Working out a few kinks

Progress report for the DVD of Three Musketeers of the West.

Three Musketeers of the West is a fun comedy that blends the characters Alexander Dumas' famous three musketeers stories introduced with the wild west as only the Spanish and Italian co-productions could imagine.

As hopeful as we were to have this film released last year, we had to push this title back.  We had terrible audio quality delivered to us back from the lab.  However, we still do plan on releasing the film and will be looking forward to getting it done in the next few months.

This film is more along the spirit of Now They Call Him Sacramento than the more traditional westerns like The Man From Oklahoma and The Last Gun.

With this film we have talked about trying something new.  The film will be sold exclusively for $9.95 at our store.  Hopefully our experiment will be a huge success and we can offer more films for much lower costs.

Stay tuned in the next few months for more information, production notes, and artwork from this film to creep onto the site.

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Print Quality

We checked the quality of our prints for two Eurospy films.

This post is to give you an overall update on two unreleased Ken Clark eurospy flicks, Tiffany Memorandum and Fuller Report.

Rick watched them and said they are very fun films, but they are definitely different than the first 3 we have released. As many of you know, Ken Clark does not play an actual CIA agent in these films. He is actually a civilian, and the plots find him pulled into the action.

Rick sadly noted that there were a lot of cut scenes in both Tiffany Memorandum and the Fuller Report. Both will require extensive work to get the cut scenes back into the print and make sure the audio blends successfully. We have, as far as we currently know, all of the cut scenes for each film.

Our goal is to not have to re-insert all the cut scenes for these films though. We have narrowed down the search of labs who have negatives for these films. There is one in Paris and one in Madrid. The negatives were stored in one of those labs. There was a fire about a decade ago in the Paris lab. If these were included in the lost films, we may be in possession of the last prints for both of these films. If that is the case, we will be forced to go through the ardous task of editting back in the scenes that were removed.

When we learn for sure which lab have (or had) the negatives, we will let you know which path we need to take.

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Last Minute changes

The release date is being pushed back a few weeks so we can fit in some last minute extras.

We are adding in some last minute features into the project and it will delay it for another couple of weeks. Our original plan was to release the DVD on September 19th, but we were going through some of our archives and found some great trailers and this other Eurospy film that just screamed to us to include in this project. So, the DVD will now have 6 trailers and the first 10 or so minutes of this other Eurospy film. The first ten minutes moves so fast and was so entertaining (well, the whole film was quite good and we will probably work it into our release schedule) that we all thought it would be a nice bonus feature for this DVD. I have put the first ten minutes of Special Mission Lady Chaplin on Google Video and our home page is displaying it. In those first ten minutes you can also see the worse cut scene in the whole movie. I could have strangled whoever cut this film print after working on this one scene for over a week. Both of the cuts made during that scene were at the most inopportune time they could have possibly chosen. Hopefully I have blended it in well enough that it is bearable. All the rest of the cut scenes were re-inserted with large success and are fairly hard to spot now. Enjoy the preview and keep your eye out for the pre-release sale sometime around the 18th or 19th of September.

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Next Phase

The cuts have been restored and we are moving on to the next part of the project.

All audio and video editing has been done for a while now and is now ready to be encoded into DVD compliant mpeg 2. We have scanned way more frames than we needed to, but I will throw a few of my favorites on the site after the project is in the hands of the replication lab. As of right now, it looks like we will make our September 19th release date for the project. The only thing that might affect this date, at this point, is if we throw on any more extra features. We have prepared several pages of information on this film and the artists that were involved in making the film (not only the actors and actresses, but also a noteworthy production crew member or two). We are currently preparing the subtitle track (in English) for this film, as this has been our most requested feature for the other two Eurospy releases.

I must say that the quality of this film has really made it a pleasure to work on. I loved the audio in this film (the dubbing was great, using many if not all of the actual artists voices). The music was very well done and impressed me how well it worked with the script and the plot. All in all, I think this film will be widely enjoyed upon release. We haven't set the pre-release date yet, but it should be at least a week before actual release.

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Cut Scenes

First step is to re-insert those cut scenes and restore the audio as far as possible.

There were 18 scenes cut from the print that we are re-inserting. Most are only a few seconds which were probably taken for promotional stills at some point. There are a few scenes however that must have been removed to make the film a certain length. We are going to reinsert all 18 back into the film to ensure it is the most complete product we can deliver. Currently the DVD looks to be released in September of 2006. We will have a definite date for release in a few weeks when all the cut scenes have been restored into the print and any video and audio editting has been finished.

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