It was all a dream...

I dreamt I was about to release a movie, and then I woke up.

In a strangely self-referential approach to machinima, I decided yesterday to treat the rough cut of Cormorant Close as a pre-viz exercise, and reshoot the whole thing from scratch. I was going to have to redo so many little things that it was looking like it would be quicker to start all over again. The movie is constructed out of several scenes using the same set, so I was having to make the same changes to each copy of the set, and try and match them. (And nope, turning it into a stock set doesn't work, because of some quirks of the Moviestorm architecture.) And there's a load of other stuff like that.

I was looking forward to getting this out and moving onto Stalker, dammit!

This time, though, I should know exactly what I'm doing. I know precisely what will be on screen, so I won't be wasting effort on building gestures or set dressing that will never be shown, or framing up cameras that won't be used. I know exactly how many cameras I need in each sequence, and I have a nice little shot list and full shooting script that tells me exactly what I have to shoot. Doing it this way means it should be much easier to light each shot separately, pull some tricks with props, and get frame-level precision by doing much more of my editing in Premiere.

It also means I can use this as an interesting test case for the next version of Moviestorm. Cormorant Close is made entirely with the release version, and just one tiny mod (which doesn't need the modder's workshop), so there's nothing in there that couldn't be done by anyone else. But then I plan to reshoot it, shot for shot, with the newest version and see what difference that makes to both the shooting time and the finished film.

When I'm done, I plan to release not just the finished movie (in both versions of MS), but also the pre-vis version, the Celtx project, the screenplay, and the shooting script if anyone would be interested. And, perhaps, the original voice recordings, with all the retakes and bloopers.