I have a new audio interview with “Caboos15” available on his Youtube channel. He originally contacted me months ago, but I delayed him because I wanted to finish The Tunnel first before doing any PR stuff. He’s conducted many interviews with other machinima makers and makes some machinima himself. He’s also the sneakiest interviewer I’ve talked to. Once or twice he would tell me he was going to ask a question, I would get confused, thinking he was asking the question, I would answer the question, then he explained afterwards he hadn’t asked the question yet. It felt like kind of a Zen exercise. Anyway, here’s the interview:

Youtube

It’s not my best interview since I think I stammered a bit, but that’s also a good example of why I do multiple takes when recording lines for videos. More news and videos coming soon.

Well the website and forum is now running on the new host, so let’s hope nothing melts down again. In the meantime, I THINK the forum is stable enough now to have a post about the new subtitle section. I meant to have this done a long time ago, but it’s only just now that some of the major problems with the forum and hosting have been ironed out (I hope).

Subtitles are probably the most major area I’ve completely failed to manage properly because I’ve gotten bogged down with organizing and reviewing everything. It’s not that I don’t care about them, quite the opposite. I want to get as many subtitles up as possible and I hope to someday have Accursed Farms videos be the most-translated machinima videos out there. However, I also want to have some standards for them as well.

Having a forum section devoted to subtitles solves a LOT of problems involved with me managing subtitles in the past:

1. You won’t have to wait on me to approve subtitles in order to see them. This is a good thing, since if I get busy with work or whatever, I often don’t have time to manage subtitles. While the first subtitles that go up in the forums may not be the most accurate, if some people can’t hear or understand English very well, then subtitles that are only 80% accurate are far better than none at all. While it’s still going to be a slow process for me approving “official” subtitles hosted on the site, from now on, you can always go to the forums and see the most recent user-submitted subtitles as they’re created.

2. This will lead to more accurate and polished subtitles overall. Moving subtitle development to the forums means they’ll effectively be “crowdsourced.” Instead of just myself and maybe one or two other people looking at them, everyone can view the subtitles and suggest revisions to them. In short, everyone can now be an editor, for better or worse.

3. I don’t have to decide who works on what now. A problem I used to face a lot trying to manage the subtitles is I would receive multiple offers from people offering to transcribe or translate the episodes and I would have no clue as to who the best person to pick was. Now, you guys get to decide. If someone rushes out subtitles for an episode that are thoroughly flawed, that won’t last long against someone who takes a little longer and does a much better job. I plan to let all future subtitles “cook” in the forums for a little while before approving any more official ones, so hopefully any errors can be ironed out. This goes double for foreign languages since I can’t judge how accurate a translation might be, but other people who speak the language can.

4. This frees up some more time for me. I do think it’s necessary for me to personally review all the English subtitles for accuracy, because my annunciation isn’t always the best. Sometimes people think I say “and” instead of “then” or “if” instead of “is,” etc. I’ll be the ultimate authority on the correct words being spoken in the videos. Beyond that, I think it will work better if viewers proofread everything else. Proper punctuation, formatting, spelling, timing, etc. are all things that can be better handled by viewers. Even the “official” subtitles that are currently up on the site could probably use some help. So if you spot problems with ANY subtitles, now you can submit your corrections in the forums and eventually they’ll get reviewed and hopefully approved. I think everyone would prefer I spent more time making new videos than editing subtitles.
 Right now the subtitles section of the forums have been launched with sub-forums for every language that I remember receiving offers for. This will make things easier organization-wise. New languages can be added as people volunteer to translate them. If your language isn’t listed, just post your subtitles in “Other Languages” for now and if there are enough posts it will get its own section later on. You are welcome to chat in your native language in the different forum sections as that will likely make communication easier.

* * * Be sure to check out the guidelines for submitting subtitles listed in the forums as this will expedite your submissions getting approved. * * *

Anyway, I encourage people who are interested to submit or edit subtitles in the forums. The process will be a bit chaotic, but I think eventually it will all get sorted out. There are some 40-50 videos made and many new ones coming this year. I’d like as many people to be able to enjoy them as possible and subtitles will go a long way towards making that happen.

Hey everyone, some bad news. For reasons that are still unknown, it looks like almost every single post made in the forums from yesterday was deleted. I’m annoyed by this since not only did I type several replies to people yesterday, but I was planning to roll out some new stuff related to the forums as well. Just wanted to make an announcement in case you thought your post on how you like rabbits or whatever was covertly deleted, it wasn’t on purpose. Hopefully this will get resolved soon.

Hey everyone, just letting you know that the status of the website and forums may be really dodgy for the next week or so. In addition to me getting ready to transition to a different host, an update was made by a web admin that broke a BUNCH of work done for integrations in the forums. For the near future I can’t promise anything as far as passwords working, forum links, uptime, etc. I think we’ll get this sorted out, but for now we’ve taken some big steps backwards as far as stability of the site and forums go, so just keep that in mind.

I’ll resume Freeman’s Mind as soon as I dampen the echo some more on my current

Hey everyone, I thought I’d give some commentary on my most involved and most sloppily executed April Fool’s Day videos yet. I wanted to try for a “double feature” for about a month or two. It almost didn’t happen. In addition to my move setting me back quite a bit, audio editor Otto Beumelberg completely disappeared days before the deadline (turns out his computer had fried) and there simply wasn’t enough time for me to do all the editing and recording AND the sound editing on both the videos.

For the Halo video, I recorded the footage for that before I left and I just barely was able to coordinate it with enough people I could contact to get it done in time. Even then, there was a very small window of time to record the main scene. Try coordinating something with 7+ people you know and see how stable it is. Even once I had the footage, I left and my computer wasn’t reassembled until a while afterwards and I had been very busy without having done much editing.

The Zombie Panic video was even more close. I managed to line up good voice actors in time, but had multiple bailouts and some slow responses. On the morning of April 30th, I still had NONE of the lines recorded by the voice actors (except one, whom I needed a redo from), and I still didn’t know if the new guy I picked for sound editing (Phai Giron) was going to flake out with everyone else. Thankfully it all came together, but not without a couple all-nighters for me of recording, coordinating and editing.

In the middle of all this, I was contacted by the host for the site about the forums causing CPU usage problems again and he was threatening to take the site down immediately unless I paid him for the extra usage. It felt kind of like a ransom payoff. I paid him, but the timing couldn’t have been worse for that, so I’ll be looking into hosting the site myself in the near future, you’re welcome to suggest options.

To add to the fun, Machinima.com offered to host these videos (I thought they would be too bizarre for them actually), so that meant I had to get all the videos in at least a day ahead of time. I just barely made the deadline for that. On top of that, they told me it would be released 5pm their time, but then decided to release the Zombie Panic vid 6 hours early without telling me, so I guess they managed to play an April Fool’s joke on me! Anyway, I’m happy it all came together. I think the sound editing could have been a little better, but considering how short the notice was on everything, it’s amazing it got made at all.

I’m especially happy with the Zombie Panic video, I think it’s my favorite April Fool’s Day one so far. That was recorded in a demo last year (back when I actually had some time for games) where it’s the longest killing spree I’ve ever gotten as a zombie. For those unfamiliar with the game, if you can get two kills as a zombie before you die, you’re doing very well. I got EIGHT in this demo, which basically never happens. It was a perfect storm of things going wrong for the survivors and I thought adding the commentary made it even funnier.

I was worried I wouldn’t fool anybody this year since April Fool’s Day is the one deadline I manage to meet each year (so far), but a quick look at Youtube comments show otherwise. Machinima.com decided to put a Freeman’s Mind thumbnail for the zombie video to trick more people, which led to all sorts of good will being expressed by the viewers. I don’t know what I’ll do next year, it’s a challenge doing something different each time. The only thing you can count on is that I’ll never Rickroll anyone, that’s just mean.

Since I was so busy on the videos, I didn’t have time to look at much on the internet yesterday, so if you saw some especially good AF jokes, go ahead and post them on the forums. All I saw was some stuff from Google and Blizzard.

Finally, while not horrid, the new place I’ve moved to could use some improvement for recording quality. If anyone has suggestions on cheap material I could line the walls with (not permanently, I’m only renting) to absorb more sound and dampen echo, let me know.