Okay. Let me lay it out for you.
Been working incredibly hard to edit the wrap. The sheer amount of compositing work is pretty staggering. I don't feel like ever putting Smiling Jack in anything again, because filling in the actor's eyeholes gets tedious, but that's nothing compared to the hole in the top that I have to fill in.
At this point I now have a playable edit of the whole main storyline. (I was calling this the "wrap-around", but in this case it's the main story so I'm going to stop calling it the wrap)
It's about 45 minutes long, which is right in line with the script length. I'm missing the last 3 or 4 shots though, which we didn't shoot. I have to get out and do that soon before the leaves start changing.
More and more I've been getting bombed by the "This many days 'til Halloween!", and I realize that my deadline is 30 days LESS than that, and there's just no way I'm going to get the other two segments shot and edited, as well as scored, as well as make a trailer and a poster, and do both the front-end and back-end credits to the movie...in this space of time.
I had a plan that I'd shoot the Pumpkin Trail segment, put it in, then release on October 1st--then when I got the final segment done I could insert it, and re-upload the whole movie.
But no way is it all going to happen unless I start cutting major corners--meaning, the quality will suffer.
So today I finally made the decision...going to have to push back the date.
It's funny...when I originally told people I was going to go for the October 1st release, we all had a laugh about how insane it was. Then somewhere in there I convinced myself I could do it...and reality has now corrected me.
I'm not sure when the exact release will be. I still plan on shooting Pumpkin Trail in September, then The Fountain in October. I SHOULD have the movie done completely by the end of the year then, no problem.
Just gotta figure out what month will be good to release it.
See, this is a thousands-of-dollars decision. If we don't hit the bonus on Amazon, we lose over five thousand dollars. Our best chance was obviously October, since that's Halloween/horror month, and we already did it with the first film.
If we don't hit the bonus but do about the same numbers, then this is pretty much a break-even scenario for me. That's not great, given the amount of time I put in.
These are the things keeping me up at night. (or trying to...but thank Crom for pot brownies)
I leave you with this...probably my favorite picture I ever shot of Richard Cutting on set. He plays Aiden, one of the main characters in the movie.
