Monday, June 23, 2008

updates

I know some people are anxious to get updates, so here's what's happening: Work's still being done, but I've gotten through what I consider the hardest part of the tutorial. There's still plenty more to keep me busy though. In the meantime progress has been made on the new website. I've been designing it and someone else has been helping to code it for me. Here's a preview of what the CP episodes page might look like, I'm pretty happy with how it's coming along so far:



For the subtitles, here's my current plan: I've received several subtitles in various languages and I do plan to post them up on the new site. However, I think it will be easier for everyone involved in translating if I can get the English subtitles up first. The advantage to this is that I'll know that the English you're working from is correct, and also the subtitles can be color-coded so that they correspond to the right speaker. This will also make things easier for the people doing the subtitles as they'll have pre-existing timing tags to work off of. So I want to concentrate on getting the English subtitles finalized, then we'll move on to getting the ones to other languages up. Right now I only have the English subtitles for CP episodes 1 - 3. If someone sent me others, I've probably lost them, I apologize, I've been disorganized with email. So if you wish to create English subtitles for Civil Protection episodes 4,5, and the special, or any episodes of Freeman's Mind, please contact me at rscott31@radford.edu. I do have the scripts for the Civil Protection episodes, but have no scripts for Freeman's Mind as I only used loose notes to create them. If you wish to transcribe those, that would also be welcome. I can verify any of the lines being said.

There won't be any new Civil Protection episodes until after the tutorial is made, but the 20+ minute long one is still in production and it's the one I plan to release next. I'm not making any promises, but I may try and get the next episode of Freeman's Mind out before then as those are less time consuming to produce.

EDIT: A volunteer submitted the English subtitles for CP episodes 4 and 5, so I'll be sure to put those up with the rest once the new site's up.

Friday, June 06, 2008

CP SPECIAL: WHAT IS MACHINIMA?



Youtube version

High quality streaming version &
1280 x 720 WMV download link (60MB)


Well this was done a little while ago and while it's normally my policy to never withhold a video release, this episode is a little different. This is a mini-episode that was done at the request of Machinima.com putting together a collaborative video asking several directors "What Is Machinima?".

EDIT: The high quality version is up now and contains additional dialogue. 


OTHER NEWS:

Also, it looks like a growing number of people are becoming frustrated with how long it's taking for me to release videos. Believe me in that I share that frustration. A big part of the problem is that with this tutorial combined with other oddjobs, I've been spending most of my time working on stuff to make income so I can do things like eat and pay bills. I ask that you hold out a little more patience, once this tutorial is done, I promise I'm going to start putting out machinima faster than ever.

In order to make more time to work on episodes, I'm planning to move soon near a friend where I'll have relatively low housing costs. I'm very frugal, so once I'm there, I think I'll be able to survive on part-time work somewhere (hopefully as a videostore clerk or something). That should afford me more time to make videos, plus I'm going to be getting more help on animation for CP, which is the slowest part of its production. In addition to this, I'm getting help setting up a new website which will serve as a central hub for all videos, especially CP. I'm still trying to find the best/cheapest host for this that can accommodate any forseeable bandwidth needs. It will contain a cleaner interface, more information, more updates, subtitles, extras, and just be better all-round. I still need to figure out what will be a good hosting option for the bandwidth load I'm anticipating however.

Right now I'm still too busy with the tutorial to work on any more episodes, I'm sorry. For the record, I am NOT taking the stance of "I don't owe you anything." If no one liked my movies, I wouldn't make them. The fact that there are so many fans makes me want to make new episodes more than ever. Also I am confident that the best episodes are still yet to come. Thanks for hanging in there.