Head Games

DVD is working now. It was all in the transcoding, which means nothing to 90% of you reading this, which equals roughly eleven people. It's really neat to see the menus and music and all that. No matter how the movie does its nice to know I could always get a job doing credits or promotional design.

Now that we're in the final day of the DVD I'm having to watch the movie OVER and OVER again. I watch for any errors etc. and then fix them and then watch it again and then fix them and then watch it again. It's starting to mess with my head. When we had the first screening with a small crew of us, I enjoyed it tremendously. I thought, story's good, it's got a neat visual look, the characters are easy to connect with, sure there are things I'd like to fix, but overall I'm happy with it. Now that I've watched it 20 more times and had to pick apart all the little problems, I hate it. Now I find myself thinking more along the lines of the story's weak, it looks like a home video, the characters are two dimensional, sure there are a few things I like, but overall I want to light myself on fire. It's so odd to have worked on something that can be measured in YEARS and then sit here with this DVD that can now be measured in MINUTES. This feeling has been the major documentation of this blog. These head games. One minute you love it, the next you hate it. Had a conversation with Eric (the guy that did the Blasto theme song, who you can check out at www.ericjames.com), about this phenomenon of being an artist. It's like at first you come up with an idea for something that your convinced is amazing. You work and toil to make it into something real with that same vision in your head, all the while loving it, hating it, loving it, hating it. Finally you've got a product, like some wrinkly little newborn baby that's all purple and gooey, and you show it off looking for some sort of validation. "Like me and what I'm doing, please." And it's like having a kid because those closest to you are going to say it's beautiful no matter what. Who goes up to a new mother and says her baby looks like Don Rickles has been taking a bath in grape Kool-Aid? There are bad movies and there are ugly babies. But, no matter how good or bad the product ends up being, the whole experience is just weird. And unforunately right now I'm in the middle of the "hate it" phase, where you question even ever having the vision in the first place. It's all head games. Too much time of lookin' and analyzing the same stuff. Just today my mom's boyfriend Tom said he saw the trailer and he's really excited to see it. Melanie Reevers' IM'ed me out of the blue and said the same thing. And there's about 20 - 30 other people who have said similar things. If all these people have seen footage from the movie and are excited to see it, then there's gotta be something there.

So what am I doing now besides complaining? Currently rendering what I believe to be the very last of the changes. From there I'm going to compress the movie down into one big old video file and make a few little changes to the DVD menus. From there I'm going to start this bad boy burning tonight and will have myself a finished Captain Blasto DVD. While all this rendering and burning is taking place, I will be working on the packaging artwork so that this all can be ready to send to be duplicated early next week.