CultRetro Reborn!

Howdy!

The all new www.CultRetro.com is online now with a new look and an improved shopping cart system that everyone should find much easier to use. And we're celebrating in style! For a VERY limited time ONLY, all DVDs on the AC web shop and CultRetro.com are 25% off!! That's all serials, TV collections, SF, horror AND original Bill Black productions, reduced in price by one-quarter!! Act fast, as this sale could end at any time!!

You'll also notice that we are expanding our social networking presence. We'll be adding more exclusive content to each social site in the coming weeks... so friend us on facebook, fav us on DeviantArt and follow us on twitter and you'll get to see more free stuff! And don't miss our Flickr photo gallery where we plan to add a new pic every day! You'll also find a link on our new photo gallery page that will take you to our Flickr photo stream where you can read our comments about the image, as well as make comments of your own. Cool!

Later,
John

Let's Try This Again!

So, uh... clearly I suck at blogging. Last update was January 12th and here we are at the end of September already. As you may have noticed, we've had a busy year! 2010 has so far seen the release of Stormy Tempest: Unmasked, Chapter II of Nightveil: The Sorcerer's Eye, Bloodfiend from Outer Space and Bikini Bloodbait, 3 Editions of Damsels in Distress and Stormy Tempest: Rogue Justice as well as the release of many, many DVD's!

So what's up next?

We have recently filmed a good portion of our latest Stormy Tempest adventure titled Stormy Tempest: Fight for the Future. We still have another day of shooting left to go, but what we have completed looks amazing so far. The plan is to finish the shoot in October or November and get part of it out by the end of the year.

The giantess epic The Ghost of Garganta continues to move forward... though slowly due to its massive effects requirement. But we still plan to release the first part by years end also.

We also have a few new projects in pre-production that we intend to tackle this fall and winter as the Florida weather cools off, but we'll have more to say about those as the time draws closer.

In the meantime we are ramping up our marketing efforts by expanding our social networking presence on MySpace, Twitter, Facebook, Flickr, DeviantArt and YouTube and adding people to our links pages, so please friend us, follow us, like us, favorite us and tell your friends about us!

We'll also be working on enhancing our own websites, making them easier to use with some additional fun (and FREE!) new features. We're sitting on a ton of photos and behind the scenes videos and it's time to share them with the world! Keep a close eye on CultRetro.com as it'll be getting a major facelift very soon!

Later,
John

Big progress!

Howdy folks!

So between working into the wee hours last night and pretty much all of today, I have managed to edit the ENTIRE set of sequences that occur on the jungle planet. This represents the majority of the film and is a good sign that we might actually be able to complete this thing by the end of the month.

As expected, and described in a previous post, we'll need to return to the woods for a few pick up shots of Clayton the Sleeper in order for all of the pieces to come together as they should, but the Stormy stuff is all GREAT! It's pretty fun to watch as it is right now, even without the special effects and audio work. So it just gets better and better from here.

Today I took this edit of the jungle footage to Bill to get his take on things. He always has his own ideas about what should be changed or adjusted, so now I have a few tweaks to do so that we're both happy with it. Not much though as we have now worked on several films together so I have a pretty good sense for what he likes to see. This is a good system as it provides the opportunity for an outside perspective of the scene that the editor has assembled. For example, I cut together the swordfight footage at a pace that I felt was both slow enough to understand and yet fast enough to be exciting... but after looking at the same footage for hours it becomes difficult to tell how the pacing "reads" to a first time viewer. So by showing it to Bill I get the first feedback on whether it was a little too fast or too slow or too confusing. But so far we're in pretty good shape and it's time to move on to editing the cockpit scenes to complete the first full edit of the movie. Still aiming for a full edit of the film to be complete by Friday.

Below is a shot of Stormy on the wrong end of a tazer-like device.

Later,

John

Fight Scenes!

Currently I've got about 8 solid minutes of the film completely edited. Doesn't sound like much on paper, but this footage accounts for the first three hours of filming that we did in the woods. It's also one of the major fight sequences of the film.

Fights take a long time to film. You end up with a lot of really great footage and you also end up throwing a lot of it away. The more you throw out, the faster the fight moves, which makes it more exciting and more cinematic. There's a lot of perfectly good footage that gets tossed, but it's mostly just variations of a particular move that you need. For example, if we have Stormy kick Clayton and he falls to the ground, you only need to see the kick once in the movie... but we may FILM it 4 or 5 times looking for an angle that makes the hit convincing, or that looks particularly powerful... or just looks cool in general. That's not to say that the ones that get tossed are bad, we just keep the BEST one for the movie.

We're getting better at this in stages. We once deliberately minimize fights scenes in an effort to avoid the mess of putting them together. The first big fight production was a major catfight in the upcoming Sangor Syndrome. Maria and another actress, both playing vampire babes, basically just started wailing on each other for hours. The result was about 2 and a half hours of footage that cuts together into a 4 minute vampire catifight. VERY cool, but slow to produce.

Nightveil: The Sorcerer's Eye has another major catfight... even more complicated since it's Maria Paris fighting against herself as she plays Nightveil, Blue Bulleteer and Alizarin Crimson all in battle at once in the big finale.

Stormy Tempest: Perils in the Past was the first time that we managed to do a major fight sequence in a reasonable amount of time...mostly due to necessity. We were at a comic book convention. It was the ONLY day we could POSSIBLY do the scene. We were down to one camera and about 1 hour of film... and we had no ENDING to the movie that we had been shooting all day. So we just went nuts, making it up as we went along with no plan whatsoever and no second chances... and it actually turned out to be pretty spectacular as Stormy faces off against three attackers at once. It was exactly the finale the film needed and we learned that if push comes to shove, we could film a fight sequence fast.

Getting braver, we next tackled Nyoka. Nyoka was designed to be ALL action, with minimal dialog and plot in the style of the old 40's cliffhangers. Nyoka has proven to be very popular and we're very proud of the results. It has the kind of sexy action that we now strive for in all future films.

So here we are with Stormy Tempest: Unmasked... and our goal this time around is to make a "Nyoka-style" film with lots of action and combat, but with the special effects and sci-fi craziness necessary to make a live action comic book. So far, it's working out pretty great!!!

I should also mention that one of the reasons why our fight scenes have improved so much lately is because Nicola Rae is FABULOUS! She doesn't actually know martial arts or anything, but she has training in stage combat and she's an EXCELLENT physical performer, plus she's gorgeous and over 6 feet tall in the Stormy boots. She'd look cool just reading the phone book... let alone kicking some bounty hunter's butt.

That's all for now. I'll add another picture to the blog tomorow.

Later,
John

Stormy Crushed

Hey folks. Nothing much to report. Tweaked a little of the footage and recorded some dialog for S.H.I.P., Stormy's A.I. co-pilot. Here's a picture though!

Later,
John

The Battle Begins

As you can see from the screenshot below, Stormy Tempest's first encounter with the bounty hunter Clayton the Sleeper does not go well.

Which reminds me, if you're afraid of spoilers you should probably skip this blog. I won't lay out for you every detail of what happens in the movie, but it's hard to talk about making the movie without talking about the movie itself.

Today I finally got into really editing together the movie. I managed to assemble about 5 minutes of the film I think. I'm starting with the jungle stuff, partially because it's the most critical part of the film requiring a lot of effects work... and also because it's the most fun!

We're going to try to populate the "alien jungle" with a few shots of dinosaur-like creatures and alien critters... not so much because the movie REQUIRES it, but just to see if we can pull it off. You never really know how "do-able" something is until you try to do it. Our first pass at CGI people goes all the way back to Nightveil: WitchWar, which was rough, but technology has much improved since then. We kicked it up a notch with Stormy Tempest: Attack of the Giantess during her battle with the flying rocketmen which turned out pretty decent. So now we'll see if we can do a few critters. Don't expect Avatar or Jurassic Park here though folks. If it doesn't work out, they may not appear in the final version of the film at all.

So today I focused on scenes where CGI critters may appear. Once that's complete, I can start planning the effects... how long the dino should appear and what it should be doing. I'll probably do a few of them myself, but I also plan to recruit Bill Marimon for some assistance (he did most of the CGI rendering for Planet of the Damned). I haven't told him that yet though. :)

No idea what will happen this weekend as always. I'll try to keep the updates going and try to keep pushing the film forward, but who knows. Next on my editing plate is a brief laser fight between Stormy and an invisible ("cloaked") Clayton. This laser battle occurs shortly before the scene you see below. Poor Stormy...

Later,
John

Cutting Complete!

Yee-Haw!! Finished cutting all of the footage into clips shortly after lunch today. 3 hours and 26 minutes of footage turned into who-knows-how-many-hundreds of individual cuts for a final film that will probably be 30 minutes long. Still have a lot of "day job" stuff to do though, so this is probably it for today. Tomorrow I can start putting this thing together. The plan is to begin with the jungle planet scenes first. I KNOW we have plenty of stuff for Clayton's cockpit scenes. Reshooting Stormy in her cockpit is not an option now that Nicola Rae is no longer in the state. We must make that work one way or another. So the only section of the movie that may require additional shooting is the stuff in the jungle.

We did a few minor reshoots for Nyoka and I suspect we may have to do a couple for this film as well. Nothing major. There's not a lot you can do without your lead actress, however, where we most often miss things is in the little transitional stuff. For example, in one shot Nyoka may be on the ground and in the following shot she's on her feet...but we never filmed her actually GETTING UP! So the solution is to cut away to a shot of Crimson Skull, creating an interval of time during which the viewer can understand that "oh, she must have stood up while the bad guy was talking". THIS is the reason why we prefer our bad guys to have full face masks! Pierson, our new bounty hunter, is ALSO out of state, but we can put ANYBODY in that costume and still get any transitional shots we may need. I made a cameo appearance in Nyoka as the Crimson Skull in 3 quick shots for the reasons described above. I may have to be Clayton the Bounty Hunter if we are missing similar shots this time... but there's no way to know what you might have missed until you start putting things together.

Below is a shot of the lovely Nicola Rae in her spiffy styrofoam cockpit! This is how it looks before we modify it, but once we add a bit of color correction, sound effects and the cool floating viewscreens, the cockpit takes on a new life and becomes much more visually interesting.

...but with legs like that onscreen, if you're hung up on the cheezy cockpit, I can't help you. :)

Later,
John