We spent the late fall of 2004 and early winter of 2005 working on a few new projects, namely our new motion picture: THE LOST PRINCESS and a new dungeon-museum we are erecting at the Sterling Renaissance Festival for the summer of 2005.

While still at the Carolina Renaissance Festival Duncan Pace, of the London Broil Show, and I spent many nights and hundreds of hours editing THE LOST PRINCESS. Along with moral and tech support from LOUIS SKARADEK, also of the London Broil Show, we were able to transform almost 30 hours of "raw" footage into a more than an hour romp in the world of Don Juan and Miguel. While many people will tell you that editing can be quite tedious, there is a great magic in seeing a story come together, very rewarding! We ended up with a very nice "first edit", parts of this picture make me laugh out loud.
Meanwhile — Jose was working with Steve Parke on the poster and card design for THE LOST PRINCESS. These should be completed during the Arizona festival. He also spent time on plans for our new Dungeon Museum for the Sterling Renaissance festival.

After finishing up in Carolina I went to "Tune Town", near the Texas Renaissance Festival to start Jim Hancock, of the Burley Minstrels, on his part of the picture project — sound! Jim, as Jimusic Digital Recording Studios, was in charge of the audio recording during the shoot of LOST PRINCESS. He is also in charge of post sound editing, foley and engineering, no small task. I also spoke with Martha Gay of Cantiga of some ideas regarding scoring the picture.

Upon returning home to Arizona for the Holiday season, I met with Jose and showed him our first edit. He suggested some changes which we sent on to Duncan, who was wintering in Florida.

Jose and I performed at the Turning Stone Casino near Syracuse New York on New Year's Eve. What a lovely experience! Fans and old friends from around the country drew together to herald in the New Year! There were many entertainers, all old friends, on hand — Gary Izzo did a great job! Thanks.

After the Turning Stone gig I went to Glen Ethel, home of Hey! Nunny Nunny to help write and produce their new cd: Hey Nunny Nunny - It's Christmas. Jim Hancock was on hand to record and engineer the project. The cd has all new and, except for a couple of traditional songs, all original material. A few of their new songs were written for them by fellow Renaissance performers: Bret Blackshear, of Blackenshear the Curious wrote two tunes for them and Duncan Pace, again of London Broil, wrote a lovely homage to Bodge. Their cd should be ready by the end of the Arizona show.

At the same time Jim and I worked on editing sound for LOST PRINCESS. It seems that the "glamour" of movie making lies in hours of time spent paying attention to detail. The easiest part of the job is the actual shoot. We spent weeks loading in Jim's audio files so we could sync them to the picture. This may sound easy but think of a giant jigsaw puzzle with hundreds of thousands of pieces and I think you'll get the picture. Anyway, we were able to get most of it done. Jim will be on his own until I meet up with him at the end of February.

Now we are in Arizona and the final stages of getting the film ready are in process. Eddie Jeff Cahill and Bret Blackshear are in charge of scoring LOST PRINCESS for us. I'm certain they will do a tremendous job. Eddie Jeff recently met with Duncan Pace, the director, and they "spotted" the film. That is to say, they went through the movie scene by scene and talked of music under-scoring. Within the next two weeks the score should be written and then recorded not long after that.

Duncan and I completed "the dream sequence" from the film, so a picture-lock (final cut) is on the horizon.

Well, that is all for now. Hopefully we'll be having our premier viewing at a theatre in Dallas in the Spring.

— Doug