Ross Scott

Happy Black Friday Eve everyone! With a lot of help, the store for t-shirts is now up! A big thanks goes to Sean Britton, who not only is an animator in the upcoming video and long-term movie project, but will also be running the store. If you have any questions regarding the shirts, go ahead and contact him here about it. He is in charge of all shirt-related activity, the only thing I've done is design the shirts and approve their final look. Shirt prices will be about $20 before shipping (more for extra colors). We can't get the prices much lower than that without owning our own illicit sweatshop factory, sorry. We WILL be shipping internationally, however it may be a high price for shipping overseas from America. I don't have any control over that. We might be able to get it down in the future, that will be Sean's department. We are launching with 4 shirt designs, but we can have many more in the future if we get enough sales. For the FM quotes, I tried to pick ones that people might want to wear a shirt of even if they were unfamiliar with the show. I think most of these will be funny to other people whether they watch the show or not. If only 3 people buy a shirt, well, at least those 3 people were able to get a shirt. If we get enough to break even however, you can expect the following designs in the near future: -Freeman's Mind Quote: "Not everyone is cut out to be me" -Freeman's Mind Quote: "Science will thank me someday" -Freeman's Mind Quote: "I know almost everything" -Freeman's Mind Quote: "Robots are the only friends I need" -Freeman's Mind Quote: "Everyone is crazy except me" -Freeman's Mind Quote: "Caution Laser Caution Laser Caution Laser" -Freeman's Mind Quote: "I can now solve up to 800 problems a minute" -Freeman's Mind Quote: "Error 482: Somebody shot the server with a 12-gauge. Please contact your administrator" -Civil Protection Logo (yellow on black) -Civil Protection Logo (orange on black) -Accursed Farms logo -Any other video-related design that gets enough popular support So go ahead and buy a shirt if you want! - - - - In other news, I'm still working non-stop to finish the next video, it will be done in a couple days, but may not go up until the end of November. Also on a personal note, I LOVE watching Black Friday mob videos, so if anybody finds or records any wild ones this year, go ahead an link in the forum or send me a link. ADHD version: Buy a shirt!

This is pretty much why I haven't volunteered. I'd love to help Ross, but I also know I'd probably have about .1% reliability. After this video is done, I plan on setting up on an organization system for the movie project that will ASSUME people will be dropping on a regular basis. Right now everything has been funneling through me, but I hope to change that.

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

It's sort of like this, except not exactly: zoa0H6hCCE8

Yeah, I figured this would probably be at least as energy intensive as producing hydrogen, the main advantage here would be that you wouldn't have to scale out a new fleet of vehicles. As for terraforming, even if Mars had the perfect combination of gases in the atmosphere, wouldn't it still be way too thin because the gravity isn't strong enough to have a thick enough breathable atmosphere?

This is probably very energy intensive, but wow, I really wasn't expecting this: http://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/home-news/exclusive-pioneering-scientists-turn-fresh-air-into-petrol-in-massive-boost-in-fight-against-energy-crisis-8217382.html

Ugh, sorry, I'll get to it. Usually email is a better way for me to get me to pay attention to stuff. EDIT: Here's the full soundtrack, some of them are in OGG format, that's all I have for some of the tracks: http://filesmelt.com/dl/NFS_PU.zip

As mentioned in the last post, I'm currently working on a custom video with a deadline in early November. 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.

I guess "volunteer" is almost the wrong word in this case, since the plan was he was going to be getting half the profits from the shirts for managing things. I ran into the same thing while working at Machinima.com for "The Tunnel." Machinima.com was willing to pay an animator to work on the video and help me with key animations I needed. It didn't matter that they were offering hundreds to work on it, that STILL wasn't enough to motivate him at the time. Most of the time I don't have money beyond what's needed for rent and groceries, but it seems like in the few times I have, it doesn't seem to make a noticeable difference as far as motivating people. Someone would probably need living wages in order for that to change, which is money I simply don't have access to. I still plan on using the donation money for key aspects of the movie project however. If it turns out I can get volunteer help with that, I'll use the money to help promote it and maybe distribute the rest of it to key people who stuck with the project.

No, this is something that came at me from elsewhere, but that I'm interested in. After this, animation projects will be focused almost exclusively on the movie. After THAT, then I'll be committed to the dark comedy series I was mentioning. I really wish I had more animation help, I have ideas for 10x the videos I've made. Urg, I thought we would, but the guy helping me on that has sort of flaked out, so now it may be mostly on me again to do this (welcome to the world of volunteer help). I have a backup plan for this that I'll pursue more aggressively in November if he still hasn't emerged.

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.

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.

Actually since I made that post I remembered a secret I plan to do with FM in the future that would make BM less desirable than HL Source for a certain reason. Also I never know what I'm doing for April Fool's, if people want to email me months in advance, I can take it into consideration. I have ideas, but like a lot of mine, they tend to be more time consuming than I want.

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 to keep going on Half-Life: Source.

My thoughts on S-3D (stereoscopic 3D): GOOD 3D is flat out amazing. It's like you're in another world. I was using the Elsa Revelator shutter glasses back around 2000. When it worked well, it's been about the most immersive experience I've experienced in a game. I also saw an old 1950s alien movie in 3D before that was again, fantastic. There was real depth, things would pop out of the screen, it would make you duck and jump, etc. Very engrossing. I have not seen good 3D in any modern movies so far. I've seen Avatar, Tron, and Pirates of the Caribbean 4 in the theater in 3D. All adventure movies that I felt had a chance to show off some eye candy. At best, they would have one scene that had any real depth at all, at worst, it's like it wasn't even on. Most of the time everything felt too flat and blurry. Avatar should have given me vertigo with the cliff scenes it had, instead it felt more like paper cutouts positioned at various depths, not wanting to push things too far. My attitude on 3D is you either need to go all-out and make it the most immersive experience you possibly can, or not do it all. Do it half-assed (like the industry appears to be doing) and it's the worse than leaving it 2D. I don't think I'll do it for Freeman's Mind, but I have had an idea of doing 3D for a Civil Protection episode for a couple years now. I wouldn't make it a regular thing, but I thought doing one episode to show people what GOOD 3d is like would be interesting. At the time it wasn't really possible with the Source recorder with any of the S-3D drivers, but that may have changed with SFM or by porting things to UDK. It's the sort of thing I can revisit at a later date.

I was planning on making a post about this later after I move, but I'm toying with the idea of starting a DayZ group. I'd probably want to do low population servers since I personally find this game plenty hard enough with just the zombies without having other people shoot at me as well. My long term goal would be to tour every landmark on the map.

Yeah I can't say I'm a fan of Ubisoft at all, but I was interested in this game.

Well it's about that time where some people are wondering if I'm dead or not again, so I thought I should give an update. I've been busy with lots of different things, here's what I'm involved with at the moment: FREEMAN'S MIND: The next episode is underway and will be a longer one. The one after that (45) will unfortunately be delayed more because what I have planned for it presents some unique challenges. To make up for the delays, I'll have to see how busy I am and what my situation is, but I am considering making November "the month of Freeman" where ALL I work on is Freeman's Mind and no other projects and see how many episodes get done during that time. Also I plan on getting the downloadable copy for #43 up soon. MYSTERY VIDEO PROJECT #1: While I was originally planning to have the movie project be the only animated thing I was going to work on for the foreseeable future, some interesting developments came up where I will be working on an original short that will be going up sometime early December (won't be Christmas related). It's still uncertain whether this will be filmed using the Unreal 3 engine (UDK) or in Source. If you have mapping experience in either, feel free to contact me at [email protected]. Be sure to send me samples or screenshots of your previous work. Who gets picked will be determined by previous map visual quality + how much free time the person will have. It will involve a forested area and will be in a contemporary setting. MYSTERY VIDEO PROJECT #2: In another set of interesting circumstances, I've agreed to help with a video project that may become a series. I won't be directing or animating it, but I am doing the writing for it and voice acting for one of the characters. More details will be revealed later. MOVING: My past has caught up with me and I am moving to a mysterious location once again. I'll be leaving in about 2 weeks, I may not have internet or a place to record for a little while afterwards, but I'll get on track ASAP. I'll get the next FM video uploaded before I leave. T-SHIRTS: Work is slowly progressing to set up an online store so that people will be able to buy Freeman's Mind and Civil Protection t-shirts (with more stuff later). I'm hoping this will become fully operational in a month or two with more shirt designs rolling out later on. ADHD version: Ross is working on stuff! More videos coming!