I finally got to see the new menus in action today and I think they look incredible.  They look a bit naff and Nintendo-esque in screengrabs, but in motion they're very exciting and slick.  Excellent stuff.

I'd love to see them do a similar CGI fly-through around the Collinwood sets - wouldn't that be cool?  All of Sy Tomashoff's blueprints still exist, so they could recreate it perfectly.

A lot of it is down to dressing, grading, lenses.  Looking at the 1991 series, there's a lot of times when just framing to avoid the sky would have helped...

Also, the episodes are graded with very high saturation - very typical for the time - but it doesn't help with the sunny vibe.  Colour grading is one area which has become a lot more expressive and adventurous in recent years, and that NY Post article suggested that they were going to be very dynamic with colour, etc.

Grade it to look stormy and matte in some ominous skies and it can easily look authentic and very atmospheric.

And add a tower! [clutching at straws]

In fairness, it's a beautiful model... it's just lit and shot appallingly.  With more sympathetic lighting and dressing, and better lensing, it could have looked beautiful.

Still, as that thing apparently cost $35,000 over a decade ago, let's hope that the bean counters nix any more overpriced doll's houses

I'd say that the Old House is being done elsewhere - there's no way they could pack that material and Collinwood's scenes into less than a week of shooting.  It's impossible.

TBH, I think we might even see a tower - that'd be very easy to add digitally.  Thinking of it, there are lots of nifty digital fixes they could do... There's a walkway on the house that overlooks the vista of Los Angeles that they avoided showing in 1991 for obvious reasons - how amazing would that look with a cliff and the Atlantic dropped in?

Visit www.collinwood.net to learn of the new(ish) location for Collinwood...

It looks like MB's got a nice coincidental birthday present

According to a recent interview in the UK's "Guardian" newspaper, John Wells makes it policy on all his shows to have a production member monitoring fan-sites.  So yeah, we're all being watched.



 

Yeah, gotta love "Black Books".  I don't know if it plays in the States, but everyone should check it out if they can...

"You're just a beard with an idiot hanging off it..."

 

This is just my opinion but I would like think there are probably several million fans that constitute Dark Shadows' fan base. I do not think if DCP told the WB that its loyal audience consisted of only 50,000 individuals, that they would have gotten to first base on this project.

Would that it was true, but there simply aren't those numbers out there.  Look at the merchandise sales, convention attendance figures, Sci-Fi viewing figures, and you'll see that "Dark Shadows" is very much a fringe fandom.  Moreover, the existing fans by and large aren't the demographic group WB will be pitching a new show to.

My view is that the WB have bought DS for its franchise potential - it's clear that the format can appeal to a young audience, and the massive existing library of scripts offers a stronger thematic base than an entirely new show would.