With "Merchant of Death" we left the comedy genre and created a darker war/action movie.

A few weeks after we had finished "The FEARless Movie", we already started with the very early concepts of a new project. At this time it had the codename "Bob".
During the following months, we created characters, the storyline and began to set us some goals we wanted to accomplish.

At some point we realized that this project evolved to something quite "insane". Because there was (and still is) no Battlefield 2 modification which would have allowed us to shoot the scenes the way we wanted to.
This meant that we literally had to learn how to modify Battlefield 2. We want to thank everyone from bfeditor.org for their help, especially mschoeldgen.

So for the following 3 months, I have then been working on our own modification which contained everything we required to shoot the scenes on our gameserver.
This was definitly the biggest challange we faced during the production of this movie.

Even though we always had too less actors, those we had were just awesome. And we managed to finish the shootings in just 2 months.
Right after each shootingday/evening, I have always been working on the scenes we finished. This allowed us to re-shoot scenes when required and so, the movie progressed nicely.

About 2 weeks after the last shooting, we already posessed a rough cut of the entire movie.
The next 4 months we were working on the music, editing, special effects (CGI) and the voice recordings.

The "voices" are essential for a movie like "Merchant of Death". And we want to thank Martin Staufenberg (aka. psychomyst) for his help.
He managed to get many very, very talanted women and men to bring our characters, and our movie, to life with their voices.

This was the most frustrating part of the production. Because it was nearly impossible to find voice actors for some of the characters.
But finally, we did it.

Our ToDo list is empty, the movie compressed and uploaded to our hosters.

And now we wish you much fun with Merchant of Death, and we are looking forward to your feedback  in our forums.

Today we are pleased to announce the release of the "Merchant of Death - Trailer" !

The production of the movie is nearly finished, we are only missing a few voice recordings for which are are looking for voice talents right now.

We are confident that the final movie will be released sometime in May 2009.

• video stream 1: gamerztheatre.com
• video stream 2: vimeo.com
• download 1: rapidshare.com
• download 2: filefront.com

On Sunday the 16. November we started with the shooting for our new movie called "Merchant Of Death".

During the last 6 weeks we had 8 shootings which took about 15 hours in total. Now we are happy to announce that on Sunday the 21. December we sucessfully recorded the last scene.

We would like to thank our crew for all the time they spent on this project. Even though there happened some annoying things (cars exploded which shouldnt, etc. ), it was really great fun to make this movie.

During the time we shot the movie, I was constantly capturing and editing the finished scenes.
Because of this, ~85% of the movie are allready edited.
I estimate that I will finish this process during the next 7 to 10 days.

After this only the voicerecordings, backgroundmusic and some tweaks to the volume levels and the cuts are missing.

A release of "Merchant of Death" in mid. February should be possible.

Expect more News Updates during the next weeks.

Beepa released a new version of FRAPS which is available for download on fraps.com.

Changelog Version 2.9.5 - 10th Sep 2008

• Added Stereo & Multichannel recording options for Direct Stream audio in Vista
• Added support for many DDRAW games running in windowed mode
• Added support for games that use multiple swapchains in D3D9
• Added large size icon for Vista
• Fixed slow video capture speeds recording many older DDRAW games
• Fixed capture crash for DDRAW games in XP SP3
• Fixed misaligned audio with Vista Direct Stream when sound was silent
• Fixed 64-bit OpenGL apps not being detected
• Fixed long delay starting video capture on some Vista configurations
• Fixed crash in Fraps if video capture key pressed quickly in succession
• Fixed Fraps exit dialog appearing at random intervals
• Fixed "This program might not have installed correctly" error in Vista
• Fixed corrupted volume slider in Vista when Fraps loaded
• Fixed scrambled colors when recording in 8-bit and 16-bit from some older games
• Fixed crash loading levels in Wolfenstein: Enemy Territory

This means that we are currently writing the storyline, creating characters and their textlines.
I can not go into detail regarding the story, but it will be (again) completely different from what you have seen in our previous movies.
It will contain massive action scenes, driven by a realistic story and some great characters.
It will not be the usual US-Marine Corps against Middle East Coalition (MEC) "Terrorists".
Perpare for something "NEW".

In order to create a totally new Battlefield 2 Machinima, we have to build "our own mod", which will contain all the required modifications.
There will be "new models" created just for this movie, modified vehicles and one or 2 maps (which we did some massive modifications on), where the movie shooting will take place.
No, i will not tell you which map it is.
All i say is that it is a community map, which many of you have not seen before.

So you can see that we (again) put great efforts in our movie.

I estimate that the pre-production process will be finished in about 2 months.
After that we will start to organize the film-shooting, where we hope that many of our fans join the project as actors for the film-shooting and that some again bring the characters to life by using their voice.

Stay tuned!
More updates will follow during the next weeks.

::discuss::