Some news:

MYSTERY VIDEO PROJECT STATUS:

I’ve been unable to meet the deadline on my mystery video project. This isn’t as bad as it could be however. This short video is being done for a film festival happening at the end of the month / early December. The original deadline was to also get some extra Youtube promotion for it, but not for the festival itself. I’ve been working around the clock for weeks trying to get this finished. In other news, this video also has the highest number of volunteers flaking out / disappearing / or becoming too busy of any other video I’ve worked on. Sometimes I get a lot of help and things work great, but most times, this happens.

T-SHIRT BUSINESS WANTED:

As mentioned previously, I’ve been trying to get t-shirt sales off the ground, but haven’t had much success with it. I haven’t given up on it however, and feel I should open up to scope of how to handle this. The reason I haven’t done this myself is because it’s very time consuming and I would much rather throw my time at making more videos than running a business. With that in mind I wanted to ask people online if anyone wanted to make an offer regarding this. Here are some things to keep in mind if you have business experience and wish to contact me about the shirts:

-I’ll want to be separate from the business / production end of things. This means I won’t be taking orders, shipping the shirts, handling the paperwork, etc.

-Due to my previous attempts at this, I’m going to have to insist on someone who has experience running a business. So this means someone who can handle all the tax forms, has licenses to operate, has an idea of production costs, etc.

-I’ll want final say over the shirt designs and will be responsible for providing them.

-Previous plans for this operation were to split net profits on the shirts 50-50. If this isn’t doable, then your offer should hopefully beat cafepress or zazzle.

-I really don’t know what to expect in terms of sales. My guess is there will be a large surge of sales initially, that will taper off after a couple months. Ideally I’d want something that can scale well. Even if only one person wants to buy a shirt a month, I’d like for them to be able to get it.

-While it doesn’t have to be immediately, I will want to eventually be able to sell shirts internationally. This can either happen by charging more in shipping for non-USA residents, or have a separate handler for different regions, like Europe, Australia, etc. The majority of sales will very likely be in the USA however.

-Shirt designs for the near future will all be black and white. I’m going to want to have the Freeman’s Mind logo, the Civil Protection logo, and gradually roll out some custom designs based on one-liners from Freeman’s Mind.

-While it’s not a necessity, it would be highly preferable if something could be set up by the end of the month.

Go ahead and contact me at [email protected] if you’re interested in this. If I don’t hear from anyone or if I’m not convinced by the offers I get, I’ll probably set this up myself at cafepress, zazzle, or some site like that.

ADHD version: videos and shirts and stuff

As mentioned in the last post, I’m currently working on a custom video with a deadline. I’m scrambling to try and get all the animation done hopefully by the end of the month, leaving a little bit of time afterwards for sound and music. I have some great people helping me right now, but if one of them were to disappear (which is VERY possible), then I may have problems. On that note, I’d rather play things cautiously and want to ask for some additional help just in case more is needed. Here are the positions I’m looking for:

3RD PARTY SOFTWARE ANIMATOR - There are two areas to help here. One is doing some custom character animation for a Valve skeleton, you can use any software you want for this, as long as you can export to .SMD or .DMX format. The other will involve altering a model and creating some simple animations for it. For this you will either need to decompile a Source model or else import a Softimage scene file into whichever software you use.

SOURCE FILMMAKER ANIMATOR - Depending on your skill level, may involve facial expression animation, movement of simple objects, patching together some scenes, car animation, maybe some lighting, could be several different minor things.

HAMMER HELPER - Someone to do misc. touch-up work to maps in Hammer. This will involve placing additional props, testing light settings, replacing and rotating a lot of textures, simple stuff like that. You do not need to be a skilled map maker for this (already have great people on that), but you do need to be familiar with Hammer for Source SDK.

If you’re interested in helping with any of this, please contact me at [email protected], thanks.

This is just a news post to let people know I’m not dead, again. I’ve successfully moved and my computer didn’t suffer any casualties in the process. Since then I’ve been working almost exclusively on the mystery video discussed in the last post since that one has a deadline. I’ll have to be done with it one way or another by early November, I sincerely hope it will be before then. Without revealing too much, it will be a short video, not part of an existing series kind of a surreal and slightly creepy comedy. I’ll be filming it in Source Filmmaker, even though I still plan to transition to UDK in the long term. While I don’t know if I’ll be able to start the “month of Freeman” on November 1st, I promise I’ll focus on outputting a spree of Freeman’s Mind episodes as soon as I’m done with this side project. Also I haven’t forgotten about the downloadable copies of the last episodes, I just need to organize a bunch of my files before processing everything.

ADHD version: Ross is working on a mystery video, he’ll make a bunch of FM episodes afterwards.

Youtube

Downloadable copy will be up after I move

Here’s the next exciting cliffhanger episode to Freeman’s Mind. If you think the laser in this episode acts strange, you can blame that on Source’s amazing demo recording code. It will be a while before the next episode comes out since I’m going to be moving very soon, but I still plan to have a spree of episodes done at some point, hopefully in November. I’m mostly going to be working on one of the mystery video projects between now and then.

This episode uses my new microphone setup, which I’m pretty happy with and will likely be the standard for videos I voice for several years. This episode also has a new sound editor for Freeman’s Mind, Max Petrosky, who does the additional sound effects work that you hear in the game and will likely help with a lot of future FM episodes. The old editor, Otto Beumelburg, will still be helping me with other video projects however.

And in case you missed the post before this, I will not be switching to the Black Mesa mod for Freeman’s Mind.

I was going to wait and mention this when the next Freeman’s Mind episode came out (hopefully this week), but since I’ve already received 5 emails on it, I can see it can’t wait. The mod Black Mesa is coming out and will be partially finished. I’ve had people ask me if I plan to switch Freeman’s Mind over to the new game. No, I don’t. I think the graphical difference would be somewhat disruptive / distracting to the series, especially if I get to Xen before the BM team does. I originally considered switching over after Freeman blacked out since that would be a smoother transition, but I passed that point, so I’m just going