OK, I’ll admit it—I suck, and I especially suck at estimation. A month ago I was sure I’d be done with the teaser and Act I by today, but as of 9:45 AM EDT this morning I still have a couple of effects shots left just for the teaser itself, and Act I is in a similar state of disarray. Bottom line, there won’t be anything released this weekend, and if all the stars align there might be a release next weekend (June 6-7).

Besides my crappy estimation skills, you can blame a variety of factors including some unexpected hardware problems—I had to replace all four motherboards on my mini fleet of computers used for the F/X rendering. The mobo replacement was time well spent though; the new boards are much better for overclocking and I’ve been able to extract another 30-40% speed improvement out of my Intel Q6600 Core 2 Quad CPUs, which over the lifetime of this project will literally shave off weeks of rendering time.

Over the past 2-1/2 years I’ve gone through three full revisions to the look & feel of the visual effects for this project, and this is the last time I’m going to do this. If I don’t make it all the way to the end this time around there won’t be a fourth time, so I am bound and determined to get this right on this pass. I hope you’ll agree with me when you see the teaser next weekend that the wait was worth it. Thanks…