2006 Retrospective Blog Part 2
Sunday, January 21, 2007 (06:50:43)
Posted by cfauteux
2006 was an incredible year for all of us at Golden Shower Studios. We produced the most movies we ever have in a single year. We ll, the reviews are in and Christian Fauteux, the executive producer, creator, editor and director of our productions has written a special retrospective blog looking back on this special year.
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Before I get started, Star Track 20 our milestone Holiday special is coming together nicely. The actual film is nearly edited, we just need a few weeks to render out the CGI. I’ll be the first to tell you that this episode is something special. It blends everything I’ve loved about Star Track from the start. It will be released February 14 as scheduled.
Part 2
When we completed episode 17, we were ready to take a break from Star Track for a little while, perhaps take the summer off to look at other possible ventures. We had to look no further than our first franchise of films. 1999’s poorly received Hiroshima Lightning! Hiroshima Lightning was created by me (Christian Fauteux) and David Devine. We made about 10 of them from 1999-2002 at which point Star Track began thus eliminating the very tired and stagnant Hiroshima Lightning franchise.
Ture Gustafson was thrilled at the prospect of a Kung Fu-esque comedy, and this inspired me to write an off the wall “prequel†to the original Hiroshima Lightning. Originally entitled simply “Beginningsâ€, the movie was initially planned to be a 3 part mini series that would be released throughout the rest of the year. This idea was scrapped when the script was finally written. New faces would replace the old characters. Exciting locales and thrilling fight scenes were planned! It all turned out so well. We began pre production for Hiroshima Lightning Beginnings in June 2006 and planned on shooting it sometime in July…or when we could get everyone together for a full day of shooting.
Our first mission was to synthesize blood. Ture Gustafson was quick to jump at the opportunity. My kitchen was designated as his lab of insanity for our initial tests. After a few tries we had it.
The next big step for me was finally getting into Adobe Premiere Pro 2.0 for Video Editing. Prior to Hiroshima Lightning, I would only use Pinnacle Studio 9, a poor program. I’m a stubborn person, but Hiroshima Lightning motivated me to make the jump to Premiere. Seeing as Hiroshima Lighting would need Lightning, this forced me to learn Premiere. After a few tests, I was comfortable enough to use the program, but I’ll admit, I was a little intimidated.
The end of July fast approached and our shooting date came. We all met up at my place for the shoot. It was a scorcher that day, and the locale I had scoped out with Ture was arid. It was an old sand quarry about 35 minutes West of Montreal. My sister prepared lots of sandwiched, I supplied the beer as usual and we were off! The shoot was a success in my opinion. Aside from some nasty black flies at the end of the day, everything went amazing. Dev Birdi spent $150 on steaks that night and we all ate like kings.
After an arduous month of work, editing and trying to find true love (which I still haven’t found), Hiroshima Lightning Beginnings was released. We had such large crowds for our premiere we had to spread it out over 2 weekends! We had another success under our belts, and I was confident that we could now blow peoples socks off with Star Track. Little did everyone know that Ture, Erik Kuras and I had been hard at work on Star Track throughout the Beginnings process.
Ture had decided that our old set had to go. My crappy cardboard consoles wouldn’t do. The Determined German took it upon himself to buy masses of lumber and construct amazingly accurate consoles. Meanwhile, Erik Kuras, our CGI artist was hard at work on episode 18. My script called for a large scale battle over Kronos. I had no idea what was to come!
Stay tuned for the final installment in my 2006 Retrospective Blog!