Youtube

Download 672x384 WMV (66MB)

Surprise, here’s yet another episode. This one’s more action-oriented and plays like some of the earlier ones, so I think fans of the series will like this one more. I wasted pretty much an entire night trying to solve the WMV encoding problem that plagued the last episode, but was finally able to crack it, so hopefully this means no more video/audio anomalies in the future.

This wasn’t made during the gap between the last one. I started working on this one on Saturday and it wasn’t finished until yesterday. Believe it or not, I can’t do much more than about 3 minutes a day on an episode, and that’s under good circumstances and not counting additional sound editing. That may sound ludicrous, but it actually does take me that long, I’ve tried to do it faster before. It’s not because I’m lazy, I just don’t know how to move faster and still have the show come out as well. While it’s loads faster than Civil Protection, it’s basically a process of going through a clip, thinking of a line, recording said line many times as I’m not the greatest voice actor (this can range from 2 - 20+ takes, depending on the line and how important it is), editing through all said takes and arranging it in the episode. If I was a better voice actor and good at improvisation I could probably be done with the game by now. In this reality however, the next episode will probably be out sometime late Monday.

In other news, I still want to catch up on subtitles, website improvements, extras, emails, and many other things, but for the moment I’m just focusing on getting the videos out.

EDIT:

I’m probably going to have to add this to the FAQ. Several of you were asking why the episode was up on Youtube before it was up on here. The answer is I never know when the video is going to be up on Youtube. I have to check it, same as you. It’s someone else’s job to upload it and they’re usually pretty busy to be able to answer my inquests all the time. In this case I was taking a nap when it went up since I’ve been working night hours so it’s quiet enough for me to me record (my old spot got converted to someone else’s office). Since I’m in a different room this is also why there’s more of an echo in recent episodes.

EDIT 2:

Well I finished episode 22, but I don’t have control over when it gets released. The original schedule was Monday, but things got pretty close to the wire on this one. I guess it’s Tuesday now?

Youtube

Download 672x384 WMV (70MB)

Here’s another new episode. This one has a new introduction for the titles I made. I originally made this to go with the Machinima.com opening logo to try and better integrate it into the show, but after being told that should be fine, it was shot down (that caused a delay with the last episode actually), so I decided to redo it and integrate it into the regular titles. Even though it’s a few seconds long I’m a little hesitant to add something like this since I know many Youtube viewers have extremely short attention spans and this on top of the Machinima.com logo and the titles might be a little more than they want to wait through, but I decided to include it anyway. If people like it, I’ll probably leave it in for a few episodes then change it to something new to maybe reflect Freeman’s progress in the game.

This episode is another wandering episode, there’s no enemy conflict in this one. I’m guessing for that reason people won’t like it quite as much, but I’m still trying to keep it interesting. The episode after this will have more action and that will be out pretty soon.

Making these in a rapid-fire fashion is cutting into my time more than I’d like (I’m working weekends, but not more than about 8 hours a day), but it’s sort of interesting to see how fast I can do them since I’ve never made multiple episodes of Freeman’s Mind where that’s ALL I was working on before. I think they might come out a little better if they were done more slowly, but not substantially so. Regardless, this is an experiment. I’ll be going back to work on Civil Protection by the end of the month.

EDIT:

Even though the Youtube version will be forever screwed up, I finally fixed the downloadable copy so the intro plays correctly and the sound is in sync.

Youtube

Download 672x384 WMV (49MB)

Well surprise, here’s the next episode of Freeman’s Mind. This one isn’t the best since it’s mainly just backtracking through the level, but I thought the ending came out well enough. There should be several more coming out this month. I’ve stopped working 70-80 hour workweeks because that simply wasn’t sustainable and now I’m basically just focusing on FM for the next couple weeks as kind of a break. Unfortunately this means Civil Protection will be getting stalled because the longer hours were the only way it was getting made in light of the other stuff I was doing. I plan to resume work on it during Thanksgiving break. I am by no means dropping it, but I’d say right now it’s looking to be more like a December or January release due to everything else that’s going on.

Youtube

Download 672x384 WMV (44MB)

Here’s the newest episode. I was pretty liberal about using cheat codes this time, though my justification is for the places I use them, I’m simply doing what I personally would do if I was in the same situation Freeman happens to be in (though I doubt I would end up in the same situations myself). I think this one may be one of the better FM episodes in terms of writing, though the voice acting probably isn’t as good as it could be in areas since practically everything I’ve been producing lately has been a bit of a rush job.

I still need to upload episode 2 of FM here since the downloadable copy has been deleted by Machinima.com for a little while now. I’ve misplaced the disc where I’ve burned a copy of it, but I’ll find it and try to take care of the link tonight.

As for the downloadable copies, I’m undecided what resolution is best. I’m trying to strike a balance between higher resolution and keeping the filesize low. The series has actually undergone a shrink, though you won’t notice it on your end. I recorded old episodes at 800x600, but usually had to encode to 832x624 to avoid encoding errors. For widescreen I’ve been recording at 848x480 and am currently releasing at 672x384 since that’s pretty close to the original aspect ratio and will have a comparable download size to the 640x480 clips. If you have any preference about the resolution, leave it below, just be aware that a larger resolution increases the filesize and time to download. I’m not going any higher than my current resolution for Freeman’s Mind, the detail just isn’t there for Half-Life 1 to justify it, plus these are just gameplay videos. I’ll continue to do Civil Protection at 1280x720. Also I’m still releasing using WMV format only because it keeps hundreds of people from emailing me asking how to play the video. Next to MPG, I think it’s probably the most compatible format there is. It’s by no means the best though, I might look into releasing higher quality copies in the future. It’s not as simple as picking a format, I have to have an understanding of the encoding settings to keep a reasonable balance between size and visual quality.

I’m also far behind on responding to email, but that’s something else I hope to get caught up with soon. In the meantime, I’ll be spending all my time on The Tunnel, though I may let up a bit because the hours I’ve been putting in lately just aren’t sustainable for me.

Youtube

Machinima.com streaming

Download 1280x720 WMV (13MB)

Okay, here is the GOOD version of the trailer available to watch or for download. I’m kind of boycotting the old Youtube version simply because it’s unfinished. The visuals are the same on both versions, though they made me add a pumpkin graphic to some contest they’re conducting, I removed that for the downloadable copy.

The real difference between these trailers is in the audio, which can be crucial to setting mood. Thanks goes to Otto Beumelburg (I frequently misspell his name) for the great sound effects and most of the audio mixing and Craig Kesicke for composing great custom music for the trailer; both of whom had extremely short notice on this. You’ll be hearing more of Craig Kesicke’s music in the future as there are situations that I require custom music for, plus there’s some drama going on surrounding my use of game soundtracks, but I’ll save that for a separate post.

Now about the trailer itself! This is NOT the best trailer I could have made, however it’s one of the safest. While it’s impossible to make a trailer that’s spoiler-free, I took pains to make sure this one didn’t reveal too much about the episode. There are major scenes of the episode that aren’t shown at all here and there should be plenty of surprises throughout the entire episode once it gets completed. Not only that, but I wasn’t really ready to begin filming, so I just dropped the work I was doing and made a lot of snippet shots. There’s a high probability almost none of the exact same shots you see here will be in the actual episode. On top of that, I changed a line or two of the dialogue so it would flow better and the joke at the end was made up for the trailer as well, it’s not even part of the episode (because most jokes are less funny once you’ve already heard them). While the plot and theme will remain the same, several lines are delivered in completely different areas or context. My goal here was to give you a reason to watch the actual episode if you’ve already seen the trailer (and vice-versa once it comes out). So if you want NO spoilers, don’t watch the trailer, but if you do, rest assured it doesn’t spoil much.

When the episode does get completed, it will be both comedy and suspense and will likely be the longest episode of CP made so far, probably at least 15 minutes. While there will be humor throughout the episode, the jokes won’t be as constant as some others because there will be more emphasis on developing the story. And while the episode will start out in the same location as “Shadow of a A Doubt” it is not meant as a sequel to it. I honestly don’t know when it will be done since I’ve been so busy with other work, but I can guarantee it won’t be rushed out the door.