Quite a few weeks ago I announced that I was converting the old Book of Dark Places multimedia files to video and uploading them to YouTube, beginning with the very first story: Damnation Denied.    That project has been chugging along silently and without fanfare since then.   Tonight, however, I uploaded the final video in the Damnation Denied series and thought I’d mention it.

Some author’s notes follow.

Damnation Denied is the first of the Book of Dark Places multimedia anthology, which I described elsewhere.

As a story, it’s pretty simple: killer robot on the rampage in a futuristic prison.   It’s made even more simple by the limitations of the format.   There just isn’t a lot of storytelling that can be done with 3D-rendered images in Flash multimedia.   At least, that’s what I thought.

I managed to pack quite a bit of story into eleven chapters.    You see (and hear) quite a few things that I honestly didn’t think I could pull off when I first started.   The story itself stays relatively simple, but there is a lot of depth and backstory, most of which doesn’t come into play until the last two chapters.

Speaking of backstory, people who know of a certain event in my own personal history might conclude that I was working out some of my own personal demons in this tale.   They’d be right.   That’s true of MOST of my stories, but it’s especially obvious in this one.    The killer robot?   It’s a red herring to draw you in and distract you from what I’m REALLY trying to say.    The real deal here is Gordon Queen… a severely damaged human being who is literally working against his own desires by helping to reform murderers.   Is he me?    Let’s just say that I’d make the same choice he did at the end, except I wouldn’t have to think about it nearly as long.    I guess Damnation Denied is my attempt to dramatize my feelings on the matter.

Mission accomplished?   Yeah.   Yeah, I think so.

As a concept… an idea for a story…  I hold Damnation Denied in very high regard.  As a final product, it has problems, most of which spring from format limitations and my steadfast refusal to proofread ANYTHING EVER.  Even this blog post.   Watching the converted videos on YouTube brought back all the mistakes I made… but I still enjoyed the hell out of it.

I’d say Damnation Denied turned out pretty well for a freshman attempt at multimedia production, especially given the limitations of hardware and software at the time.    It’s not perfect, but it has some tense moments, a good jump-scare or two, a few disturbing revelations, and some pretty good sound effects.  Plus its got demons AND killer robots in the same story, so what the hell else could you want!?   Okay… I guess I could have thrown in some zombies…