So, quickly, while she's out, I'll go over the test screening. I was up until 2am on Thursday working on the first half (which is basically Sup1) quickly doing work on the fx that were necessary to the plot. We're talking really bad fx (like the smear job under the Landspeeder in the original Star Wars) and then left it to render the mpeg2. My son decided to get up at 6am the next morning, so that was 4 hours of sleep, but I scheduled friday off from work, so I got to do more sloppy fx work on part 2 all day. I spent too much time polishing the end, so I was up until 3am. I left it rendering, and set my alarm for 7:30. So after another 4 hours of sleep I started on the audio mix of disc 1 Saturday morning. The best I could do is blend some tracks together, and for major edits where clips were re-arranged (like the destruction of krypton sequence) I just removed the surround sound track which had most of the original music, keeping the center channel, and found a good place to lay down the music only track. I'm so glad they provided the isolated score on Sup1 dvd. There were still some harsh audio transitions, and I'm sure the levels fluxuated a lot, but I just didn't have the time to rewatch the whole thing, so I rendered the audio and loaded them into Adobe Encore to make the DVD. The program muxed the audio and video together and then I get a "Unknown Error -1". WTF??? A quick search for an answer on the Adobe forums came up with nothing useful. The movie marathon started at noon, and here I was at home at 11 with no superman. So I searched around and found DVD Lab Pro that I had installed a long time ago. Loaded it up and started the muxing process which took so much longer than with Encore. But it did finish, and I left my house at 11:45 and made it to the location just at noon. First on the movie marathon was Deleted Magic, which everyone enjoyed. I set my computer up in another room and started burning the first disc. Then I had an intemission of 1/2 hour to let more people arrive. We ended up with 8 people at the test screening. I gave a little introduction on Fan Edits, a quick history of the making of the first two Superman movies, and what I was doing with them. Two of the people had seen the both movies in the last few years, everyone else hadn't seen them in a long time. That was perfect. So after explaining that most of the effects were only temporary and that the audio mix will probably be horrendous, I started the showing. I hung around for the Krypton scenes, and they looked great on the 8 foot screen.
I snuck back to work on the audio for disc 2. Unfortunately Sup2 dvd doesn't come with an isolated music track, so I had to fill in the major edits with music from Sup1. The ending took the most work because I was replacing almost all of the audio, and even had ten new lines of dialog that I wanted to blend in. The rest of the movie could survive a bad audo mix. But I was afraid the new ending would fall apart if it was obvious that it wasn't a scene from the original films. Time flew by way too quickly and the first half of SoJ was done and I still hadn't rendered the audio for disc 2. So I threw on a disc of short film intermissions that I had put together, and started rendering. I had a fresh disc about 1/2 hour later and was glad to be able to sit down and watch it all myself.
Although I'm very happy with the way the first half turned out, after seeing it on a big screen I realized the second half is now my favorite. Out of the two, the second movie had the most room for improvement, and at a lean, mean 74 minutes, it works very well. Although it still has its share of levity, it is mostly dark as hell. And the new ending... well, I can't describe it as a happy one. There's no time travel or amnesia kiss in this movie. Things aren't neatly put back to the way they were. At best the mood is more of a melancholy hopefulness, sort of like the end of Empire Strikes Back.
The greatest thing was that no one noticed that the new footage didn't belong, except for the actor himself and my wife, who was present during taping. Until we started giggling uncontrollably, no one knew anything was up. They were just going with it.
The only suggestions I got from the audience was the audio levels in a few spots (which I expected), and fixing some rough edits, which are already planned with FX. They said it moved along at a good pace and except for one cut plot point, which I was hoping no one would pick up on, everything made sense. I'm sure I can fix that with some more FX work, although it will take some work. But everyone enjoyed it, and even the people that had seen it recently weren't that sure of what I changed. One person, who wasn't a big fan of the original superman movies said that he really liked it, especially Superman 2 (which he HATED in the theatre).
So enough congratulating myself... I'll be back to work next week. I'm actually going to enjoy the break!
-T