Sands of Fire Blog

Hello everyone! And yeah yeah, we know, it's been a while. You guys must be wondering what the hell we have been doing since the Trailer announcement... well, I have some good and some bad news to tell you about this sudden silence. I'll start with the bad news first and get it over with.

Well, the lack of updates is mainly due to my sickness. I have been struggling with a heart condition (actually it started a long time ago). My health drastically worsened beginning of this year. I have gone through a very difficult period with many examinations and visits to doctors and cardiologists. They still haven't diagnosed my condition but I started a treatment with medicines and thankfully my heart stabalized quite a bit, not 100% though and I probably won't be the same ever again, but it makes living easier. I'm telling you this because I feel you all have the right to know this. You guys have been following us for so long and that's the least I can do, telling you the truth and being honest. But of course, care or don't care, that's your choice. Anyway, my contribution to the movie has never been so low and I'm afraid it has had a huge impact on the production timeframe. I'm feeling sorry and hope you guys will understand its not in my control. I'm feeling better though and I already promised Donkey that I will (slowly) pick up my work when I'm ready for it and I hope this will be very soon! But I'm sure it is.

So yes, the movie has had some delay because of this but I can garantuee that Donkey has not stopped working on it. In fact, and now I'm moving to the good news portion of this update :) ... Donkey has already finished his work on the soundfx. So that's another huge task that has been completed in post. That being said, he started to work on the tweaking part last month. Tweaks on the editing, adjusting imagery, finetuning the sounds, for just naming some are all part of this job. Not to underestimate though because this will put the movie in it's final cut. Another thing he's working on right now is the dialogues and voices. Donkey has been in touch with some people that will support us on voiceacting and he's doing tests with them as we speak. Definitely looking forward to that.

Another thing I'm really, really excited about is that SoF will officially be released in HD. In contradiction to earlier reports (we always said the movie would be in standard PAL) we decided to go with modern techniques and formats. We will be upscaling and rerendering the movie in HD format (720p resolution) to get the best possible image quality that this movie deserves. I have seen test results of the intro and it looks amazing and very promising to what the rest of the movie will be like. This will probably take some extra work but after 4 years, who cares... right? :) But as a result you will be able to play this movie in Full Screen on your PC and Home Theater setups. Here's an example of what the Intro will look like in HD (notice the removal of the widescreen bars).


And to conclude this update, we are very pleased to announce that our latest trailer has won 3 awards on the recent Game Movie Awards'08 hosted by planet-videos. The trailer won awards in Best Cut/effects, Sound and Trailer categories. Actually, this came as a big surprise to us because I stumbled upon this news by accident. But nevertheless, I guess it's very cool that we were able to win (with a Trailer) from other machinima.

That's it for this update, next time I try to update a bit sooner, really promised ;).