I’ve mentioned before that I’ve been working on many different things since I’ve left Machinima.com, well here’s one of my failed attempts. Several weeks back, one of the viewers informed me of a voice acting audition for the game “Unepic.” I contacted the developers and they sent me a giant script of all the lines, and was told I could apply for as many as I wanted. I applied for several different roles, but unfortunately didn’t make the cut. I found out however, that I was a finalist for the lead role, and was the #2 pick (although maybe they tell everyone that). Anyway, for those that are curious, I’m posting all the takes I submitted to them:

Audition for “Unepic” 3.8MB ZIP (contains MP3s)

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CONTEST:

As a consolation prize for participating in the audition, I was also given a key for a free copy of the game. I’m currently way behind on games I want to play, plus I’ve already had this spoiled a bit by seeing the script, so I thought I would give it away instead. If you want to try and win a free copy of the game, go ahead and post a screenshot from any game you want in the forum thread (link below). They should be real screenshots from a real game, not a faked one made in Photoshop. I’ll give this contest a week or two, whoever posts the screenshot I like the best will win a copy of the game. Alternately, you can email me with the subject “SCREENSHOT” and send me a link to your screenshot instead. To keep people from going insane, I’ll put a limit of 3 screenshots per person.

More news coming soon!

LINK TO FORUM COMMENTS

Blip.tv link

Youtube link

Download 848x480 MKV

Alternate Title: Of Bees and Bullets

Here’s the next episode of Freeman’s Mind. I think people will like this one, there’s usually a correlation of how much people like the episode v. having a high bodycount, and this one might be the highest one yet.
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HD QUALITY BY THE NUMBERS:

I get the question from time to time as to why I don’t film Freeman’s Mind in HD resolution. The short answer is it takes up too much time and space. Due to how the Source engine is set up, adding motion blur adds an incredible amount of space processing time, and this episode was a reminder of that. Most of the episode is all in the same level load, which means I can’t really break it up without glitches occurring. To give you an idea of the filesizes I was looking at, here are some statistics on this episode:

-Time for recording 10 minutes 37 seconds of footage to hard drive at 180fps: 1 hour 6 minutes
-Time to process 114,714 individual files into a more usable state: 50 minutes
-Time to do motion blur processing: 1 hour 47 minutes

Total processing time: 3 hours 43 minutes

-Filesize before motion blur processing: 130.2GB
-Filesize after motion blur processing 21.7GB

Minimum amount of space required to process episode: 260.4GB

Now I could just get rid of motion blur processing, but I love the effect and thinks it make some things look more real, even for Half-Life. Unfortunately this means using the Source engine to export the footage (my computer can’t reliably record this real-time) means processing time and filesizes will get a lot larger if I increase the resolution:

720p = multiply every number above by 2.26
1080p = multiple every number above by 5.09

So until it starts raining hard drives or SSDs, I’ll be sticking with 480p for Freeman’s Mind for now.
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LIGHT / DARK

You’ve probably noticed that the footage can be a bit dark sometimes in the episodes, that’s because that’s how how the Source engine exports it and I’m reluctant to change too much because making a dark scene bright can make a bright seen look washed out. This time however, it’s some of the worst I’ve ever seen it. Here’s a comparison below:

Before:

After:

Turning up the brightness in-game has no effect on how bright the footage is when it exports. I think I was able to do a decent job tweaking it this time, but my method wasn’t reliable and I’m hardly an expert. If someone with editing experience wants to look at the original footage sometime and make suggestions as to what sorts of universal tweaks I can do in Adobe Premiere to correct this (as opposed to changing it scene by scene), go ahead and let me know.

That’s it for now, don’t forget about the Dota 2 voice pack!

LINK TO FORUM COMMENTS

After my stumbling launch from last week, I finally have a trailer to go with the announcer pack I’ve submitted to Valve for DOTA 2. Check it out here!

For everyone who voted for this without seeing the trailer, thanks. For everyone else, GO VOTE FOR IT ON STEAM RIGHT NOW. Here’s the link below:

VOTE RIGHT NOW OMG

(Downloadable copy up after this gets 10k votes on Steam)

Don’t just vote yourself, try to get friends, relatives, pets, to vote for this pack. I want to see Jacksonian democracy in action here. I’m tempted to hold the next Freeman’s Mind episode hostage until this gets at least 10k votes on Steam (I won’t though).

For everyone who wants more information than just the preview trailer, here are some highlights:
-Normal lines for every standard situation in the game
-MANY alternate lines for most events in the game (attacking, destroying, denying enemy towers / barracks, etc.)
-Database configured so that you won’t be spammed with the same alternate lines every game, it’s spaced out a lot so it will likely take many games to hear them all.

What this pack does NOT have (yet):
-Lines for specific items bought
-Lines for specific heroes selected
-Even more alternate lines

I would have added many more lines, but Valve put the cap for submission at 600 lines, so that’s what I sent. If I can actually get this in the Steam store, I’ll support it as long as people are interested. I’m also willing to change or add things based on player feedback, so it can keep growing even after it’s released. You know what separates me from other announcers out there? I’M DESPERATE.

 

ADHD version: CLICK ON THE LINK AND VOTE FOR THIS ON STEAM!

 

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The announcer pack for DOTA 2 that I mentioned earlier has been submitted! It contains over 600 lines, has lots of situational humor, and the highest recording quality I’ve produced to date. Here is proof of it:

Link to DOTA submission

I have NO IDEA what the next step is! I guess Valve will look it over and decide if it’s acceptable or not, then I’ll get further instructions from there. It wouldn’t surprise me if they make me change the name from “Freeman’s Mind Announcer Pack”, but that shouldn’t affect the lines.

Anyway, now that this is submitted, I’ll be getting back to the videos and other things. More news coming this month!

EDIT:
I’ve been informed that this will need to be voted up a bunch for Valve to look at it. I don’t expect people to do that without knowing more about it, but I’ll make a proper media campaign for this later. Feel free to vote on it for now, but I’ll have a lot more details later.

EDIT 2:
Apparently no one can vote on this because it’s marked the item as “private” even when I temporarily make my profile public. I have no idea how to fix this, I’ll be researching it.

LINK TO FORUM COMMENTS

Well this should have happened a long time ago, but the story of my life seems to be “better late than never.” Here is the re-released version of Stranger In Need, the first and probably last video I’ll do in Source Filmmaker. The original version of this video was just barely done in time for a deadline and I had to cut a few corners on it that I wanted to spend a little bit longer fixing. This version has the main fixes I wanted to have the first time around. It mainly consists of slightly improved animations, adding a few effects I meant to have the first time, a more polished sound mix, etc. This the closest thing I get to a “patch” for my videos. I promise I didn’t go George Lucas on this though, all the changes are very subtle, you may not even notice the difference.

Youtube

Blip.tv

1920x1080 H.264 MKV H.264 MKV Download (110MB)

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I was hoping to have more news for August, but it’s looking like that’s not going to happen. That just means there’s more news and videos coming for September though!

LINK TO FORUM COMMENTS