lights and skin

Hi all,
I'm sorry I didn't post yesterday.
I spent yesterday finishing off my lighting of my scene, and attempting to add my rain. The latter deemed difficult. I have added some but I am testing to see what works best, as I keep getting crashes etc.
Here is the comparison of the lighting in my scene in 3 stages.

Before any lighting

After my spot lighting

After fill lighting

I also attempted to add rain  by using the rain that I had already created in previous test, but this appeared to be too processor heavy, so I looked around and discovered that there was another way of doing rain, called spray. So I tried that and here are the results of some tests

Since I am having to many problems with this, I may have to look at alternative ways of doing it, e.g. adding it in post production via adobe after effects, but this may results in complications so I'm not sure yet. I also may be faced with the problem of not being able to render the trailer out, in which case I think that I will render still images, but still animate them by panning over them whilst the voice over is playing. This will be a cool effect, but it is a last resort should everything else fail on me.

Now that I am home, I appear to be having problems rendering any kind of rain in my scene, so I carried on skinning Frank, because this needed doing so that I could animate him, so that is what I have been doing today.

I have also rendered a short video to show the effect of the skinning

Now I need to create a quick pre-viz animation to try and figure out all of the timing etc for the scene, so that is the next job.
Let me know what you guys think please.

P.S. sorry for this kind of lengthy post