Sands of Fire Blog

Ok guys, here's the latest update on SoF. And first of all, the project is NOT dead (and nor am I). I want to start by saying sorry to all the fans that have been left in the cold by the lack of updates the last couple of months. Yes WE know, we should have updated the project status a bit more or at least have given a sign of life. Unfortunately, personal reasons prevented us from updating. For me personally, many things have changed (yeah, again) and because of that I was forced to go in 'hibernation' mode. It was very hard for me to leave the project behind but eventually I had no choise. It resulted in Donkey working on SoF all by himself. Fortunately, Donkey isn't quite the type to quit on a project easily. So he kept working on the project in his own way and tempo without my help.

Many months had passed and then this one day, Donkey called me. I believe it was just before Christmas last year. He told me he was thinking about releasing the movie in a different format. I was a bit shocked because we always wanted to release the movie as a full feature film. He had the idea of splitting the movie up in two big parts. Part One which will cover the intro and first two acts (around 20 mins) and Part Two which will be the final act and endcredits (around 25mins). At first I didn't like the idea but when I took some time to think about it, it fully made sense. I guess it was better to have some sort of release than to have no release at all, especially after such a long production time and all the hard work we had put in this project, and not only us but all the guys/gals that had worked on the movie. Seeing it all go to waste would just break my heart. So I told Donkey to go ahead with his idea. So he started to focus on Part One only. We also decided to transfer all the shots into HD (720p) which resulted in creating a whole new intro!

So where do we stand now? Well, recently I have teamed up with Donkey again to try and fix Part one from start to finish. Many shots had to be redone (some shots dated back from 2005/2006). Donkey had to put a lot of work in these older shots to give em fresh and updated looks, even the compositing had to be 'modernized'. But it worked out fine and I'm very pleased with the results, the HD shots really look amazing compared to their older PAL versions. I had the fortune to watch it on a big screen and in full detail and I was blown away... it looked like a completely different movie.

Of course, the most important question remains: 'When will it be released?'. And guys, seriously, if all goes well, and Donkey promised to work very very hard (I'll do my best too), we hope to release Part One sometime around the release of Battlefield BC2. That's right, that leaves us just a couple of weeks. There's still a lot of work (tweaking, fixing, dialogs, voices, music) but I'm confident that we will be done with this first part in a couple of weeks....

And if that's not enough, we have finally launched a new website!
So be sure to check it out on http://www.sandsoffire.com/ and we have a facebook/twitter channel too, just going with the flow! :)

I hope you guys can live with the decision of breaking up the movie in two parts, I still believe this was the best choise to make as we finally will be able to show you the beginning of a movie we are working on for 5 years! But please keep in mind, we are no robots, we do the best we can in sometimes very hard circumstances but for some, that appears to be just not good enough. For those still standing behind us, thanks for your patience, it's really, really appreciated and we hope to make it up to you with the release of Part One.

See you soon!!!

Btw, remember that we still have our forum/site/blog/facebook and twitter channels. All links can be found on our main site @ http://www.sandsoffire.com/