FREEMAN’S MIND: EPISODE 42
At long last, here’s the next episode of Freeman’s Mind. Your enjoyment of this episode may be proportional to how much you like dams. As a bit of a spoiler, I didn’t intend for the helicopter encounter to go quite how it did, but I’ll just keep moving forward with the game.
As I mentioned in the last episode post, I kept a log of how long the entire process for creating this episode took (image below). This ended up being an ideal episode to pick for this experiment. This turned out to be a pretty average episode I think in terms of time. It wasn’t especially long and some minor mistakes happened, which always adds to the time. Also I already had the existing titles and flyby intro created, which also cut down on the time.
This episode was also such a good choice for measuring the time because it perfectly illustrates why I CAN NOT promise release dates. If you look at the log, you may notice that one entry stands out a little bit more than the others, by about about 4 weeks. I thought I was going to have this episode done about 3 weeks ago. That’s obviously not what happened. While in the earlier episodes I did EVERYTHING myself, nowadays I depend on volunteer help in various areas. While I COULD do all the sound editing myself, it’s really worth it for me not to. Even though the sound editor (Otto) took a long time on this episode, during that time I was learning more of the Unreal 3 engine and making some progress on the movie project. That’s time I didn’t have to spent scouring for sound effects and editing. And before people start forming lynch mobs against Otto for taking so long, I really have to come to his defense. He CAN be quite fast, having had a turnaround of about two days or so before. Also he does an OUTSTANDING job on the sound effects, better than I think even I can do now, and better than other volunteers I’ve worked with (though I appreciate their help too). Finally, out of the people who have assisted me as long as he has, I can easily say he is the MOST RELIABLE volunteer I’ve had during that length of time. That should give you an idea of some of the other people I’ve worked with. That said, I’m open to having more sound effects help on Freeman’s Mind. If you have experience with that sort of thing, go ahead and email me and I can arrange a trial test for you.
Now you business majors out there may look at this time log and think “Why, with a fast sound editor Ross could make an episode every 2 days!” While that’s been true once or twice, it only happens under certain conditions. First, I have to be in a good mood to think up lines; otherwise I won’t have anything funny and nobody wants that. Second, when an episode has a lot of shouting, I need several hours for my voice to recover during recording sessions. Finally, I can’t be working on ANYTHING else, and most of the time I’m working on several different things. Usually I only spend a couple hours each day on Freeman’s Mind. If I was good at improv comedy, this process would be approximately 50x faster, but I’m not.
Speaking of other things, before I progress too far on the next episode, my next goal is to update a LOT of the movie links and get a bunch more MKV copies of the older videos up on the site. I don’t think I’ll fix everything, but I plan to spend the next few days getting the videos more organized on the site.
ADHD version: This episode took a while. Expect updates to the site soon.
