Precious Metalhead #10: Progress, Inflation, FRN Fire, Sequels, Downcount
June 8th, 2011
Greetings fans – we’ve had a busy month. Here’s the latest!
Movie Progress
Movie production is cooking along on all burners now. We have a fully-animated test movie in place – it’s rough as all get-out, but it’s a recognizable and interesting movie already. And, in a couple of weeks at PorcFest, we’ll be premiering a full-quality sequence from the movie as well as a trailer. It is great to see the full-quality footage come through, after months of looking at test clips!
Also now that we have a full pseudo-movie, we are able to work out the soundscape – we’ve started scoring, and are booking bands for the key scenes – we are still looking for one or two awesome songs for the car chase and the love scene.
We are very optimistic to get this film up and running for our September Sundance deadline. We also are in discussions for some secret celebrity cameo action – more when that is public!
I don’t talk much about our technology, but for the geeks among you, this kind of animation requires quite an infrastructure. We are just about to add another 12 Terabytes of storage for render frames – now that we are increasing render quality, bit depth, and layers, each frame of the movie is 20-40 Megabytes, and there’s 24 frames per second. You do the math!
On the distribution front, we are working out the budget for a 15-city theater release… More to come.
Inflation Update
When we ran the numbers for this film in 2009, we wanted to create an inflation scenario that was very bad, but not hyperinflationary. So, we set 2019 prices to be 10 times what they were in 2009. Since then, silver has moved to $36 today, from $12 in 2009 – better put, the dollar is worth a third of what it was vs. silver. This can be attributed to many things, but it certainly does imply that our original calculations were not bad enough. So… I’m redoing the price structures for the movie – which means re-voicing some lines and changing some signs. The price of dinner and some beers will still be two pieces of silver, but we can justifiably make everything worse in terms of US dollars. My current plan is to make 2019 prices 20 times what they are now. Let’s hope it’s not that bad!
FRN Fire
Which reminds me, we’re sponsoring the bonfires at Porcfest this year. And on Friday night, we are sponsoring a special to show what you really think of fiat currency. Actually, any dollars you burn should be your own and at your own risk… but we’re going to iParty to get some equally-fake dollars for fun.
Sequels
Story and script development take a long time, and really need to be started very early in the process. So… we’re already playing through some top-secret sequel story treatments. I’m also reading a lot of comics and books to find other similarly-principled stories that would animate well. This way, if Silver Circle can pay its bills, then we’ll be ready to start the next production right away.
So if you have any bright ideas or leads, please send them my way!
Metal Band of the month: Downcount
This month’s Metal band is Downcount, led up by Doug Kendall. He’s one of these Facebook friends who I really want to meet someday. They have an awesome self-produced CD called “Soundtrack of the Revolution” and here’s their song “Free – The People Fight Back”
Have a great month y’all – we should have some amazing progress this summer!
