Frequently Asked Questions

Q: What is this site?
A: This is a hub for all the videos I create. I work primarily making machinima movies. Almost everything here will be comedy, but I eventually hope to make videos with action, adventure, suspense, or horror elements as well.

Q: What is Accursed Farms?
A: It’s simply a name I wanted to tack on to all my videos to give one central location for everything. It’s not a real company, or even an official group. It’s just a convenience for me and viewers.

Q: How did you come up with the name Accursed Farms?
A: I originally wanted something completely misleading, like Smith Dairy Farms, but decided against it. I compromised with Accursed Farms because I think it creates a slightly uneasy feel, which I like.

Q: Who are you?
A: I’m Ross Scott. I’m the writer, director, creator, etc. of the videos you’ll find here.

Q: What is machinima?
A: Movies created using a computer or videogame engine. Find an alternate definition here.

Q: Do you make these videos by yourself?
A: Some of them. The early Civil Protection and Freeman’s Mind episodes I did, but more recent videos have gotten a lot of help from volunteers (and it reflects in the credits).

Q: Who is in Accursed Farms besides you?
A: There’s not really an official roster. Things operate more like a mercenary camp. Some people have helped for a long time, others only briefly. The credits to the videos is always the best indicator to find out who worked on what.

Q: Why do these videos take so damn long to come out?
A: Animation. It sucks up more time than anything else. While I don’t have the same problems with Freeman’s Mind, if there’s a long delay it means I’m probably working on something else that is more time consuming.

Q: Why is the Machinima.com logo on a bunch of your videos?
A: I have an agreement with them that gets me a tremendous amount of exposure, which is great. I’m probably getting 10x the number of views through them that I would be just releasing videos by myself.

Q: Are you going to continue Freeman’s Mind all the way through Half-Life and Half-Life 2?
A: Maybe. Freeman’s Mind is sort of a runaway experiment that’s turned out more popular than I anticipated. There are projects I would prefer to work on instead, but nothing I could create in a similar timeframe. As long as there’s a continued interest in more episodes, I can’t see a reason not to make more of them. I just don’t want to promise I’ll complete the entire series in case people grow tired of it in the future.

Q: Will you switch over to Black Mesa for Freeman’s Mind once it comes out?
A: Maybe. I’m undecided, that might be a good transition for after Freeman blacks out.

Q: Can I put your videos on another website, DVD, ipod, etc.?
A: Yes, you can copy and show these videos in any format as long as you’re not selling copies of them.

Q: Can I be a voice actor in one of your videos?
A: Probably not. I’ve already had a ton of requests for voice acting and I prefer using people I already have some history with. The exception is if you can sound like a particular character I’m looking for. I’ll make announcements if I ever need a new kind of voice.

Q: Why is the sound out of sync for all the streaming versions of your videos on Machinima.com?
A: I don’t know and they don’t either. I recommend watching either the Youtube versions or downloading them instead.

Q: Has Valve contacted you about these videos / have you contacted Valve?
A: No. From what I’ve gathered Valve has a laissez-faire approach to machinima, plus I’m not exactly Speilberg, so I doubt they care about what I’m doing here in the first place.

Q: Will you link to my machinima site?
A: Generally no. It’s not that I’m trying to be unfriendly, I just don’t like playing politics. There are some videos I really like that I would link to, but there are other people that request links that seem like nice people, but I may not care for their videos. So rather than reject people, I’m trying to maintain a policy of neutrality. I’ll still link to other people’s series in posts when they contribute something for a particular episode.

Q: I posted a comment on your page, why isn’t it showing up?
A: It’s a delayed process as someone has to approve the comment first. I didn’t use to have this, but then I got spam comments along with ones from the occasional psycho. I won’t block any comments that criticize the videos as long as you’re civil about it. If you act like a jackass however, there’s a good chance your comments will get blocked. I’ll also block comments that insult other people just because that rarely leads to anything good.

Q: Is the character Dave based on Craig Mengel?
A: No. Craig is a friend of mine who was willing to play the part.

Q: Do you use Garry’s Mod to make your videos?
A: So far, no. There’s so much work and customization involved in using the Source SDK that Garry’s Mod doesn’t really add much on top of that to justify it to me.

Q: How do you animate everything / how is it so smooth?
A: I use the software provided in the Source SDK, a combination of the programs Face Poser and Hammer.

Q: How do you record your videos?
A: For the most part I use the video recorder built into the Source engine.

Q: How do you do the Combine voice in Civil Protection?
A: It’s not really the Combine voice, but for Mike I talk in a different voice, use a pitch changer, and a bandpass filter to make it sound like it’s coming over a radio. For Dave I just use the bandpass filter.

Q: What other software do you use?
A: I use Virtualdub for processing clips, Adobe Premiere for editing, Cooledit 2000 for audio editing.

Q: How did you do the tai chi animation in “What Is Machinima”?
A: I didn’t, that was a custom animation done by Ryan McDonald using Softimage XSI.

Q: Will you release your videos in a format besides WMV?
A: Maybe, it depends on if I can get mirrors for them.

Q: Why don’t you host your big videos on Filefront?
A: Filefront has a policy of deleting videos that don’t get downloaded within a certain timeframe, making it only good as a short term solution.

Q: How do you do pullups in Freeman’s Mind?
A: I have cheats enabled and have “noclip” mode assigned to a hotkey.

Q: How do you put away your weapon in Freeman’s Mind?
A: Originally I was switching to another weapon covered with invisible textures, but since then, one viewer has informed me of the command “impulse 200″, which can put away the weapon.

Q: Can I have your permission to do a new series in the Freeman’s Mind format for another game?
A: You don’t need my permission to do this. I’m not the first person to come up with the idea of putting words in other character’s mouths.

Q: What is the subscribe feature?
A: The subscription feature will let you get email updates when the blog is updated or a new episode is released. Your email will not be shared with a third party, and your email will only be used to send email updates.