***UPDATE ON MOUNTAINS OF MADNESS***
Okay gang, here's the report from WonderCon 2016.
My apologies first of all for how late this is. We have guests for a garden party at my house so I've been busier than a one legged guy in a butt kicking contest yesterday and today trying to get the house and the setup ready. I still haven't downloaded the video yet but I will tomorrow afternoon. I've got guests showing up in half an hour so this will be brief.
First the bad news (not really that bad...)
They did not allow videotaping of the previews. I videotaped the panel but the sound came out terrible. I'm working on it and will release it on Youtube with a link ASAP as I mentioned.
Tom was not present. At least I didn't see him. But I thought about that for a while and it kinda made sense. I should have expected that as he wasn't on the H.P. Lovecraft panel. Not only that but if you've ever been to one of these ComicCon or WonderCon shows, it's really a bunch of young people (and not so young) in costumes of their favorite comic characters. Kinda strange. The guys on the panel were animators and script writers.
So here's how it went. I sat in on the end of the previous panel. The attendance was about 60 or 70 people. In looking in on the other panels in the different convention rooms I noticed that the average attendance was about that. 50 or 60. When the panel concluded and the H.P. Lovecraft panel came in, another 60 people came in. So the room had about 120 people in it. That was good news #1. A lot of interest in H.P. Lovecraft. After the introductions of the panel they got in to describing H.P. Lovecraft and his stories. They made an interesting statement about the author. No one knew him when he was alive. He was never recognized for his stories during his lifetime. It has only been lately that a huge interest in his works has developed. His parents both died in an insane assylum and it had a dramatic effect on his storywriting. In his novels, there were no good guys at the end saving the day. It was horror story writing in the sense of fear of the unknown or unknowable. The theme of the panel discussion was entitled "Describing the Indescribable - Adapting the Works of H.P. Lovecraft." The panel described how difficult it was to film a Lovecraft novel because the story was all about the alien or monster and there was no character development per se. That's why it works more with animation and probably why Tom Coleman chose to produce an animated version of Mountains of Madness.
As far as the clip of Mountains of Madness: when the panel chairman announced the preview of Mountains of Madness (there were other previews of different H.P. Lovecraft works), all of the panel members ran off the stage and grabbed chairs in the audience to see it on the two huge projection screens on either side of the stage. That was good news #2. The industry guys were excited about it. The clip itself was about one minute long and it showed a scene of one of the characters running to escape from the monster. It was pretty average animation that was on par with the animation style of the old TV Series "Johnny Quest."
What was crazy was what happened at the end of it when a chasm opens up and the character leaps for the other end of the chasm and manages to barely hold on to the edge of the chasm. So he's hanging there and his partner who was yelling at him to jump to his side of the chasm reaches out to give hime a hand and something horrible happens to him. You never expected it and it fits the style of H.P. Lovecraft.
You'll have to watch the clip on the MountainsofMadness Facebook page and see for yourself. I do not know when they will release it but it will probably be soon, if it hasn't already happened. For the type of movie it was fairly well done but with the clip only a minute long, it was too hard to tell too much of anything, other than it will probably have a large audience. It will, no doubt, come to be a cult classic when it's finished.
The panel announced that the release of the movie will be in June.
That's good because it will be within the Q2 financials that cover April thru June.
It was worth it seeing the preview. I wasn't disappointed. I think it's going to be a big macabre film noir animation and it will probably do very well in either syndication or internet sales. I'm not sure how Tom is going to market it but I'm sure he's got all of that figured out already.
My guests are here so i have to go. Sorry but a busy weekend. More later.
