FREEMAN’S MIND: EPISODE 17
Here’s the new Freeman’s Mind episode. This is the first one in widescreen format at it was requested by Machinima.com that I film it this way. I originally gave it a 4x3 aspect ratio to accommodate Youtube and since that changed on me, it’s not a big deal to switch over to a widescreen ratio. Ironically since all my Civil Protection videos are in widescreen, my early episodes were hard-encoded to be letterboxed in a 4x3 ratio for Youtube by Machinima.com. It feels like I can’t win sometimes.
Speaking of which, I’m afraid this episode comes at a cost. Between making three Freeman’s Mind episodes this month and other side projects I’ve had to work on, I really don’t think the next Civil Protection episode is going to come out before Halloween. If it was up to me, I would have put FM on hold and made sure the next episode of CP came out in time, but Machinima.com has its own priorities. This does disappoint me, but for what it’s worth, this won’t be strictly a Halloween episode, just a scary one. So while the timing would have been better for this month, it should still be enjoyable for November. Also to be clear, this rate of Freeman’s Mind is perfectly sustainable, it’s this and other things on top of Civil Protection which is causing the overload.
This delay is not due to lack of effort on my part. I’ve been working about 75 hours a week the past couple weeks where I was trying to get this done on time, but I can only create the episode so fast. I haven’t been doing much besides working, exercising, and sleeping. To put it in perspective, I’ve been told that Machinima.com has only done one show in-house that uses scripted animation like CP and for that they were funded, hired lots of outside help, had a team of 6 internal animators working overtime and even then just barely got it completed in time. I don’t have a paid team helping me, just volunteers the same as previous episodes (though I’m not discounting their efforts), so I still have to fill in every missing role that I can. Factor in that this will likely be the longest episode of CP so far and it’s becoming a pretty big strain on me. I’m going a little batty with these hours actually, but I’ll be happy once the episode is done.
Also I fixed most of the broken download links Machinima.com keeps deleting randomly, I’ll get more done when I get a chance.
