Thanks to everyone for the feedback - makes it all worth while! :-)

The music - I am a huge Star Wars fan, so a lot of the inspiration for writing my own score came from John Williams' work. But, I'm a guitarist, so writing orchestral music can sometimes be a challenge for me.

The next parts - I have already started pre-production on Chapter 2. I am in the set building stage right now and starting sketches for a couple of new characters that will appear. But it's nice to have the main characters done already! ;-)

Carrara 5 - Yes, I am using Carrara 5 now... when 5 came out I was just finishing up some final renders, so I decided not to switch over until this part of the film was done. Looking forward to putting the Replicator to good use in the next two parts.

Post production - was done in After Effects. Things like dust blowing when the crate lands, motion blurs and depth of field. I decided to do DOF and blurs in AE instead of Carrara so I wouldn't have to re-render if I didn't like something. So, I rendered characters with alpha channels and brought them all together with the backgrounds in AE. And all of the views through characters' viewfinders were done in AE as well.

Chuck