The Adventures in Dating finale, “Facing the Future,” is finally available for viewing. I tried to get the movie done before the end of the year but clocking in at 26 minutes and 76MB, it was like working on two episodes at once—not to mention that I didn’t plan to spend Christmas through New Year’s in front of my computer. ;) Anyway, because of the episode’s size, I’ve made several viewing options available. You may watch directly on my site or you may download either the good or lower quality version to watch from your computer. Before you watch though, there is one very important piece of advice you should follow. To get the full effect of the episode, you MUST watch the entire thing from beginning to the very end. You’ll see what I mean.

I want to say a very big thank you to my cast: Artcgrrl, M1tchm, Scapino, Blessed, Dave, and X.Muse. I have to say a very special thank you to a few other people. First to Carisa who was the original Cecily but had microphone quality issues and so I couldn’t use her lines. Next, thanks goes to Adele who quickly agreed to fill in for Carisa, recording the lines multiple times, but her mic quality didn’t work for me either. Finally to Blessed who not only rushed to get the lines and retakes done before leaving for the holidays but agreed to buy a new microphone when I couldn’t work with the quality of her old one. I really was unsure I’d get this episode finished with the Cecily issues but all these great people were willing to step in quickly to help out. I have to really say thanks to ALL my actors who have been so amazing and have truly helped me to realize this series. They know what a demanding director I am—asking for multiple retakes, to record lines with comforters over their heads to reduce reverb, etc. and they always did these things for me affably. They are all so talented and have really pushed me to work on and improve my own acting.

Ok, it’s movie discussion time which means don’t read further until after you’ve watched the movie as the following contains spoilers. Believe it or not, Emma’s ending monologue was one of the first things I wrote when I started working on this series. Of course, it’s been tweeked and reworked a bit since then but the essential message has remained the same. It was really important to me that the story remain open-ended. My goal was to portray two plausibly real women in real life situations and I never planned to have a formulaic happy ending all wrapped up in a nice bow because I like to give the audience more credit than that. Just as in real life, we don’t know where our lives will lead us and we can never be sure how things will turn out, no matter our intentions or plans. In the finale, we’re not really sure if Ellen’s marriage will really work out in the long run or if Eli and Emma will be together again.  Initially, I planned to have Emma and Eli’s relationship just end for good but decided to add the phone call at the end to leave it open to interpretation.  I’m hoping I left the series in such a way that your experiences in life and with watching this series color how you perceive the sisters’ future. I would love to hear your thoughts on how you think things will turn out and why. I have an idea of how I think they end up but I’m not totally sure myself.

I think the thing that’s most important in this episode is everyone’s perspective and relationship to each other. We hear how Ellen’s philosophy has changed because of her marital problems, how Emma’s grown and tries to better herself and also, for the first time, Cecily’s views on marriage. I wanted to provide different, yet realistic, perspectives on relationships from women who’ve had a bit of life experience. In listening to Cecily’s conversation with Emma, you can also tell how close they are and that their friendship will last a lifetime. In the final scene with Ellen and Emma, it’s clear that they’re mending their relationship and Ellen is learning to open up to Emma while Emma is learning to be a better listener and to not judge. Whatever may happen to Emma and Ellen in their love lives, it’s clear that they have loving, caring people around to support them. I’ll discuss the significance of the scenes and dialogue more thoroughly when I get around to writing the production notes for the finale.

I’m sure many of you are wondering what I’ll be doing next—if I’ll continue making machinima or if I’ll be moving onto Sims 3. My short answers are that yes I plan to make more movies and no, I don’t plan to move onto using Sims 3 (at least for a long while). I will blog more about all this in the future so sit tight. I hope you enjoyed watching the AinD series in its entirety and for those of you who’ve stuck with me since the beginning, so patiently I might add, thank you so much for your gracious support.

EDIT:  I went through 65GB of bandwidth on the release date.  I’m pretty sure that’s a record on my site (which was partially helped by the file size, no less).  Anyway, who are all you anonymous drive-by watchers?   :lol: