Lalle Larsson: a nightmare before christmas

27-12-2008:
Lalle Larsson describes hos tale of woe... oh to be a musician... some nice lessons to be learned.



order the dvd
Lalle says:

Seasons greetings from Sweden,

Hope you are all having a great holiday.


* NIGHTMARE BEFORE CHRISTMAS...

The Seven Deadly Pieces DVD is delayed again.

Here's the whole story:

This project has been a nightmare from beginning to end.
And now everytime we think it's all ready to print, some unexpected problem comes along. It's like a curse...someone doesn't like my sins... ;-)

The last month we have made about 15 different master DVD's to send to the pressing plant. None of them worked.

Everytime we burn a master we have to watch through almost four hours of material only to find different mistakes, chapters jumping etc... things that have worked before, in the computer, but for some reason doesn't work now. We just couldn't believe it!

In one month we have re-buildt the whole DVD twice from scratch, trying to find the bug in the program, re-installing the film program, updating, burning out new masters. Watch through them all only to find that it still doesn't work.

When everything felt completely hopeless we tried other things.
To make sure that every file was OK we re-coded the stuff, and even re-wrote all the subtitles and put them in again.

Now we finally had a working master, except that when we watched through several hours of the new DVD master we noticed that the subtitles were taken from the old translation, so we had to change some of that again. It's an easy mistake for one person to do working tired in the middle of the night.

After hours of rendering and sleepless nights we had a DVD with the right subtitles that hopefully worked. Everyday was a deadline and the pressing plant and pre-orders were waiting.

After another three hours of watching the DVD that I received from Per (the guy doing all the work) it all seemed to work except that the Ominox bonus footage jumped and couldn't be watched. Before that it was the documentary that didn't work so at least the bug had changed place...

Anyway, after several days and with some kind advice from knowledgeable people on the internet we managed to fix any problem that had to do with double layer breaks and commands etc...

The last master I received a couple of days ago couldn't really play in my DVD-player, but my player is old so we checked it in another player only to find another problem with the head menu button going to the wrong page. And one of the buttons had the wrong colour.
All easy problems to fix though. I will receive another master tomorrow. Another 4 hours to watch through... but it feels as if it could actually work now. At least we know what to do now. If we don't get attacked by a poltergeist or something... wouldn't be surprised...

As if that's not enough, right before I was going to get some test prints of the booklets and artwork, the pressing plant contacted me and had problems with some of the files we sent them, so we had to change that for them to be able to print. Hopefully that is sorted by now.

Now it's holiday so I haven't heard from the plant. If everything works tomorrow we will get the master to the pressing plant on Monday. Then it is up to them how quick they can print it. Shouldn't take long since they have all the material then, if nothing goes wrong at the plant. Feels like anything can happen now.

If everything goes according to plan there will be a release party with live-music in January, but I'm pretty much on hold before I know that everything works and when I will get the DVD's... my hands are tied at the moment.

That's where we are right now. We are working on this everyday now and hope to get it out to you as soon as possible.

I apologize to those of you who have pre-ordered the DVD, sorry about the delay, we are doing our best. We were expecting it to be out in early December but ran into a lot of unexpected trouble.

You will be notified by mail as soon as the DVD has been posted to you.

We are as excited as you are about finally holding the DVD in our hands. You can anytime you like get your money back into your account via paypal if you don't want to wait. Just let me know.

It's been so frustrating and several times we have almost given up. I would like to give a big thank you to Per Christoffersson for not shooting himself throughout this project =)

I am alive too, so I guess I'm managing quite well too... ;-)
The good news is that it is going to be a fu#¤%¤ng great DVD and I am very proud of the result.

Again thank you all for the support!
Without you and my own vision and determination I would have given up a long time ago. Thanks!

Happy New Year and hope that 2009 will be an exciting year for all of us!

Peace,
Lalle Larsson