A lot of unkind and untrue things have been said about me while I was away, and I have no comment on any of them as that will only provoke people further.
This is not the place for a discussion of such things. If you have something to say to me, you can say it to my face, or take it into the Star Wars forum. This thread is about The Thief and the Cobbler.
I've been providing regular updates at SomethingAwful in the thread there. For those who missed them, let me fill you in.
The DVD is now complete. You can write me at [address removed] for more information.
Let us go back in time now one week. Here are the updates from the Somethingawful thread, in chronological order.
MAY 8, 2006:
The edit is complete now as far as I know. I don't rule out that I might find some small things in it to fix yet, but I'm currently calling it done. I'm rendering out the last few shots of part 2 now ... for some reason it says it's going to take 6 hours even though it's just a few shots. Not sure why.
... Make that 7 hours. And it's been rendering for an hour now. Oh well.
I have to create the animated menus now, which will all be very Thief in style. You'll see. Creating menus is always annoying because you're creating them before the structure of the DVD is really set, and they often have to be changed later once you decide, oh, we don't really need that feature or that, and the chapter listing is different etc.
The Kenneth Williams website has sent me the full audio of Richard Williams' abandoned 1963 animated film "Diary of a Madman" starring Kenneth Williams. A very ambitious almost feature-length project which Williams never animated, it was aired more recently as a BBC radio play.
I haven't actually listened to it apart from a few seconds ... I can't take THAT much of Kenneth Williams being fey.
WHAT I DID YESTERDAY
At the last minute, I had to make some music changes as well as redo entirely any sequence I had taken from the Princess and the Cobbler credits (Thief up a tree, Thief still has his hands, Thief in airplane). I must say they look good now, but it was a lot of work and a lot of rendering. I had to redraw a lot of mattes and generally spend more time on this than I should have.
At the last minute, I also went and replaced every shot in the first part of the film with a version reedited to remove color artifacts ... as I had done with the second half of the film a long time ago. Basically I had two files of every chapter of the film from the Japanese DVD ... one had nice clean color but problems with interlacing which showed up every four frames, and the other had no interlacing problems but had some blocky color artifacts with very saturated colors (especially red).
In both parts, I went in and cut out every fourth frame of the first version, and replaced them with frames from the second version. The result is a version which looks good, has no color artifacts and if there's any blockiness it only shows up every four frames, and is thus almost invisible.
I did this for the entire movie, which was a lot of copying and pasting. It's hard to explain but it does look good.
I've redone all the end credits for the film. I have a much longer list of people to thank now, and sorry to anyone I've forgotten. Anyone from the original crew (or who knew Richard) is listed as just their initials, which I thought was best to avoid naming anyone who didn't want to be named! The film is now dedicated to Richard at the end.
Credits now roll over music by Ralph Vaughan Williams and Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov rather than Robert Folk. You'll be hearing a lot more from those composers in this edit. Folk's music is still used where I was using material from Princess, or just liked a Folk track better than any other ideas I had.
The last edits I did were adding Korsakov music to the Thief in the war machine, and using a CD quality version of Scheherezade for most of the Thief going after the balls on the minaret.
Now it's on to rendering the whole thing out as a DVD. That'll take some time ....
ADDENDUM: Added back more of the Tack/Zigzag fight. It was too confusing the way I'd cut it down. I think what people are objecting to most is Tack punching and kicking Zigzag, so I just cut it so that Zigzag is attacking Tack, and Tack ties him up. Violence done to an innocent, which is punished ... always works psychologically. Anyway, it's very short now but makes sense.
I played with where One Eye's death should fall in the film, and I'd originally put it very early, but I know that that deflates what tension there's supposed to be. I wanted it to break up a very long Thief sequence, so what I did was actually break up the long Thief sequence further - I stop the long Thief sequence in the middle, kill One Eye, then return to it. So it's literally breaking up the Thief sequence!