THE DVD's HAVE ARRIVED!!!

The DVD's of The Creature from Lake Michigan have finally arrived. That means...dare I say it? The Creature is...DONE! After 21 years, it's finished with only two days to spare until the anniversary of the completion of principle photography!

WOW. That's a load off.

Chapters, Paperwork and Missing Persons

Last night I created still images to be the chapter markers for the DVD. It was a little tedious to do, but one of the last remaining steps in getting the DVD finished. Now all I have left to do is finish the commentary track, author the final DVD and then burn the thing for the duplication guys.

Wow, I guess that's still quite a bit. A few more days, but getting closer.

I was going through some boxes of Creature stuff in the basement and came across a bunch of miscellaneous notes. It's fun to read back through all this stuff and see what I was thinking at the time.

There were two notes that were particularly fun. One was a journal entry from the one-year-anniversary of the start of shooting and the other was our first report to the film's investors, in which we noted that the film was more than a year behind schedule and had gone over budget by... $10.64

I'll post some excerpts tomorrow.

My hunt for actors and crew members continues. There are a couple of folks who are proving devilishly difficult to find. I wouldn't mind so much except that there are a few tantalizing clues to their locations scattered about the vast Internet, but all of them seem to be dead ends. Maybe I will start printing their pictures on milk cartons.

Day Is Now Night!

Last night, I fixed the final remaining "day for night" shots from the opening sequence of the Creature, and it only took 21 years.

See, back in October of 1989, we had to shoot a scene where gangsters drag a guy out onto a pier to give him a pair of "cement overshoes". Of course, this kind of work is best done at night, but we didn't have a lighting package scheduled for the shoot and we only had a skeleton crew that day, so we decided to do it "day for night" by putting a filter on the lens that was supposed to make the blue sky look dark. A production team with a real budget and shooting schedule would have shot test footage to make sure the effect worked, but...
Because we were shooting film, we didn't realize until days later (when the film came back from the lab) that the effect hadn't worked at all, so it just looked like the gangsters were doing their dirty work in broad daylight. We had no idea how to fix the problem and didn't have any money for a re-shoot, so we just added fixing the scene to our growing list of "deal with it later" issues, where it stayed until last night.

Jim Barrett, the engineer at Downstream Digital where I did the film transfer, was able to fix a bunch of the other shots four years ago, but there were a handful that still looked like daylight--mostly close-ups of the lead actor from the sequence Bob Hartley, who played Patrick. Anyway, last night I made mattes for the shots and darkened them appropriately. Now it looks like it was supposed to. Finally!