Good/Bad News

Good news: I'm getting pretty close to done on the next episode + I found out about another contest it would qualify for

Bad news: The contest has an exclusiveness rule which means that I can't publish the episode until after the contest is over, which would be at the start of March.

I'm kind of torn here, because I really want to show you guys the next episode, since it's going to be awesome in comparison to the first. However, I'd also like to enter this contest; the last one proved to be a really good move on my part. I'll probably enter the contest, even though I feel like you guys are getting robbed by it. Time is a resource for me, but once I finish Episode 2, I'll do my damndest to try and get episode 3 out before they allow me to release Episode 2 (The order on these doesn't really matter anyway). In the meantime here's a link to the contest. Feel free to let them know how you feel about this exclusiveness rule.


Also, if you have experience using Faceposer, I might be interested in someone reliable who would want to help with the animations (this will help the episodes come out faster). I can't pay you anything, since I don't have any money, but your name would be in the credits, in big blocky letters.

Word.

Some good stuff going on with Civil Protection. After I started making the first episode, I found out about a contest for machinima making going on, so I worked to finish it in time before the deadline. It was hosted by Machinimasia, an institution devoted to this type of media. They're located in Singapore and since the focus of this was to spread machinima awareness in Asia, it was pretty cool of them to accept entries from other continents as well. The results got posted a little while ago and it turns out that I not only won for best student category, but also BEST OF SHOW. I guess this means I'll start getting death threats from other machinima makers now, but they don't know where I live. They could do an IP trace, but that should only get them the general region of the ISP. Anyway, this trophy looks neat:





The bad news is that I've fallen behind on episode 2 for several reasons. One of the biggest was my getting sick over Thanksgiving break but also with my exams/graduation coming up. I'm still working on it though and will get it out as soon as I can, I just have less time to devote to it right now.

Posting and stuff

I finally figured out how to add a direct link to the movie off to the side on this page, so now I feel like I can do a second post. The response to the first episode has been overwhelmingly positive, which leads me to one conclusion: everyone likes ninjas. Unfortunately, the majority of the episodes of CP will not contain any ninja material. Because of this, I naturally expect the positive response to go down for the next episode. I plan to be working on it all this week, but who knows when I'll finish it. Judging only from the script size, it's about twice as long as the first, and contains much more dialogue. So this means that on top of having no ninjas, I'll be taxing attention spans as well; which is rather taboo for the internet. Anyway, for those of you still jonesing for a ninja fix, I recommend this site. 

EPISODE 1: FRIDAY / CLICK HERE TO DOWNLOAD (33MB)

This will be the webpage devoted to the Civil Protection video series. I've just finished the first episode which you can download from the link above. As for the series, it's inspired by the oppressive policing force within the game Half-Life 2. It's a comedy created using the game engine itself to animate everything. Right now I am the writer, animator, director, producer, cinematographor, editor... pretty much everything you see in the episode is my fault. This episode does contain some language and violence, but it's not much worse than a PG rating.

It was a real pain to learn the SDK and animate all this, so I won't be starting on another episode immediately. Not that you have any frame of reference, but the next one should go much more quickly since a lot of the time was spent on learning everything. Whenever I start on it again, that is. I need a break, I'm practically dreaming about those spooky metal helmets that the CP units wear. Anyway, feel free to contact me or post comments about whatever.