(ADHD Version at the bottom)
----------------------------------------

Hey people, I’ve got another update which you may or may not care about, but it will affect production for a little while. Some of you probably saw this coming, but I’ve recently made the decision to leave Machinima.com as an employee. I’ll still be working with Machinima, but on a different view-based contract, which will pay substantially less, but I won’t have the same kind of deadlines I’ve had lately.

The reason for me leaving is pretty simple. I was getting less done on the stuff I wanted to work on, and I found it much more stressful than working independently. I was working 7 days a week for months, (about 70-80 hours a week in October, 50-60 hours a week in November) and I was either just barely making deadlines, or falling behind on all fronts. Also it led to me having basically no free time, and I had to neglect everything else; exercise, basic household maintenance, recreation, time to research new technology for future episodes, etc. What’s worse is that I felt like some of the projects might be at risk. “The Tunnel” trailer was a perfect example of this because it was rushed out the door without sound effects or the right music, simply because I needed more time. Working indepedently, there would be less Freeman’s Mind episodes out now, but I think the entire episode of The Tunnel would have been completed before Halloween. As it stands now, it probably won’t be until at least January (I may have a different surprise video for December though). I felt like my only choices when producing content was to either lower the quality standards dramatically so I wouldn’t have to spend as much time on it, or else to put in more hours to try and keep up. I obviously went with the latter option and it still wasn’t enough in most cases.

I think pretty much all of this came from a misunderstanding about how much work some of the episodes required and my goals v. Machinima’s. I got along with everyone at the company and don’t think there was ever any negative intent. They never asked me to work those long hours, it was just the only way I was able to try and meet the deadlines. I think the whole situation was simply Machinima being used to producing content faster than what I’m able to keep up with, plus I’ve never been terribly good at time estimates. I’ve noticed in past comments, that some people seem to demonize the company, but you should remember that I accepted this job with some idea of what it would entail, plus I was doing all this on a salary, so it was their money being spent producing content. While I took that very seriously, it’s also the main reason I’m leaving, so I can afford to spend extra time on the videos if I have to.

Some of you may think I’m insane leaving, and maybe I am, but it’s simply a matter of values. My new income will likely put me slightly above the official poverty level, so I may have to find some part-time work to balance things out. While I absolutely care about having enough money to support myself, my main motivation with the videos is making something I’m satisfied with. Some videos that I make I really don’t mind cutting corners on (Freeman’s Mind falls into this category). Others, primarily ones that haven’t even been produced yet, I care about extremely and wouldn’t want to rush or sacrifice anything that wasn’t absolutely necessary. Although I want to clarify that statement a bit since it’s misleading. I do feel some aspects of a good production shouldn’t be rushed, like writing, editing, voice acting etc., my view on that will likely never change. However, working with the Source engine can be horrendously inefficient for some aspects of production and I’m constantly on the lookout for better ways of doing things. So while I do like to take my time, I also feel some things could be done faster and I sympathize completely with the frustration some of you feel with how long it takes for some of the videos to come out.

On that note, things are likely to be delayed until 2010 because I’ll probably be moving back to Virginia and try to find a cheap house to rent where I can make a lot of noise, so I can record any time I need to. I have a lot of things I’ve been wanting to research technology-wise and I’m pretty confident there will be an increase in videos for the next year. For Freeman’s Mind, while there will be a lull period, I can see myself doing another “marathon month” at some point in the future and promise to make many more episodes. I may alternate between that and other projects. For people who don’t care about my other projects and just want more Freeman’s Mind episodes, that’s fine, but realize that if I were to sacrifice anything, FM would be first in line; so just be glad I’m alternating and not killing off anything.

In the meantime, I’ll be trying to catch up on a million things (I’m months behind on the subtitles), and continuing work on Civil Protection.

EDIT:

I decided this post must be pretty wordy for some of the Youtube people, so here’s the ADHD version!

Youtube

Download 672x384 WMV (55MB)

Well sorry about the website being down for those who came here earlier. I still don’t know what happened, which is bad, because it means it might happen again. I believe it’s related to the company hosting the site. I haven’t heard back from the person in charge of that yet, hopefully the site will hold before another screwup. In the meantime, here’s what I wrote before that happened:

This episode is another 100% backtracking one, though if I remember correctly, this area is one of the biggest backtracking sessions in the whole game. It’s also on the short side, but only because I like to pick good jumping off spots. A lot will happen in the one after this and I’ll make that one as long as it needs to be. This episode is also a little bit coarser than most of the others, but my reasoning was Freeman is dealing with a lot of combat and having his goals frustrated, so his agitation level increases accordingly. On that note however, if you like this episode I think there’s a good chance you’ll like the mystery series I still plan to make, but haven’t finished the pilot episode to. There’s also some glaring bugs in this episode which I didn’t have time to attempt to fix. Many of the decals are missing, particularly the blood ones by the security guard you saw earlier. This is a shortcoming of demo recording in the game and it seems to happen randomly. If I had more time I could rerecord until it didn’t happen, but alas, you get this instead.

Speaking of time, this is going to be the last FM episode for quite a while, probably at least another month, but probably not more than 2. Hopefully the surge this month gave you some to tide you over. The short answer as to why is because I’ll be resuming work on Civil Protection since NOTHING has gotten done on it since I started on the trailer. The long answer I’ll explain in another post a day or two from now.

Youtube Download 672x384 WMV (55MB) Well sorry about the website being down for those who came here earlier. I still don’t know what happened, which is bad, because it means it might happen again. I believe it’s related to the company hosting the site. I haven’t heard back from the person in charge of that yet, hopefully the site will hold before another screwup. In the meantime, here’s what I wrote before that happened: This episode is another 100% backtracking one, though if I remember correctly, this area is one of the biggest backtracking sessions in the whole game. It’s also on the short side, but only because I like to pick good jumping off spots. A lot will happen in the one after this and I’ll make that one as long as it needs to be. This episode is also a little bit coarser than most of the others, but my reasoning was Freeman is dealing with a lot of combat and having his goals frustrated, so his agitation level increases accordingly. On that note however, if you like this episode I think there’s a good chance you’ll like the mystery series I still plan to make, but haven’t finished the pilot episode to. There’s also some glaring bugs in this episode which I didn’t have time to attempt to fix. Many of the decals are missing, particularly the blood ones by the security guard you saw earlier. This is a shortcoming of demo recording in the game and it seems to happen randomly. If I had more time I could rerecord until it didn’t happen, but alas, you get this instead. Speaking of time, this is going to be the last FM episode for quite a while, probably at least another month, but probably not more than 2. Hopefully the surge this month gave you some to tide you over. The short answer as to why is because I’ll be resuming work on Civil Protection since NOTHING has gotten done on it since I started on the trailer. The long answer I’ll explain in another post a day or two from now.

Youtube

Download 672x384 WMV (98MB)

Here’s the next episode. Sorry about the delay on this one, I have very limited control over how things get released on Machinima’s channel. This episode is pretty typical of the series. I think my voice acting could have been better, but there ended up being a lot of time pressure on this one. I’m also running into a new bug that I’m basically just ignoring. When there’s a level transition, the demo recording function for Half Life Source completely ignores all ragdolls that weren’t spawned with the level. So if there are any bodies left there previously, they’re gone later on. I doubt there’s any solution to this, so oh well. I should be done with another episode for Thursday. I believe it will go up then, but I’m hesitant to promise since it’s beyond my control after a point. It will be a shorter one, but the length is dictated mostly by the best areas to have a jumping off point in the game so it doesn’t feel too abrupt.

Also I am far behind on email and plan to respond to most of them, but I may adopt a new policy of not responding to questions that you can find with 5-10 minutes of research as I’ve been getting a lot of these lately. I can appreciate if you have a specific question about something I did in the Source engine with a Civil Protection episode because I sometimes employ a lot of tricks there, or information that is very difficult to find; but dozens of emails asking me things like how to enable cheat codes in Half-Life I just can’t see myself responding to, sorry guys. Nothing I do in Freeman’s Mind is terribly exotic, it’s just some config file editing. I’m not editing maps, running mods, or changing any code. It’s just cheat codes and hotkeys. I should be your LAST resort for finding information, not the first. I’m not trying to be unfriendly, but I think everyone, myself especially, would prefer I just make more videos rather than play tech support to the world.

EDIT:

Well guys, I had Episode 23 finished and submitted first thing this morning, but it’s not up yet, so oh well. It’s anyone’s guess when it will go online.

Youtube

Download 672x384 WMV (66MB)

Surprise, here’s yet another episode. This one’s more action-oriented and plays like some of the earlier ones, so I think fans of the series will like this one more. I wasted pretty much an entire night trying to solve the WMV encoding problem that plagued the last episode, but was finally able to crack it, so hopefully this means no more video/audio anomalies in the future.

This wasn’t made during the gap between the last one. I started working on this one on Saturday and it wasn’t finished until yesterday. Believe it or not, I can’t do much more than about 3 minutes a day on an episode, and that’s under good circumstances and not counting additional sound editing. That may sound ludicrous, but it actually does take me that long, I’ve tried to do it faster before. It’s not because I’m lazy, I just don’t know how to move faster and still have the show come out as well. While it’s loads faster than Civil Protection, it’s basically a process of going through a clip, thinking of a line, recording said line many times as I’m not the greatest voice actor (this can range from 2 - 20+ takes, depending on the line and how important it is), editing through all said takes and arranging it in the episode. If I was a better voice actor and good at improvisation I could probably be done with the game by now. In this reality however, the next episode will probably be out sometime late Monday.

In other news, I still want to catch up on subtitles, website improvements, extras, emails, and many other things, but for the moment I’m just focusing on getting the videos out.

EDIT:

I’m probably going to have to add this to the FAQ. Several of you were asking why the episode was up on Youtube before it was up on here. The answer is I never know when the video is going to be up on Youtube. I have to check it, same as you. It’s someone else’s job to upload it and they’re usually pretty busy to be able to answer my inquests all the time. In this case I was taking a nap when it went up since I’ve been working night hours so it’s quiet enough for me to me record (my old spot got converted to someone else’s office). Since I’m in a different room this is also why there’s more of an echo in recent episodes.

EDIT 2:

Well I finished episode 22, but I don’t have control over when it gets released. The original schedule was Monday, but things got pretty close to the wire on this one. I guess it’s Tuesday now?