The Watchmen continues to be the most anticipated upcoming movie for self-satisfied comic book nerds everywhere. In fact, even self-satisfied non-comic book nerds like myself are getting a little jazzed about it. Opening date is still more than a year away, but that doesn’t keep Watchmen creators from trying to keep it in the public mind.

The official Watchmen blog just posted a brief note from executive producer Herb Gains noting that principal photography has wrapped in Toronto. The lag between today’s date and the 3/6/09 projected opening date indicates how much of this movie will be produced on the computer rather than the soundstage. Still, progress is being made and, according to Gains, it will be “something very special.” Surprising that a movie’s producer would go out on a limb like that.

Gains went even farther and said that he was shocked, shocked, that director Zack Snyder was able to shoot all of the wonderful things he planned on shooting. Gains said, “I think back to January 2007 when I first met Zack and he walked me through his drawings for the title sequence. I remember my initial reaction was, ‘How can we shoot all of it? Why do we have to shoot all that? And if we do, how do we shoot all of it?’” Well, shoot it all they did. Now they have to add all the things they didn’t shoot in real life and we’ll have a full blown moving type picture show.