Hello! Carl King here.
1.) I wanted to let all you backers know that I am — right now — working on authoring the Blu-Ray of Morgan Ågren’s Conundrum. I’m in the process of adding all the chapter markers, etc. After that, I will do some final testing on various platforms and order them. I had been delaying the authoring because I was worried about my master files not looking appropriate for an HD release, and considered re-grading them. That turned into a bunch of extra work and trying to get the files out of FCP7 and into Premiere and re-applying all my filters from scratch, and fixing any weird translation errors, and needing to worry about lots of little things. But after a bunch of back and forth, I decided to go with the same grade I used on the DVD. So — same exact edit / master files, but exporting full-resolution instead of 480i. Blah, blah, blah.
2.) We now have THREE HOURS of deleted scenes edited, but they WILL NOT appear on the Blu-Ray. They’ll be available as a separate download for purchase through Vimeo-On-Demand. HOWEVER, if you pledged for the Blu-Ray version, you’ll get that extra download (in HD) for FREE, because you were probably expecting all that material to be included. If we were to include that footage on the Blu-Ray along with the movie, it would just compress the material too much — and I’d prefer to save that bandwidth for higher quality.
3.) For those geeks who care, the Blu-Ray will be in 24p — instead of the original 30p that appeared on the DVD. 30p looks weird to me these days, so I converted it. I think there is one long panning shot that looks jumpy, due to the loss of frames. But that’s OK!
4.) Kickstarter T-Shirts will be shipping around the same time as the Blu-Rays.
5.) I just ordered the James Pitts Autographed Headshots today. Those will ship out along with the complete Carl King Care Package (books, et cetera) as soon as I get the autographs back from James Pitts himself.
6.) If you pledged for a DVD and have not received it, please send a message — and either I or Morgan will ship you one, depending on which continent you inhabit.
7.) The final bit of good news is that Morgan and I are, as of last month, finally making a profit on the movie. It’s small, but we’re in the black. We actually spent more than the Kickstarter funds on producing the movie, so it took a while to earn that back. I’ll actually be sending Morgan his first check for DVD / Vimeo Sales very soon — so hopefully Alvin is still young enough to enjoy a mountain of Legos by then.
Thank you very much for your continued support of this movie, and be sure to follow Morgan’s new musical projects. (morganagren.com)
Carl King
carlkingdom.com