When Is This Film Going To Be Finished?

Along with ‘How far through it are you now?’, this is the question that Chris and I hear most often.  If you’re to do a Google search and type in ‘Shadows of a Stranger’, one of Google’s auto-completing suggestions is ‘Shadows of a Stranger release date’, which seems to imply that a lot of people are doing searches on this one in the hope that the answer is secretly hanging out there somewhere.

The truth is we don’t actually have a definite answer to this question.  We do not have a specific date when we will be releasing this film.  We are aiming for the end of this year, and we sincerely hope that it will be finished by then.  When we feel we’ve broken its back (or broken our own backs) then we will be in a position to comfortably announce a completion date, but we’re not there yet.

The reason it’s taking so long is that the film was shot entirely on blue screen, and for nearly every single frame of film, the blue has to be replaced with a background generated in After Effects.  We are a small team so it’s an enormous workload.  Next time you watch a special fx laden film, have a look at the long list of credits at the end and you’ll see how these feature films are put out there a lot quicker than ours will be.

This film has taken so long look at the state of us!  Relax, this is just a frame showing our recent fx renderings (Barnaby Edwards as Jacob Marley).

The other issue working against us is that the script was a bit of a long one, so we’re talking about a film that’ll be at least a couple of hours in length.  That’ll teach me not to write such long scripts in the future!

Anyway, we are looking into us increasing our productivity soon, so we’ll hopefully be knocking out rendered scenes at a faster rate.  See?  We really are trying to get this thing out by Christmas.