The Afflicted is online!

Little did I know that this would be such an ordeal - Vimeo took about 15 hours to convert the movie (I uploaded yesterday) - that has never happened to me before...

The Moviestorm version is visually nice, but there's a sound-synch problem due to flash converting. Nonetheless I thank all those who already watched, and hope you'll watch it again in HD, now on Vimeo (also for download)! It's also up on TMUnderground now, and I'm happy to say that it's the featured film on the Moviestorm page!

I hope you'll enjoy the movie - I'm very glad that both Kate and Sherwin seem to like it!

It's done when it's done.....

.... and it is done!

After countless problems, The Afflicted is finally rendered now - until the last this film was very stubborn - filters didn't work, Vegas produced countless crashes even though I had pre-rendered every little scene (with a heavy heart, but my computer just isn't up to handling files of this complexity, so I have to live with the quality loss) and decided it didn't want to render in .wmv, which is normally my preferred format - so I tried loads of different things, none worked until I found this tutorial by Eugenia.

So now I have a very nice looking mp4 version of the movie - I think it looks even better than .wmv, and the file is astonishingly small - only 311 MB at high definition!

As you can imagine, I'm very, very happy. :)

Was there anything else? Mhm? Oh yeah, release date.... :D

Either coming tuesday or wednesday... so stay tuned!

Hurray!

Back in business, baby -

I've got my vo re-takes for The Afflicted, already re-shot and re-composited (is that a word? Oh bugger), and now it won't take that much longer to finish the movie!

Sound design is coming along fine, too - I've reverted to my old working style, doing it scene by scene.

So all's well in sisch-topia. :)

On another note, I just saw a film that blew me away -
Mellowhardy's Cafe Insomniac ep. 2 - just wow!
I strongly recommend you watch it, and if you haven't seen ep. 1 (shame on you!), do that first!
It's a great story, professionally filmed - the camera work is to die for, and pure inspiration to me!

Until soon!

When nothing works as you want it to

A two weeks holiday for which I had so many plans - and now I've spent most of the first week lying flat on my back and accomplishing next to nothing ... must be some cosmic thing that makes me come down with a very nasty bout of stomach-flu during my holiday!

Haven't been able to do any of the vo's I promised people, The Afflicted is lying around unfinished, haven't been able to export Saving Grace in two parts to a format that the uploader on bitfilms will accept... haven't been able to work on an idea for a music vid that struck me; or sing any of the songs I wanted to practise on.

The only good news is that the script for my not-yet-to-be-named- project is slowly growing - in fact, is nearly written in it's entirety, but a whole new bunch of questions have arisen... I'm not at all sure that I'll be capable of doing it any time soon. As of now, it has about 18 characters who just need to have distinct faces - I'm not sure I can pull that off with Moviestorm at the moment.
Just as well that I planned on a break after The Afflicted - I'll have to do some serious brain-storming, asking a lot of modders for help - but that won't help the lack of faces, especially as I will need even more different characters for mass-scenes.

Of course it could work with incorporating The Movies characters - but I really want to make this film using MS only. *sigh*
Doesn't help either that I think this is the best script I've written so far, and that my perfectionistic streak insists on not making compromises.. or if I have to, the less, the better.

Oh well.

Off to bed now again - I'm sure everything will look brighter again once I've recovered fully.

/rant