Sands of Fire Blog

Hello everyone, it's time for our monthly update. And oh boy, do I have some exciting news to share with you guys :)

Where do I start... Well maybe I should start with the most interesting part! Finally, after several months of searching and doing tryouts and just when we wanted to give up we found a composer for the movie. Yes, thanks to Crazycanuck from GamerzTheatre we came across Justin R. Durban (an American composer who lives in LA). He has done quite some remarkable music in his career and not only is he a composer but he's also a 3D artist and into moviemaking himself. More recently his music was chosen to feature in the theatrical trailer from the new Harry Potter movie, The Order of the Phoenix. His music is licensed under the well known trailer company "X-Ray Dog". We are very excited to be working with him and we can't wait to hear his fantastic music in combination with our movie. You can find out more about Justins work and even listen to some samples through his personal site.

The last couple of weeks, I've also been working with Dainiuxxx. He will provide some custom made animation. Ok, before you'll start thinking,... 'Why custom animation, that's not machinima?' Well, let me tell you this. There are some crucial scenes in SoF that we tried to record but were unable todo because they were simply too complex. Therefore, I searched alternative solutions and I found Dainiuxxx. He's a very talented guy and he's very strong in manipulating models. But don't worry, aside a few shots, still 99% of the movie is pure machinima.

Then some other great news. SoF has it's own website. It's currently in development and a temp site is already online. Check it out on http://www.sandsoffire.com. This site will go live somewhere next year when the release date has been set. So, it's certainly something to watch out for! Kingdriehoek (collegue of Donkey) is responsable for the site, so please give him a warm welcome!

Ok, I'm still not done ;). I added a few new features to the Blog. One of them is the addition of a poll, check it out in the right bar (scroll down). I think it's a good opportunity to ask about the interest in our movie after the long production time we have already been facing. So definitely something you want to cast your vote on! Also, I've changed the project status (on the bottom of the page). Well, it's changed in a few places. Actually, this is a very accurate status. The filming has finally been finished (reshoots are done) so it's a final wrap. And because we have Justin working on the music now, we screwed it back to 0%. And you also may notice the 0% on the tweaking part. We will start tweaking once the music has been done and because of that the sound mixing has to be rebuild from scratch. Also a lot of compositing tweaks still have to be done once the editing/sound is done. Both Donkey and I are working on the compositing of a few major scenes of part3 (4 and 6 mins) and we hope to get it finished by the end of this year.

And to please everyones appetite, I have made a batch of new screencaps. This time it's a comparison of before/after shots. I think you will like this and it gives some insights in the hard work that goes into the compositing (again explaining the long production time).

That's it for now. You see, we've been pretty busy lately, so no need to jump on our backs and asking for updates. We'll keep you posted as much as we can. And oh, one last thing. The people that thought we would just sit down and relax (see previous update), well think again. We're pretty much alive and kicking :). Cya next time!