DaveD here posting this on behalf of Ross Scott:

This is being displayed hopefully not-post-humously, but my access to internet will be infrequent for a little while, so I typed this in advance.
“The Tunnel” is finally released! It feels like some sort of curse being lifted. I have a LOT to say about this episode, so I’ll break it down into chunks:

THE EPISODE:
This is the longest video I’ve created, coming to 26 minutes total. It’s split into two parts on Youtube, I didn’t have time to do an encoding of the unsplit version before I left, but that will be put up on the site as soon as I have access to my computer and internet again. The full size of this episode is 120GB uncompressed, so I need to crunch that thing down.
In some posts I’ve stated before that I have some top-level ideas that I think would blow people’s minds. This still isn’t one of them. I have always wanted to have some variety in the episodes for Civil Protection however, and this is an example of that. This isn’t really like any of the previous episodes. I’ll warn you that this isn’t the funniest one either. I was trying for a balance to make it kind of creepy and develop more of a story versus having some comedy in it. There will be more of a comedy focus in future episodes of CP however.
I think the biggest weaknesses in this episode are that it’s a little slow to develop and I may have left too many unanswered questions. The episode was written years ago and if I were to do it again today I would have made some more changes. By the time I noticed some script weaknesses in it, I had come too far in production to just change everything. This is actually one episode I could see getting a direct sequel, but there’s no way in hell that will happen under current production methods. Also, I noticed after the fact that there are some minor light glitches I might have been able to fix if I realized them sooner, so I recommend not watching this on a screen that’s TOO bright. I might fix them before I release a copy of it on the site, I’ll see. That’s the closest thing I get to a “patch.”
As for the strengths, this is my first real attempt at trying to create something scary (in “Halloween Safety” the scare was more of a coincidence) and I hope it’s succeeded a little bit. I also think this is the most atmospheric of the episodes. When I was working on the editing, it felt a little like Mike and Dave were getting sucked into another reality, I enjoyed that aspect of it.

WHY DID THIS TAKE SO DAMN LONG :
The length of time this episode has taken has been an embarrassment. To make matters worse, it took a long time for all the wrong reasons. This isn’t the most spectacular looking episode and if it were filmed in reality, most of it could be shot very easily. If I had known how much work this deceptively-easier-looking episode would be, I never would have started it in the first place and would have worked on different ideas instead. It went on and on just because I wanted to finish the damn thing rather than throw all my work out. If you’re wondering what the reasons for it dragging on, here’s quick breakdown:

-The Source Engine. This, far and away, trumps every other reason as to why the episode took as long as it did. This episode was filmed mostly in the Episode 2 version of the Source engine and I ran into far more bugs than I’ve ever faced before. If it wasn’t for some coding help, this episode would have never even been finished. I’m not a programmer, so when I face a bug, I have to come up with some elaborate workaround to it with the SDK tools, or else it can put a halt to the whole production.
I can forgive a company for bugs, it’s inevitable. What makes me bitter though, is I swear Valve breaks as many things as they fix when they make an update. So the engine may receive some lighting update, and then an entity I was using to animate characters no longer functions at all. While I think it’s great that tools are released for free, I have a real issue with how Valve will auto-update the SDK, which can often break important functionality of it, and then LEAVE IT broken. I’m sure they just see it as fiddling around, but from an end-user perspective it feels downright mean when it breaks all the work you’ve been involved with; like someone coming in and stomping on your sand castle. The bug list for this episode was staggering. For future episodes, unless I can solve major, major problems involved with engine for creating machinima, I’m going back to the Episode 1 engine. It really is that bad.

-Work on other things. The episode has been dropped and resumed multiple times. I’ve created 4 other Civil Protection episodes since I first began working on it, started the Freeman’s Mind series, launched the website twice, moved various times, etc. While technically it first started in 2007, it hasn’t been worked on during that whole time.

-People flaking out. I won’t name names (except for Ryan McDonald), but at times getting some people to work on a simple task felt like pulling teeth. I see this more as my fault, since this is very common with volunteer help. If I had been more on top of things I could have gotten more “backup” people sooner. If I could afford to actually hire people, especially an animator, I would in a heartbeat. However, if I were to pay everyone what I could afford out of my own pocket, it would just be an insult (”Congratulations, here’s your 45 cents!”). Don’t get me wrong however. While I did all the work on the older episodes, this episode wouldn’t have been possible without help from other people, some of which did an absolute fantastic job.

-I kind of hate animating. As much as I love creating movies, I find the animation process to be misery a lot of the time. I hope that some day I won’t have to do nearly as much animation work as I currently do. While I did receive some great help in areas , ultimately I think did the majority of the animation work on this episode. This is the last episode where I spend as much time as I do on animating. I’m really getting serious about exploring motion capture and you can expect it to be a cornerstone of future episodes or else I’ll just work on something else.

-I’m not a great manager. While I think I could be a competent manager by itself, I’m not when I’m also a director, animator, editor, and work on more than one series. With more people helping, most things are managed primarily by email, so keeping track of everything can be a bit daunting for me in addition to everything else. Having something like a better project communication / coordination system, or an actual producer or assistant director could help tremendously.
In the future, I expect to address most of these problems and have a complete overhaul of the production process.

THE MUSIC:
Machinima.com has changed their policy on the use of game soundtracks multiple times. Music was very important to this episode for establishing mood and at one point I was told I wouldn’t be able to use ANY game soundtracks. Since then, I managed to get lucky with one or two (and received direct permission from composer Zdeněk Houb), so I at least got to keep the original title theme to the series (for now anyway). Because use of soundtracks is still discouraged, a lot of music was composed for this episode and it really shows. I couldn’t be much happier with how the music turned out. I gave the composers a lot of feedback to try and get the right mood I was after.
Unfortunately, not everyone who composed music had material that made it into the episode; and I felt really bad having to throw out good music that simply wasn’t the right mood I was after for a particular scene. To make up for this, over the next few weeks, I plan to have a “composer showcase” periodically for each person that contributed music to me for the episode, so you’ll get to hear music from everyone who tried to help out, not just the people in the credits.

THE FUTURE:
The immediate future will be involved with me moving and getting a new place set up, but after that, my focus in the shorter-term will be with producing a LOT more Freeman’s Mind episodes and with responding to the many, many emails I am woefully behind on. Months behind. I’ll have a later post detailing my plans for future videos farther in the future.

Hope people enjoy the episode, and if you don’t, just remember I plan on making many different videos.

Hey everyone, as some of you have informed me, the website and forums have been going down off and on lately. As it’s been explained to me, this is most likely due to some sort of coding bug in the forums causing a massive increase in server CPU usage. It may have been resolved, it may not have been, I’m not sure. If you have a web programming background and may have insight on this sort of thing, especially with phpBB, by all means contact DaveD or Jexius in the forums.

Machinima.com does seem to be taking longer than usual to put “The Tunnel” up, my guess is it’s due to its length and that they’re planning to release both parts at once (at my request). They have a complicated system for when Youtube videos appear over there; I don’t understand it much better than you do.

At the moment I don’t have regular internet access yet, but I’ll definitely post an update when the video goes up, or a web admin here will post it for me. I can’t record just yet, but I’ll be doing some work on other videos in the meantime. As soon as I can record again, I’ll resume work on Freeman’s Mind.

This is an announcement that “The Tunnel” has been uploaded to Machinima.com. As usual, I never know when exactly the videos will post on Youtube. My guess is it will be sometime this week. When the video does post, I’ll have lots to say about it, but in the meantime I wanted to hopefully adjust people’s expectations to reality.

I am quite pleased with how the episode came out and am very happy it’s finally done. Since this episode has been mentioned for years now, I think it’s inevitable some people will expect this to be the best video ever created. While I do have future ideas that I think will astound people and will be worth it no matter how long they take, this is just an above-average episode that took a long time for many different reasons. I’ll go into more detail after the video’s released. I think if you just expect a normal Civil Protection episode, you wouldn’t be disappointed; but if you see this as the best work I can possibly do, then you might. I generally hate hype and like to let whatever I make stand for itself, but this one dragged on so long hype for it has been kind of inevitable.

As for the episode itself, the total length will be about 26 minutes and it will be split up on Youtube as 2 parts. An unsplit version will be released on the website afterwards, but it may be delayed more than usual since I may be traveling when the episode goes up.

In other news I unfortunately didn’t get to finishing the other Freeman’s Mind episode, but I will as soon as I move (and keep making more).

UPDATE: Editing is DONE, although rendering, encoding, and uploading is not. Even though it’s watchable on my computer at the moment, realistically it won’t be uploaded to Machinima.com until tomorrow.

Okay, I THINK we’re good with the forms now, hopefully this version won’t implode like the last one did. The link for it is up at the top of the page. I’m quite happy with how this version is looking. It’s based on phpBB and is almost all finished. There’s a couple minor features not present yet, but it should be quite functional. Really most of what I said a few days ago is still valid, so I won’t repeat it all here. Comments on the front page will be locked, but you can reply to all news posts now in the forum. Also I was mistaken, the posts from the last forum incarnation will NOT be preserved, sorry. There were only about half a dozen on there before it got shot down, and none of them were a cure for cancer or anything. Thanks for the forum go to “Jexius Something” for doing most of the work on this and to David Donaldson for helping out as well.

I’ll be leaving to move in a few days, but I promise I’ll have “The Tunnel” finished sometime this weekend. I’ll upload it, but I can’t promise when it will go up on Youtube. I’ll make another announcement when it is uploaded.

UPDATE:

I’ve spent most of today working with new volunteers helping to build a forum in phpBB and it’s very close to done. The lead behind it (Jexius) was pushing to launch tonight, but said he had to go to sleep very soon, so I decided to wait since a few features were still missing and I didn’t feel like risking a second botched launch in a row. The forum looks FANTASTIC, and I found a good theme that matches the site well. It looks like all user registration info will still be preserved and it’s possible old posts and comments will transfer over, though it may or may not launch with that feature. If all goes well, the forum will be up sometime tomorrow afternoon / evening.

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Well last night’s attempt at the forums was less than stellar. Before I give it a second try, I thought I should get everyone’s opinion on what they want. My original goal was to migrate all the news posts and comments over to the forums and not make people re-register. That still is an option, though it’s apparent the software being used may have a few more bugs to be worked out.

The software we tried last night is called Simple Press, a forums plugin for Wordpress. It has a boatload of features on it and is actually pretty customizable. On their showcase page, they have multiple examples, some of which look pretty decent, so the potential for it to look good is there. The only wonky thing I noticed with it was that their search engine interface is a little strange, but other than that I think it’s pretty decent software.

The main alternative I’ve been offered help with is phpBB. This seems like a solid forum interface that many people are probably familiar with and I’m sure there’s a lot of support for. However this option means that you may have to re-register on the site and that all the old posts and comments probably won’t be carried over to the forums.

I still do want to phase out the comments system on the main page so that all new commentary is directed at the forums, but beyond that I wanted to see how important re-registering and old posts were to everyone. I’ve put up a poll. I’ll go with whatever the winner is, unless people make really compelling arguments for another in the comments section.

So let me know what you think, I’m still eager to launch the forums and have more involvement on the site all-round.

[poll id=”2”]