Off-season, 2005.

It's been a long summer, filled with great anime conventions from coast to coast. This year we managed to get to all of the major ones, from Expo to Otakon, and the points in between. And then all of a sudden it was over: summers fly, winters walk.

Now it's time to look ahead to next year, working on new projects and hopefully giving a bit more attention to the blog. There's a lot of time where there's just nothing going on, and when there is, we're too busy. Blogger's remorse.

The first thing on our plate is getting a finished version of City Hunter on Fire. After its less-than-stellar reception at ACen (I seem to recall "Well, it wasn't the worst thing I've ever seen," being the best review), I've been hesitant returning to it for cleaning up. It has several flaws, though fundamentally it's not the material so much as the presentation. Most prominently is that the muddiness of the audio, especially on a large-room system but equally damaging are points left from the original where there is just no action: things like ten-second pans across a view from a window. Looking at the problem with fresh eyes makes you begin to understand why Macek cut bizarre snatches of apparently-inconsequential shots from Robotech's parent shows.

To this end, we sat down with the FCE files over the weekend and made some cuts, mostly non-dialogue snippets that probably won't be missed, or even noticed. When that version is done we will clean up the audio with a mind for better-than-home-tv play. These are the important lessons; it's been a long time and so many rules have changed since the titular Bunch of Guys with a VCR days.

We'll also be working on new projects for 2006...