Home to Civil Protection and Freeman's Mind
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CkJXy3ejScE
Youtube
Downloadable copy will be up after a revision is done to the audio.
Here’s the next episode. This episode was brutal on me. My old microphone died on me a small ways into the video (you’ll probably be able to hear where it changes), so I had to take my best guess as to what kind of microphone to get as a substitute. I’m relatively ignorant about mics though, and one problem the new mic had was that for some reason it makes my shouting seem much less intense than it is in reality. So if my voice performance seems lackluster, blame the mic, I was screaming my head off to try and make it sound believable. On top of that, I wanted to make sure this episode got on this Friday before the meetup so there would be an annotation blurb at the end about it. That put some time pressure on me and due to some miscommunication, all the volume balancing for this was done in about half an hour by me in a desperate attempt to get the video submitted in time. I made the deadline but the audio quality likely suffered a bit. There will be a remix of the audio for the downloadable copy when it goes up later that will sound better. Also I’m going to take a break from Freeman’s Mind until I get a more appropriate microphone. I’ll be working on a surprise video you can expect in the next month or two however.
MICROPHONE ADVICE NEEDED (AGAIN)
I’ve received a lot of promising suggestions about what microphones to get in the past and I feel like now I have a LITTLE more knowledge about what I need, so I thought maybe people could give me recommendations based on what the problems I’m having with my current mic are. My biggest issue with this new mic by far is that it makes my shouting seem a lot less intense than it really is. Before you recommend a mic to me, I would like someone to explain exactly what properties of a mic would cause that to happen . I get very, very loud when doing the shouting for Freeman’s Mind. I consider this video to be a fair representation of how loud I can shout. I’d like whatever microphone I use to capture that intensity when doing lines, it will help me a lot. Anyway, I’ve made a small chart illustrating my experiences with microphones so far:
https://www.accursedfarms.com/images/News_Images/microphone_quest.jpg
Just because a microphone is good, doesn’t mean it may be good for what I do necessarily. I thank knowledgeable people in advance for advice they can give me.
Youtube
Downloadable copy will be up after a revision is done to the audio.
Here’s the next episode. This episode was brutal on me. My old microphone died on me a small ways into the video (you’ll probably be able to hear where it changes), so I had to take my best guess as to what kind of microphone to get as a substitute. I’m relatively ignorant about mics though, and one problem the new mic had was that for some reason it makes my shouting seem much less intense than it is in reality. So if my voice performance seems lackluster, blame the mic, I was screaming my head off to try and make it sound believable. On top of that, I wanted to make sure this episode got on this Friday before the meetup so there would be an annotation blurb at the end about it. That put some time pressure on me and due to some miscommunication, all the volume balancing for this was done in about half an hour by me in a desperate attempt to get the video submitted in time. I made the deadline but the audio quality likely suffered a bit. There will be a remix of the audio for the downloadable copy when it goes up later that will sound better. Also I’m going to take a break from Freeman’s Mind until I get a more appropriate microphone. I’ll be working on a surprise video you can expect in the next month or two however.
MICROPHONE ADVICE NEEDED (AGAIN)
I’ve received a lot of promising suggestions about what microphones to get in the past and I feel like now I have a LITTLE more knowledge about what I need, so I thought maybe people could give me recommendations based on what the problems I’m having with my current mic are. My biggest issue with this new mic by far is that it makes my shouting seem a lot less intense than it really is. Before you recommend a mic to me, I would like someone to explain exactly what properties of a mic would cause that to happen . I get very, very loud when doing the shouting for Freeman’s Mind. I consider this video to be a fair representation of how loud I can shout. I’d like whatever microphone I use to capture that intensity when doing lines, it will help me a lot. Anyway, I’ve made a small chart illustrating my experiences with microphones so far:
https://www.accursedfarms.com/images/News_Images/microphone_quest.jpg
Just because a microphone is good, doesn’t mean it may be good for what I do necessarily. I thank knowledgeable people in advance for advice they can give me.
Since so many people are interested in the meetup idea from the earlier poll, I’ve decided to split things up into TWO meetups instead. I don’t have all the details yet, but I wanted to give people as much notice as possible on the dates and locations, so here they are:
It’s over!
Location: Carowinds - Charlotte, North Carolina
Date: August 4th
Price: 1 for August 4th if you use this link to purchase tickets. (6 + BS “processing” fee.)
My apologies about the prices of these places, these were really the minimum I was able to get the ticket prices down to after a lot of phone calls.
-Freeman’s Mind and Civil Protection T-shirts will be for sale!
-More detailed info will be up soon!
It’s over!
Location: Carowinds - Charlotte, North Carolina
Date: August 4th
Price: 1 for August 4th if you use this link to purchase tickets. (6 + BS “processing” fee.)
My apologies about the prices of these places, these were really the minimum I was able to get the ticket prices down to after a lot of phone calls.
-Freeman’s Mind and Civil Protection T-shirts will be for sale!
-More detailed info will be up soon!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WeTurbxoeE4
Youtube
Download 848x480 MKV (85MB)
At long last, here’s the next episode of Freeman’s Mind. Your enjoyment of this episode may be proportional to how much you like dams. As a bit of a spoiler, I didn’t intend for the helicopter encounter to go quite how it did, but I’ll just keep moving forward with the game.
As I mentioned in the last episode post, I kept a log of how long the entire process for creating this episode took (image below). This ended up being an ideal episode to pick for this experiment. This turned out to be a pretty average episode I think in terms of time. It wasn’t especially long and some minor mistakes happened, which always adds to the time. Also I already had the existing titles and flyby intro created, which also cut down on the time.
This episode was also such a good choice for measuring the time because it perfectly illustrates why I CAN NOT promise release dates. If you look at the log, you may notice that one entry stands out a little bit more than the others, by about about 4 weeks. I thought I was going to have this episode done about 3 weeks ago. That’s obviously not what happened. While in the earlier episodes I did EVERYTHING myself, nowadays I depend on volunteer help in various areas. While I COULD do all the sound editing myself, it’s really worth it for me not to. Even though the sound editor (Otto) took a long time on this episode, during that time I was learning more of the Unreal 3 engine and making some progress on the movie project. That’s time I didn’t have to spent scouring for sound effects and editing. And before people start forming lynch mobs against Otto for taking so long, I really have to come to his defense. He CAN be quite fast, having had a turnaround of about two days or so before. Also he does an OUTSTANDING job on the sound effects, better than I think even I can do now, and better than other volunteers I’ve worked with (though I appreciate their help too). Finally, out of the people who have assisted me as long as he has, I can easily say he is the MOST RELIABLE volunteer I’ve had during that length of time. That should give you an idea of some of the other people I’ve worked with. That said, I’m open to having more sound effects help on Freeman’s Mind. If you have experience with that sort of thing, go ahead and email me and I can arrange a trial test for you.
Now you business majors out there may look at this time log and think “Why, with a fast sound editor Ross could make an episode every 2 days!” While that’s been true once or twice, it only happens under certain conditions. First, I have to be in a good mood to think up lines; otherwise I won’t have anything funny and nobody wants that. Second, when an episode has a lot of shouting, I need several hours for my voice to recover during recording sessions. Finally, I can’t be working on ANYTHING else, and most of the time I’m working on several different things. Usually I only spend a couple hours each day on Freeman’s Mind. If I was good at improv comedy, this process would be approximately 50x faster, but I’m not.
Speaking of other things, before I progress too far on the next episode, my next goal is to update a LOT of the movie links and get a bunch more MKV copies of the older videos up on the site. I don’t think I’ll fix everything, but I plan to spend the next few days getting the videos more organized on the site.
https://www.accursedfarms.com/images/News_Images/FM42_timelog.png
ADHD version: This episode took a while. Expect updates to the site soon.
Youtube
Download 848x480 MKV (85MB)
At long last, here’s the next episode of Freeman’s Mind. Your enjoyment of this episode may be proportional to how much you like dams. As a bit of a spoiler, I didn’t intend for the helicopter encounter to go quite how it did, but I’ll just keep moving forward with the game.
As I mentioned in the last episode post, I kept a log of how long the entire process for creating this episode took (image below). This ended up being an ideal episode to pick for this experiment. This turned out to be a pretty average episode I think in terms of time. It wasn’t especially long and some minor mistakes happened, which always adds to the time. Also I already had the existing titles and flyby intro created, which also cut down on the time.
This episode was also such a good choice for measuring the time because it perfectly illustrates why I CAN NOT promise release dates. If you look at the log, you may notice that one entry stands out a little bit more than the others, by about about 4 weeks. I thought I was going to have this episode done about 3 weeks ago. That’s obviously not what happened. While in the earlier episodes I did EVERYTHING myself, nowadays I depend on volunteer help in various areas. While I COULD do all the sound editing myself, it’s really worth it for me not to. Even though the sound editor (Otto) took a long time on this episode, during that time I was learning more of the Unreal 3 engine and making some progress on the movie project. That’s time I didn’t have to spent scouring for sound effects and editing. And before people start forming lynch mobs against Otto for taking so long, I really have to come to his defense. He CAN be quite fast, having had a turnaround of about two days or so before. Also he does an OUTSTANDING job on the sound effects, better than I think even I can do now, and better than other volunteers I’ve worked with (though I appreciate their help too). Finally, out of the people who have assisted me as long as he has, I can easily say he is the MOST RELIABLE volunteer I’ve had during that length of time. That should give you an idea of some of the other people I’ve worked with. That said, I’m open to having more sound effects help on Freeman’s Mind. If you have experience with that sort of thing, go ahead and email me and I can arrange a trial test for you.
Now you business majors out there may look at this time log and think “Why, with a fast sound editor Ross could make an episode every 2 days!” While that’s been true once or twice, it only happens under certain conditions. First, I have to be in a good mood to think up lines; otherwise I won’t have anything funny and nobody wants that. Second, when an episode has a lot of shouting, I need several hours for my voice to recover during recording sessions. Finally, I can’t be working on ANYTHING else, and most of the time I’m working on several different things. Usually I only spend a couple hours each day on Freeman’s Mind. If I was good at improv comedy, this process would be approximately 50x faster, but I’m not.
Speaking of other things, before I progress too far on the next episode, my next goal is to update a LOT of the movie links and get a bunch more MKV copies of the older videos up on the site. I don’t think I’ll fix everything, but I plan to spend the next few days getting the videos more organized on the site.
https://www.accursedfarms.com/images/News_Images/FM42_timelog.png
ADHD version: This episode took a while. Expect updates to the site soon.
Acting on the philosophy of “It’s better to regret something you have done, than regret something you haven’t done”, I’ve had an idea for a while to see if anyone was interested in doing a meetup for Accursed Farms. You would get to meet me, maybe F.C. Meixell (voice of the shadow man from CP), and maybe Craig Mengel (voice of Dave from CP) although Craig may decline on account of him thinking you people are psychos. Right now I have no solid plans at all, I just wanted to see if there was any interest in this. I was leaning towards going to an amusement park as a venue for this. That way if nobody shows up, I still get to go to an amusement park. If hundreds show up, I don’t have to worry about facilities to handle that.
I currently live in Blacksburg, Virginia , so you can look that up on a map to figure out where a good location for everyone might be. The farther away from me the location is, the less likely I want to travel there for this; especially since I don’t currently have a car, but I can try to figure something out for that. Again, there are no definite plans for this right now, I don’t know when, where, or if it will happen, but if there’s enough interest in this, I’m up for it.
Finally, I was hoping to have this post after the next Freeman’s Mind was released, but since that’s gotten delayed a few weeks due to a sound editing hold-up, that unfortunately won’t be for a little while still.
[poll id=”6”]
I currently live in Blacksburg, Virginia , so you can look that up on a map to figure out where a good location for everyone might be. The farther away from me the location is, the less likely I want to travel there for this; especially since I don’t currently have a car, but I can try to figure something out for that. Again, there are no definite plans for this right now, I don’t know when, where, or if it will happen, but if there’s enough interest in this, I’m up for it.
Finally, I was hoping to have this post after the next Freeman’s Mind was released, but since that’s gotten delayed a few weeks due to a sound editing hold-up, that unfortunately won’t be for a little while still.
[poll id=”6”]
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LINiACtKfVY
Youtube
Download 848x480 MKV (109MB)
After many delays, here’s the next episode of Freeman’s Mind. I’m hoping to get a lot more out soon, though we’ll see what happens. If you like explosions, you’ll probably like this episode.
I ran into a bizarre bug in this episode where the skybox texture would randomly become very bright. Fortunately I was able to re-record the footage on a different system, thus you won’t see it in the episode. I’ll have to do some experiments to determine if the problem is something wrong with my system software or if Nvidia has decided to outsource its driver development to monkeys.
For the next episode I’ll be trying something new and will record exactly how much time is involved with making an episode. I plan for this to be a one-time thing, but I’ll give a full breakdown of how much time is spent on every aspect of Freeman’s Mind #42.
Youtube
Download 848x480 MKV (109MB)
After many delays, here’s the next episode of Freeman’s Mind. I’m hoping to get a lot more out soon, though we’ll see what happens. If you like explosions, you’ll probably like this episode.
I ran into a bizarre bug in this episode where the skybox texture would randomly become very bright. Fortunately I was able to re-record the footage on a different system, thus you won’t see it in the episode. I’ll have to do some experiments to determine if the problem is something wrong with my system software or if Nvidia has decided to outsource its driver development to monkeys.
For the next episode I’ll be trying something new and will record exactly how much time is involved with making an episode. I plan for this to be a one-time thing, but I’ll give a full breakdown of how much time is spent on every aspect of Freeman’s Mind #42.
