Earlier, I'd gone out to the garage and found a file with Creature materials, so I have that now - also found the cassette of our second preview screening with the temp track - but it's missing the entire second half and is running slow. But I think I'll put a clip on the DVD as an extra, just so everyone can hear the laughs this got in the first five minutes.
What's funny is that as it goes along you can hear us losing the audience - it's plain as day. Part of that is because for the second screening I put some extra stuff in, none of which worked, but mostly there were no sfx at all and that really deadened everything and the temp track was sparse. But that opening five minutes, you'd have thought we were gonna be a big hit. I believe what Marshall has done to help is pretty great and it moves much faster now. I wish the Creature's song was on there, because I know that brought down the house.
But the news is we're not locked yet because the DVD, which I'd had great difficulty finding in the garage, and from which we pulled Dirty Harry and a few other shots, looked weird to me and that's because it was some cheeseball knock-off DVD - tonight I found the real one and looked at it and it's much better. The knockoff one has a stretched image, horrible color, and however they made that transfer was completely inept and probably just copied horribly from the other DVD. So, I'm bringing the good DVD to Marshall in the morning and we may end up using more shots from it, as the clarity is just so much better than the 3/4" quality. He's clever about how he does it, so it's not terribly jarring, and shots or scenes can only be used where the re-cut is exactly the same as my original, which is the case on several scenes - almost the entire planet scene is exactly the same until the very end, and I think the final ten minutes of the film is exactly the same, and I'm hoping the Creature's song is, too.
