assignments? Oh yeah, that's right -- I gots to be a clever monkey!
June 7, 2002
Urk, that was a week I could have spent downloading hardcore porn or something. Ah well, all images are ready to import into the Leica reel.
May 31, 2002
Okay, I should have expected this, but I guess my brain took a walk. I've a crapload of very large bitmaps and in order to import them -- even for the Leica reel, I've got to make them smaller. Now, I'm asking all my wonderful, wonderful animation helpers to do this, but for the remaining 2000 scenes or so, it's still something I have to do. Sigh...
May 20, 2002
Finished the first cut of the voice track. It rolls in at ninety minutes, but there are several places I think I whizzed by some gorgeous artwork, so I'm going to make one more pass to set the timing in stone. What I've noticed doing this is that the individual voice pieces are going to have to be monkeyed with. This is because we're amateurs, which is okay! (I'm reminding myself this regularly). Some are louder or softer than they need to be. Some are more or less muffled than they ought to be. Cyoakha sent more music and a few good sound effects. Oh my, this is going to be quite cool! I'm going to MP3 one of the tracks and post it here for download, once I have a friggin' MP3 codec. So cool, still so much work to do!
May 5, 2002
Finished editing Nyarlathotep's voice. Sounds really nice. I think Kate was a really great choice!
May 4, 2002
Happy birthday, Dad! I finished editing a bunch of voices from the final recording session, as well as a few of the SFX we recorded. The "Ghouls Feeding" SFX was just perfect! We are so bad! Lev and Dwight and I are crowding around the microphone, munching on all kinds of things (I think Dwight even started biting my arm) and fussing over food. The final effect is just delightful!
April 28, 2002
Finished the storyboards. 365 pages, 2252 or so individual scenes called out. Yeesh!
April 20, 2002
I receive four tracks of music from Cyoakha. Very nice stuff. Most groovy! I wonder if I can MP3 any of it and post it to the website. That would be nice...
April 9, 2002
Still deep in the heart of the storyboards. Man, I wish I'd done these at the very beginning! A couple more animations sequences have come in and a couple more potential Assistant Animators have contacted me. I need more, dammit, more! On a more grim note, a couple of recruiters have contacted me, looking for technical writers. On the plus side, that means I'd have an income again. On the minus side, that takes away 8 hours each day from the production schedule.
April 1, 2002
Just spent a weekend at Norwescon showing the teaser and talking about the movie. The response was great! Met a lot of very enthusiastic people!
March 27, 2002
Received the first animation sequence back. Oh cool -- this crazy-ass idea might actually work!
March 26, 2002
Sent out the first batch of sub-animations today. Yikes! I am just so amazed that people are so willing to help. It's awesome! We're going to have a lot of "Assistant Animators" in the credits. Man, I wish I could pay these people...
March 20, 2002
Finished recording the last few voices. Received some more artwork from Jason. Getting into the storyboards pretty heavily -- I should have done these a long time ago, but I was too busy screwing around with voice files. Now, it's catch-up. We have the new promotional postcards -- these look pretty cool. Also, I recently prepared a sample for the animators, most of whom very politely requested a copy, rather than bluntly tell me that I can't explain what I want worth a damn.
March 6, 2002
There's going to be close to 750 voice samples for the movie. Lots of music samples and SFX, too, but I'm looking at probably more than a thousand audio samples in a single project and I'm not sure Premiere can handle it. Well, maybe it can. I think now's a good time for faith. If I find out it can't, it'll be far more entertaining later, when I'm closer to being done. Oh, and mouse-cleaning. I mean serious take-it-apart-and-alcohol-everything mouse cleaning can do wonders for morale! Mental note there.
March 4, 2002
I'm getting grumpy about this. A few of the voices were recorded too close to the microphone and the blowing pretty much obliterated the voices. So, it looks like a few will have to be re-recorded. Grumble, grumble, grumble...
February 25, 2002
Kinda' had to drop back a ways and re-assess the workflow. The animation wasn't going exactly how I liked. I've only lost a few days, however. The remaining voice files arrived. I've tasked Producer and Sound Engineer to get me some SFX and am editing WAV files like a madman possessed. Not just a madman, but a madman possessed. On a happier note, I sent out a little query about animators and much to my surprise, I've received good response from people! Looks like I have maybe four Photoshop nuts who really know what I'm talking about and can do frames for me, and maybe a half a dozen more who might need to be shown a few baby steps first. Very encouraging! Still need more, but this is not bad!
February 15, 2002
Started animating the first scenes today. Holy mother of god, what was I thinking?! Okay, I feel better now. Someone suggested that I include in this diary my bouts of doubts with the production. I just figured that anyone reading this would know they were there, but just in case you don't -- they're there. But sheesh, like I'm going to let my doubts interfere with this?! Sure I have 'em, but when they come up, I look 'em straight in the eye and say "I'm real busy right now, so how about after I finish this project we spend some quality time together?" The doubts nods and leaves, and then I slam the door and continue working before it realizes it has been tricked. I hear the "D'oh!" from behind the door.
February 12, 2002
Issue #1 artwork arrived today. Most excellent!
February 10, 2002
Went through Eric's recording the Narrator. Broke it up into the blocks as called out in the script, filtered and amplified everything, then trimmed out all the extra noise, breathing, and such. It sounds really great! I'll probably leave breathing in most of the characters, because flesh-and-blood characters will breathe, but the Narrator's gotta be squeaky clean!
February 9, 2002
Finished recording all the voices. That's a lot of voices! I don't have them as data yet, but there's just a matter of time before the ball is entirely in my court. Updated the Cast listing. Unless something bizarre happens, this should be final.
February 8, 2002
I finished the SFX script today -- every sound effect I could imagine in the art is spelled out as clearly as possible. There's a lot of 'em.
February 7, 2002
Jason writes to tell me issue #1 art is finished and on the way.
January 22, 2002
Formalized some new changes to the cast listing and uploaded more photos to the web.
January 19, 2002
Second recording session. Now we have most of the voices, just a few outliers. This session netted us some really good voices! I am totally impressed with the way people are coming up to bat and taking on voices.
January 12, 2002
Modified the Cast listing. A few people have been dropped. Some have dropped themselves, in which cases I redistributed their voices as best I could. Second batch of recordings today. I took a couple of pictures, but they're not online yet.
January 8, 2002
First recordings tonight. Nyarlathotep's voice. Oooooh, cool! As soon as we got home, I watched an old Munsters movie. But after that, I went through the evening's pictures and posted some to the website.
January 4, 2002
Voice assignments complete. Whew! Also, later tonight, catch-up auditions for a few people who were out of town. Redid the damn website. Okay, I'm happier about it and now I promise to leave it alone and get back to the damn movie. Talking with someone the other day about New Year's resolutions and I suddenly realized, with a funny, sinking feeling, that most of this year is dedicated to completing Dream-Quest. Somehow, I keep forgetting that if I don't eat this project, it's going to eat me. Also, I finished a preliminary readthrough of the script and my first estimate of the length of the movie is about 105 minutes. When it's done, I'm going to come back and take a look and see how well I guessed.
January 2, 2002
Installed a new hard drive in the Production machine -- 100G. This is specifically for all the recorded voices and images and animation files. It'll probably be overkill. Ah well, I'll feel less dumb about overkill than I would about insufficient disk space ten months into the production. What am I saying, "ten months"?! I'm supposed to be done with this project in less time than that!
January 1, 2002
Happy New Year. No time to relax. Preliminary assignments of voices done, verifying schedules and such. Man, people are coming from all over to do this. Kewl! The did-it-in-a-minute design of this website is finally getting to me. I either need to spend a couple of evenings doing it or find someone who'll build me one.
December 29, 2001
Voice auditions today. We had to set up a microphone in the far bedroom, shoe-string tied to a camera tripod, but by golly, it worked very well! About twenty people showed up eventually and there was some really cool voices in that mix.
December 26, 2001
Finished typing the shooting script and uploaded it to the website. Taking four weeks off for vacation and family obligations can be a real crimp for such a project. Boy!
November 11, 2001
Finished about 2/5 of the shooting script. It's real tricky moving so much narration into dialogue. Lovecraft didn't use this much dialogue. I think it'll play well, but only time will tell.
November 8, 2001
Final technical hurdles (I think) overcome. We're able to cleanly export to VHS tape via this system. Also, export to tape works just fine for large and long movies. I tested this by looping Tom Jacoby to a 2-hour movie and then telling the thing to Print-to-Video. Like a charm!
November 4, 2001
Completed the trailer and posted it into the Downloads section. I'm, well, "satisfied" with it. If my goal were to create a perfect trailer, then I would probably spend more time on it, but I'll focus that energy on the finished movie, instead.
October 25, 2001
Success on a number of fronts. First technical hurdle leapt was the audio results. Lev found some
settings on the recording device that minimized hiss, and I was shown how to characterize a specific
noise filter in GoldWave, our sound editing software. This allows us to get really clean sound.
Another technical jump made was the unfortunate blurring and distortion we would see in stills,
particularly in titles. Premiere seems to have a bit of difficulty rendering colors that are
especially bright and out-of-gamut for NTSC. Fortunately, I was able to knock all my colors back to
values at or below 180, which is well within the safe zone. The images were scanned at a good
resolution, resized in Photoshop, and then animated using Premiere's Image Pan and Motion effects.
As long as we don't do too much zooming, the results are really quite satisfactory! I tore
up all the layouts I had for the trailer, deciding to take a completely different tack. I like this
one much better and am hoping to complete the trailer soon. The first version will be without music,
but that'll be fixed as soon as our composers score for it.
October 15, 2001
Recorded some test sounds at the new studio, swords clashing, nightgaunt wings flapping, dialogue and voiceovers. The digital recording gear works like a charm! Also uploaded some pictures to the Picture Gallery.
October 11, 2001
Checked out a local studio. It looked like just the sort of thing we would need for our cast of thousands. Now if we can only keep that cast quiet while we're recording... Cyoakha O'Manion of Land of the Blind has expressed a strong interest in scoring the movie. Oh, I like her stuff! I've sent her a copy of the books to review -- just in case she decides to bail out.
October 9, 2001
Recorded some music for the trailer. I hope it comes out better than it sounded going in.
October 8, 2001
Looks like we have some good digital recording gear and a sound engineer on board. I'm sweet-talking an actor to voice Randolph Carter and am experimenting with some interesting possibilities for Nyarlathotep. Finished layouts for the trailer.
October 3, 2001
Katrina agrees to Produce (as in wrangle the schedule and resources and supply a brain-powered bankroll). I start contacting a few musician friends of mine and another friend sniffs after a studio for me.
October 1, 2001
I decide it's not a crazy project after all. I contact Jason Thompson, who agrees that it sounds like a pretty wicked bit of fun. Easy for him to say, he's not piloting this suicidally ambitious project.
