BloodSpell Development Updates

Alex Nuttgens, long-suffering QA person (he did the QA for 3 out of four of the feature-length versions of BloodSpell, too) is currently sitting on my sofa, cackling away at the commentaries. Apparently they're quite funny. Hurrah.

OK, we have Release Candidates for the PAL DVDs, and we'll have them for NTSC DVD players shortly.

I could really do with some people to test the darn things! All you'd need to do is play some of the features in your home set-top DVD player - I'm not expecting you to watch everything, given that's about 7 hours of content.

Particularly, if you have an NTSC-only DVD player, that would be awesome.

Comment here and I'll get a DVD out to you if you're in the UK, or figure something out if you're elsewhere. First come, first served - ideally I want to do about 5 of these.

If, at any point, you happen to be physically near me, and you hear me say that my film will have a DVD with over 4 hours of special features on it, on a zero budget, would you firmly slap me and tell me to stop it?

The DVD is, as it has been for a week or so, nearly done. Very, very nearly. Oh, so nearly. I hve a release candidate of the first disc, I should have RCs of at least the other PAL discs by the end of today.

Man, has it been a lot more work than expected.

Transcoding for PAL and NTSC DVD now, and waiting on Bioware, to check they're cool with the DVD.

We don't know how he does it. We're fairly sure he doesn't sleep. And we suspect he's actually a strongly superhuman AI awoken from Cold War technology, hidden in a military bunker somewhere in the Bavarian mountains.

But less than 24 hours after we posted the English subs, Andre Bogus has sent us the German feature subtitles!

Yes, after the sterling work of Alex Nuttgens and Steve Wallace (and the equally sterling polite reminders of Andre Bogus - thanks, Andre), the English feature subtitles are available!

On the DVD, would you prefer to see a bit of the animatic that ended up being quite similar to the feature film (but that still has lots of small differences, lines that were cut, changed camera angles, and so on), or a bit of the animatic that was wildly different to the final film?

Just so everyone knows where we are and how close it is...

• Get and incorporate comments from focus groups on documentaries.


• Get legal opinion on where we can distribute DVD without ending up in prison


• Get the OK to go from Bioware


• Get the OK to go from Creative Commons (you'll hear more about this later)


• Incorporate Johnnie Ingram's intro into the Bloopers


• Get Ben Sanders' re-recorded vocals and incorporate them into the Crew commentary.


• Get any additional materials from Phil Rice


• Ask Phil for comments on the commentaries I've sound edited.


• Final edit on the two "From Script to Film" features


• Shoot easter egg


• Edit easter egg
• 
  
• Choose animatic section and get permissions from everyone on it


• Create menus for Disk 2


• Convert everything to MPEG-2


• Assemble menus


• Compile disk


• Test disk


• Make available through chosen retailer


• MAYBE - author DivX files with identical content, for smaller download

Cool stuff that is happening:

• We're Featured Commoner over at CreativeCommons.org at the moment - woo!


• BloodSpell and some of the Making Of documentaries I'm preparing for the DVD will be shown at Urbanimation next week in Jakarta, Indonesia. That's just awesome.


• The BloodSpell feature was Gold Movie of the Season on Machinima Premiere for Autumn 2007. Yay!


• Stay tuned for more DVD news soon - I've nearly finished prepping the documentaries, and so all that remains is mastering, distribution, and the potential huge hurdle of the British Board of Film Classification

I'm editing the third of the 5 commentaries for the DVD (wow, that's a lot of audio), and I came across the harrowing, intense, dramatic final confrontation between The Master and jered, as interpreted by Steve:

"Oh, this is the bit where Jered folds like Superman on laundry day."

The DVD is nearly finished...