This meetup is coming up soon and I finally have all the information finalized. Here’s the itinerary:

Date: July 22nd
Location: King’s Dominion - Doswell, Virginia (near Richmond)

9:00am - 10:45am
Meet at Denny’s Restaurant which is right next to King’s Dominion.

Link to google maps.

I’ll either be having breakfast or else be outside in the parking lot. T-shirts will be sold outside. If you don’t want to pay for the amusement park ticket, here’s your chance to meet up for free.

11:00 - 11:30
Arrive at King’s Dominion, meet at the plaza area (near a flagpole?) in front of the gates. Here’s a picture from google maps:

If traffic is really bad, this time might get pushed back some.

WARNING: There is a 2 parking fee inside King’s Dominion. You might want to try to park somewhere else and carpool with people.

11:30am - 2:00
Enter King’s Dominion, go on rides. If you still need a ticket, here’s the info to get a discount on it if you buy one online:

Price: 9 for July 22nd if you click on this link and follow these instructions:
Username: KDVAFUN04
Password: KDVAFUN04
Then buy the “multi-day” ticket (not what you think) for 3.99. They’ll still add a BS “processing” fee.

2:00 - 2:30
Meet at the Eiffel Tower structure in case more latercomers arrive or people get lost

5:00 - 5:30
Meet again at the Eiffel Tower structure.

- - -

I don’t really have much in the way of plans aside from going to the amusement park, this whole thing will be pretty informal. I figure I’ll just talk to people, you can ask questions, meet Craig Mengel and Fred Meixell in addition to myself. I can sign stuff if you want, if nobody has any ideas what to do I’ll just make up stuff to talk about. I’m really not sure what to expect at this meetup. My guess is it will be something like this:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X4keTxDO6hk

- - -

HOW TO FIND ME

Arriving late? No problem! I’ll be wearing a bright lime green t-shirt like this:

Also I should say to the dismay of many of you, I no longer look like Gordon Freeman. Unlike earlier photos, nowadays I look more like a backup Musketeer or something, judge for yourself:

If I look like I’ve only had 4 hours of sleep in this picture, that’s because I have. And yes, the people with chainsaws behind me were doing their work the same time I was trying to record a lot of the dialogue for the last episode.

Anyway, if you arrive late, you’ll just have to hunt me down at the park, like a real-world “Where’s Waldo” book. I’ll try and remain pretty visible and plan to be at the park all day. If you’re colorblind, you should probably arrive on time.

Hope this works out!

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:

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.

There’s been a ton of stuff going on lately, here are some highlights:

T-SHIRTS

People have been asking me about producing t-shirts for a long time. I’ve never really made much progress with it because I’m really not a businessman at heart, I always rather focus on making more videos, so t-shirt production has been constantly postponed. Fortunately, a personal friend of mine, Evan Anderson, has been VERY interested in helping me print t-shirts and take over the business aspect of things so I don’t have to mess with it. His enthusiasm level for this reminds me of Steve Ballmer, if Ballmer didn’t act like someone who was on cocaine.

We’re still just starting off, but there will be a trial run of SHIRTS FOR SALE AT THE MEETUPS coming July 22nd and August 4th. They will be basic ones, most with the Freeman’s Mind logo, and a smaller amount with the Civil Protection logo. The price for one will be 0. Our plans are for Evan to sell shirts in the parking lot of the amusement parks until he runs out. Right now we’re looking at having around 200 shirts total at the North meetup and then see what happens after that.

For everyone else, don’t worry, there are plans to get an online store going on the site for selling shirts and maybe other things like coffee mugs. I’ll be in charge of which designs go on the shirts, my friend Evan will be handling pretty much everything else. Besides the logos for the shows, I have plans to print some of the better one-liners from Freeman’s Mind along with accompanying artwork to go with them. It will be a gradual process, since setting up a small business can be very complex, but I want to let people know that it’s coming. Also while it’s probable the shipping costs will be higher, I’ll make sure that future shirts will be available to be shipped internationally.
 

MOVIE DOWNLOADS

Good news, all the downloadable copies of the videos have been converted to x264 MKV copies. This means that the copies you download on the site will be about as high quality as possible for the space size. You may still see some minor compression artifacts in the older Freeman’s Mind episodes, but that has more to do with me not following great archive practices rather than the codec itself. Even with the minor compression artifacts, you can know that all the downloadable copies of the videos on the site now are pretty much the highest quality copies available. During this process I also spotted an error with the previous copies that may have caused the sound to skip in places. That has since been corrected, so if you were having that problem, try redownloading the episodes. I also fixed episodes that were released too dark or too bright.

I was able to update most of the links on the website for the videos, but I wasn’t able to add new ones. The movie links are still very haphazard with their accuracy, I apologize about that. I was hoping to have a new and improved movie page section rolled out about 2 weeks ago, but it’s hard to say when that will actually happen, since I don’t do the website programming. I decided to make this announcement now because if we had to wait until things were final, it might be months from now. Expect things to be more organized sometime in the near future.

If you need help finding a player for MKV files, after rigorous testing, I can recommend the program PotPlayer. I do NOT recommend VLC Player, I’ve found it produces some errors in playback of some of the videos, so the quality may not look as good if you are using that.
 

SOURCE FILMMAKER

I’ve received over a dozen emails since yesterday regarding the Source Filmmaker. This is a new set of tools being released by Valve that could assist a lot with machinima making in the Source engine. Some people want to know what my thoughts are on this, so here they are:

-I’m a little bitter this is coming out NOW when a WORKING COPY of this was leaked about 5 years ago. If these tools had been more public back then, it might have saved me hundreds of hours of time collectively over the years. But, better late than never.

-By only allowing this in Team Fortress 2 that normally would limit a lot of things over HL2 games, because TF2 doesn’t really allow for NPC manipulation. However, the Filmmaker does seem to have much more robust animation tools that could largely compensate for this. I think there will be a loss of a lot of AI functions that can make some aspects easier, but the tools added seem to make up for it.

-I think this will add a LOT of functionality to the Source Engine. I think it will mostly fix camerawork and recording issues and allow more animation options via keyframing. But I don’t know if it will address many other issues I’ve encountered using Source that have almost completely shut down my videos in the past. Maybe I’m too cynical, but I NEVER want to have to throw out weeks or months of work because there’s a bug in the software that I don’t know how to fix. Working with the Source SDK for years has made me feel like that is a VERY real possibility and it’s been almost pure luck that I’ve been able to produce the videos I have without everything falling apart.

-Based on what I’ve seen so far, I’m not sure this software has any features that aren’t already included by default in the Unreal Development Kit. While the filmmaker is enough to make me see Source as less of an outright liability, I’m not sure it’s enough to avert me from steering away from the engine in the long term. I’m going to end up using whatever software allows me to get the most things done and still look decent. At the very least, this makes Source worth re-considering instead of me proclaiming it outright doomed like I was ready to in January.

-This software really needs to needs to have open access (instead of closed beta) before I can do much with it, otherwise the only people who can assist me have to also have beta access (assuming I even get it). Let’s hope this will happen before another 5 years!

 
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X4keTxDO6hk
ADHD version: Shirts for sale at meetup! Movie downloads are now high quality! Source Filmmaker makes the Source Engine look less masochistic!

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!

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.

ADHD version: This episode took a while. Expect updates to the site soon.