It was indeed a labor of love. The Phantom of the Opera introduced me to the world of musicals -- and it wasn't even the original cast recording I listened to first, but a second-rate recording that came with a magazine about musicals. I fell in love with the music, and when my cousin played the original cast recording for me, I fell in love with the singing. When the movie was released, it was like a dream come true despite the subpar singing (and I'm embarrassed to say I saw it six times in theaters, the same number of times I saw The Return of the King and Revenge of the Sith in theaters though as a movie it doesn't come close to those two). And when I finally saw the stage musical on Broadway last year, I was in heaven -- or almost, because to be honest it didn't quite meet all my expectations.

Now, the recent movie of The Producers -- that's the way a movie musical should be made (and I know I'm going to get lots of argument on this). Great singing, great acting. Those are the things that really count.

As much of a fan as I am of Andrew Lloyd Webber's vision of Phantom, I am also a huge fan of the Phantom story in general and I would like very much to see a movie version based on the original novel by Gaston Leroux during my lifetime. No, scratch that -- I really hope I can make such a movie. And I've also been thinking that a TV series about the Phantom's life before the opera (perhaps partially inspired by Susan Kay's novel but not entirely) would be a great idea.

If I have time (and HDD space) during the summer, I might try reworking this using uncompressed sources, and re-rotoscoping the swordfight/fireball scene. (Any tips on how to improve that would be greatly appreciated. As it is, it's a lightsaber-like effect, cycling through the red-yellow palate to avoid a static look (not that it worked, really); how might I rotoscope an actual flaming sword (like the one the Witchking had in the extended ROTK)?

I know that frameserving original DVD-MPEG2 files using AviSynth would give the best-quality sources (short of converting them to uncompressed RGB AVI files) -- thing is, I made this edit with a resolution of 640x272, which is the resolution at which I encoded my source XviD file (with the black bars cropped away). Does anyone know of a way to change the dimensions of a Premiere project (so that I can just substitute my source files with the anamorphic DVD files) while still keeping all the edits intact? (I don't think Premiere allows you to change the dimensions once you've created a project.)