WarpedMindDogma Productions

Team Shenanigans

2010-06-16T09:45:00.006-04:00

Here is my final project team's brand new website, where you can learn a little bit about the people I've been working with the past 5 months and check out our game Gingerdead, a survival/defense game with a Hansel and Gretel theme.

www.Teamshenanigans.net

Achievement Unlocked: Successfully Defend Thesis

2010-04-28T20:49:00.006-04:00

Today was a very big day in my academic career down here at Full Sail; after months and months of writing and research, I was able to successfully present and defend my thesis, Application of SRK Framework to Game Mechanics.

My next step is to figure out how to get it published and out into the world. Shawn Stafford, one of my committee members, recommended Gamasutra, so I've been taking a look over there to see what kind of requirements they have for publishing. Appears to be mostly word limit and what not, so I think I'll confer with my committee members and send an email to Gamasutra's publisher, see if my thesis would be of any interest. For now, though, I'll just have it available upon request for any interested parties.

Setbacks

2009-09-23T16:45:00.003-04:00

Currently recovering from a virus that required me to format all of my hard drive partitions, and ended up with me losing a great deal of files and information. It's going to be a while before I get things back up and running.

Let's restart a bit, shall we?

2009-09-13T21:59:00.005-04:00

Okay. Hold on.

A lot has happened since I previously posted in this blog little under a year ago. Suffice to say, a lot has happened.

The quick things- Worked an absolutely horrible job at a call center dealing with customer service for a cell phone company based in Mississippi, after all, had to pay the bills somehow.

However! During this period of which I will block out, I applied to and was accepted to grad school at Full Sail University in their relatively new Game Design Master's of Science Program.

I've also been attending said program for the past two months as well. So! In light of trying to be professional and academic, I'm going to try and cease neglecting this website, post some information about life at Full Sail and my experiences going through this Master's Program. Also going to try to talk more about games and what not, since that is my career goal now. I'm most certainly learning a great deal, far more then I ever did in New Media (for which I'm quite happy.)

Other news to report - 'Stray Dog' remains in pre-production (probably forever stuck at this point), and given the little free time I have, I'll probably have to scrap any plans for a machinima project and focus on just completing the screenplay. Once it's done I might consider a creative commons for it, and see if maybe I can get some feedback from...somewhere.

An Update

2008-10-27T22:08:00.004-04:00

Everything's still in pre-production, albeit on and off. Still working on the script, and I'm starting to think I'll try an episode format rather then trying to get a whole movie together in one go. Plus it'll give me an idea of whether or not this project has any merit when it's all said and done.

Other news, I'm applying for graduate school and going to attempt to write a novel in November. Go me!

Not Exactly Dead

2008-07-24T21:32:00.003-04:00

So the re-write of the "Stray Dog" script is progressing slower then I had hoped, but I'm pushing myself to be done before mid-August. I've put the whole 'editorial' style project on indefinite hold until I have access to a much faster connection then I do now. I'm pretty sure that Steam along with every Valve game I own is incredibly out of date, so I have a strong feeling that's going to put any kind of real machinima production on hold for the most part.

In other news, I recently joined a mod team for Sins of a Solar Empire. There's a lot of helpful mod stuff out, so I figured I'd look into it and found a mod called "Gothic Sins" that's translating Battlefleet Gothic (a Warhammer 40K variant game) into SoaSE.

The Curse of Dial-Up

2008-06-10T21:00:00.002-04:00

Since graduating and moving back home, I've been limited to the quite crappy internet connection my parents currently have, so it's put quite the crimp in a lot of my post-capstone project ideas.

I was hoping to get my concept of addressing the machinima community with an editorial series or some kind of reviewing series (something with a bit of a joke title like "Your Machinima is Bad and You Should Feel Bad") but since it takes me four or so hours to even download the most recent episodes of the new Red vs Blue series with my paltry 26.4 kps connection, I'm pretty much unable to watch a lot of the machinima videos out there, let alone do some research on the matter. Once I get a faster connection I'll be able to look into it more, but for now, looks like it'll be on hold. Again. Which pretty much sucks.

On the other hand, I'm planning to be done with the re-written script of "Stray Dog" by the end of the month at the latest. Once it's done, I'm going to see if I can get some input on it by anyone in the machinima community (probably from LitFuseFilms or TheLeetWorld.) and from there try and proceed with pre-production. I have a friend who's willing to put together some concept art and from there I'll see if I can get some advice on how to put some of those creations together. I'll probably be putting together a list of what I need to do once the script is done.

What's Next

2008-05-21T12:19:00.003-04:00

So, now that I've passed Capstone, and more or less officially graduated, it's time to look at the next project!

So far my thoughts are either to go with either my original idea of a full-length Machinima based off the script I originally wrote in back in October of 2007, or to try those 'editorial' style Machinima pieces that address the community.

However, I'm a little unsure as to where to start with either project, as they're both going to require some lengthy planning and research. I think initially, I'll re-write the script for the feature-length Machinima (tentatively titled "Stray Dog") and put out some feelers in the Machinima community to see what are people talking about or would like to see talked about.

Post Capstone and Beyond

2008-05-08T15:28:00.002-04:00

As of today, I have handed in all works and papers related to my capstone to my professor. It'll be a while before I hear about any grades or the like, but I'm hoping for a passing grade.

Beyond that, I'm planning to use this summer to work on more Machinima projects, most likely related to the routes I did not taking during the development of my capstone.

Thinking with Portals: An Experimental Machinima

2008-04-07T19:49:00.004-04:00

TwP is the final project for my senior capstone at the University of Maine, titled 'New Media Machinima'.

Higher Quality Link:

http://vimeo.com/872695

The live-action elements were filmed using an HD Sony handicam, while all of the machinima aspects were generated in the Source Engine by Valve. Both were blended together in Adobe After Effects to create the project you see here.

I dub this an experimental machinima because machinima is hybridized with more conventional filmmaking in this project, rather then being the dominant medium. More of my thoughts and comments on machinima as well as information on how exactly I made TwP will be in a later post, right here at this website.

The release of "Thinking With Portals"...

2008-04-04T00:17:00.000-04:00

...Will be released sunday at the latest.

The Status of My Capstone

2008-03-31T22:18:00.007-04:00

I hope to have the film complete by this friday at the latest.

Experiments in Machinina 1: Thinking with Portals

2008-02-25T14:07:00.002-05:00

Put together over the course of a Sunday and most of that time was making the green/blue screen map in Hammer. Video was edited in After Effects. I know it's really not much, but it's mostly just a test on combining elements from machinima and conventional filmmaking.

I have a couple of small videos like this in mind, they're currently in production and I hope to have them up by the end of this week.

Unfortunately, Stage6.com is in the process of shutting down, so I won't be able to host anything higher quality until either I find an alternative or another high quality video website fills the void.

On a Side Note...

2008-02-21T00:31:00.001-05:00

...I just realized that I haven't actually posted my real machinima on here, which I meant to do months ago.

The Concept of a Machinima Pre-production Website

2008-02-17T22:20:00.013-05:00

Over the past couple of days I've brought up the discussion of a pre-production oriented website over at Machinima.com and Litfusefilms to see what those involved. Some of the feedback I recieved was mixed, but mostly pointed out that it wouldn't be that much of a benefit, for several reasons I'll go into at a later post.

Overall, I think one machinimator, SgtPadrino (who made the very excellent Born Into Freedom film), summed things up very bluntly-

"This is the straight truth: if all someone is willing to do is post a single question thread expecting somebody else to write a fucking essay about the ins and outs of Premiere or After Effects while you hold their hand, telling them what to do every step of the way, they will never create anything worth two shits. Period. That's the mentality of everyone that wants to emulate Lit Fuse, and everyone asking stupid goddamned questions about how to make quality work (God forbid they ask something anymore specific than "duuuude howd u get those sweet camera anglez???") then give up as soon as they realize that you've got to put effort in to get quality out. It doesn't matter if there was a fucking website, because they'd all still expect you to dig it up and link it for them - and hell, even then they'd just browse through and think "lulz taht program costs liek a hundred dollars fcuk that." If somebody really cares enough to make some shit, they'll take the whopping five minutes out of their day to get their own start. Once they're off on the right foot, hell I'd be all for helping them; they're at least willing to put something into it. For everyone else: why bother?"

Personal Thoughts on the Machinima Community

2008-02-03T22:01:00.000-05:00

From my personal experience so far, I've come to find that there's not much of a pre-production support structure in the Machinima community as much as there is a post-production capacity, in that it's easier to get critique and comments on your machinima projects after they've been competed and released compared to getting technical advice or help when you're first creating your project. When trying to find a specific tutorial or guide to modifying an aspect of game (such as Half Life 2) with creating a machinima in mind, it can be rather difficult. This is mostly because there's more of a focus on modifying the game for single or multi-player gameplay.

While there are sites like Machinima.com, which do have articles on the basic theories on creating machinima or modifying some of the games commonly used for machinima, there doesn't seem to me to be a central 'hub' of sorts, with guides, articles and tutorials aimed specifically at creating machinima. I sometimes wonder if someone were to create a kind of "How to make Machinima" super website with more focus on the overall creation of machinima rather then just the critique of finished films, if it would be a helpful addition to the machinima community as a whole.

Concept Ideas

2008-01-12T00:08:00.000-05:00

As spring semester starts up, I've come to the conclusion that I really don't have the time, manpower or resources to create my original capstone idea. I've opted instead to create a series of smaller machinima experiments instead. I've only come up with a few ideas at first, but I hope that through discussion with other machinima-related forums (like those at Litfusefilms.com) I can come up with some others as well. I'll probably look into the various filming techniques used in older movies (before most of the digital stuff that most movies have today) to see if there's any other kind of interesting things to experiment with in a game engine.

So far, I have two main ideas in mind:

Real-Life Actor vs Digitally Replicated Actor

The basic idea for this experiment would be to test the boundaries and capabilities of the Source SDK program Faceposer. I'm going to talk to some friends who are in the Theather department, and see if any of them would be interested in doing a monologue or something. I'd record it with a camera, later seperate the audio, and then see if I can replicate the actor's expressions and body language using a character from Half Life 2. The ultimate goal will be to see just how close to a digital performance I can script based off a live performance.I'm also going to look into reskinning the game model to look like the live-action actor in question.

Machinima Movie Scene

Although my film's currently out of my capabilities right now, I'm looking at least attempting to create one of the scenes from the original script. I'm currently looking at the opening sequence, which details an assassin escaping from a pursuing helicopter across the roofs of a cyberpunk/Blade Runner-inspired cityscape (though it's probably not nearly as dramatic as it sounds). It'll be a chance for me to experiment with scripted sequences in Hammer, and possibly a chance to create some original content in the XSI Mod Tool that Softimage offers.

Half Life 2 Faceposer Prototype

2007-12-13T22:09:00.000-05:00

I recently gave a presentation for my capstone class (The second one this semester) detailing more information on my machinima project and the programs I'll be using.

I messed around with the Source SDK's Faceposer for a little bit and managed to come up with this. I used it as my capstone's 'prototype'

It's pretty basic, but didn't take long to do. I think using this as my prototype sort of backfired- I may have given classmates and attending professors the impression such a video took some time to put together, which wasn't really the case. I'm sure as I practice with the programs and attempt more prototypes, I'll get a better grip on things and speed up the production process, so that small projects like the above video can be completed on short order.

Opening Statement

2007-12-12T01:31:00.001-05:00

What you see here is the first post in what I hope to be my production journal for duration of my senior capstone project, which is the creation of a Machinima film.

I've been involved with the New Media program at the University of Maine for the past four years, and I've had very strong interests in film, video, and other time-based mediums. I've always had a strong interest the video game industry, and hope to pursue a career in that field post graduation. My interest in machinima stems from the early days of Red vs. Blue, and I've been facsinated with the development of video game filmmaking as an alternative way of delivering complex narratives. While I'm not sure about trying to make a career out of machinima, I would like to hopefully incorporate some of it into whatever job I end up getting out of college.