Ross Scott

Youtube (Downloadable copy will be up later) Here's a new video that was meant to be simple, but I ended up spending entirely too much time on it. This was made for a film festival that Machinima.com contacted me about, saying that if I made a video for this, it would open up a portal to a new universe and humanity would transcend into a state of pure energy. The festival isn't over yet, so I'm not sure how accurate their claims are, but either way, it was an excuse to make a new video. Part of the rules for the festival were that the video could not be part of an existing series, like CP or FM, so this is something else. I'm expecting this video to be hit or miss with people. If you like surreal or mysterious stuff, then this should be right up your alley. If you're expecting jokes or explosions every 10 seconds, then probably not. Personally I'm very happy with how this came out, it might be my own favorite of the videos I've done so far. The atmosphere is pretty much just how I wanted it and the voice acting and sound are great. I recommend watching it full screen in a dark room and not turning it off once the credits start. This is the first video I've made in Source Filmmaker and will also be one of the last. I was originally going to attempt this using the Unreal 3 engine, but I wasn't able to get enough functionality from the ported models in time, so the video was made in Source instead. As a result, this video just BARELY got done before deadline. For every advantage SFM has, it also has a shortcoming compared to Source SDK and the whole experience just strengthens my resolve to stop animating any videos in the Source engine. If you look for them, I'm sure you'll see lots of flaws with the animation in this video. I'm fully aware of all the shortcomings, it was simply the best I was able to do by the final deadline. I may make some small improvements for the downloadable copy later, I haven't decided yet. In terms of animation, I think it needed a few days more of polishing, but the vast majority of people will only see the online copy anyway. Anyway, I hope people enjoy the video, this is the LAST one I'm going to animate in any form of the Source engine (not counting FM). I'll still keep making videos, but Source is hell. - - - You can vote for this video in the festival, but as I understand it, you can only do so via twitter, and then there will be a judge panel to decide who has the best vote (I am not making this up). What happens if a video gets the most or "best" votes? I DON'T KNOW. My guess is this. EDIT: Looks like my 36 hour sleep deprivation paid the price on the credits and I made a typo with the name of the LEAD VOICE ACTOR. It should be Kamran Nikhad, not "Karman." It will get corrected on the downloadable copy.

Hey everyone, I have some news to bring up. There's a user on Youtube that's been hosting copies of the Freeman's Mind videos without permission with the user name "FreemanMind." Just so everyone knows, this is not me. While I can live with a doppleganger of myself floating around, what I have a problem with is apparently he's been sending out this email to his subscribers: " If you want to see more episodes please donate some money to develop the channel WEBMONEY: wmid: 997662107645 OR Z404399251838 PAYPAL: email: [email protected] " THIS IS A SCAM I can only hope no one has been tricked by this, but with about 7500 subscribers to his channel, I'm sure someone has. I have never asked for money from viewers, I'm happy people even watch the videos. I have set up the donation page because I had so many requests for it, but even on that I clearly state there is no obligation to donate, that money is going towards helping the movie project along. If my situation ever got so dire that I wasn't able to keep up with food and rent, the most I would ask from anyone would be for room and board from somebody. I'm sure at least one of you has a farm. I can chop wood and dig ditches and stuff. Anyway, I'm going to try to shut this guy down since this is just scamming people in my name, I just wanted make an announcement in the meantime. Also in other news, the mystery video I think will be going up on Monday and I'll begin working on the next FM episode tomorrow. EDIT: Machinima.com has since taken down this guy on Youtube.

Hey everyone, this is another one of my I've-been-awake-for-36-hours-and-feel-the-urge-to-communicate posts. The REASON I've been awake so long is I just barely managed to hit the extended deadline for the mystery video I've been working on for weeks. This deadline was a for a film festival Machinima.com is going to be participating in a few days that will last about a week. You can expect the video to go up in a few days, I'll make a new post about it when I'm more lucid. For now I guess I'll just rant about Source Filmmaker. My initial impressions of it acting like an inverse relationship to Source SDK are entirely correct. They are both great at some things, and horrible at other things. So horrible. Just saying the software sucks doesn't really do it justice, because it does have some nice features, but to take that and assume that as a WHOLE it's great is incorrect. I get kind of annoyed by this kind of reasoning as I think some people make one TF2 video of some guy jumping around (or better yet, have never animated anything in their life), then assume Source Filmmaker is the answer to everyone's problems and will usher forth a new Renaissance for all. I kind of feel like eventually someone will make the end-all standard for making good machinima with the least amount of pain, but it's not there yet. I've been waiting for it ever since I started working on this. I do plan on jumping ship to UDK, but I'm going to have help with getting models ported over and having NPCs created. UDK gives you basically nothing in terms of assets, whereas Source has a plethora of options there. If I was just starting off making machinima today, UDK wouldn't be a realistic option. Great potential, no assets. That's great for developers, but machinima is all about taking shortcuts so you can actually get stuff done. I don't want to animate, I want to manifest things in my brain, but that doesn't happen, so I animate and do a hell of a lot of other things too. I really don't understand what the hell's Valve's attitude is with their tools. People complain about how long it takes their games to come out, but I'm guessing those people haven't worked in the Source engine. Hell I'm amazed they get as much done as they do. The crazy thing is I think Valve as a whole works like I do. They take a long time to do things and their energy gets divided up among several different projects. I want to do civil protection, I want to do freeman's mind, I want to do short fun videos, I want to do the movie, I want to do other series ideas, also have improvements to the site, finalize subtitles, respond to emails, etc. The thing is though, I'm just one guy who earns less than your schoolteacher. They're a mega corporation with no rules. If I had access to a fraction of the money valve has to work with, I feel like I could get 10x more done than I do now. Hell, anything to get animation out of my hands without sacrificing quality would do it. If I didn't have to animate anything, I would have 10x the videos I have now. So back to Valve, what are they doing with that money? Are they building an underground secret civilization? Rich people should be doing all this crazy Scrooge McDuck stuff with their money, not just letting it in sit in a pile when you already have more money than you would ever spend in your life several times over. I guess the idea goes against their touchy-feely "no management" employee ethos, but why not hire some people whose sole job is just to fix the source engine and make better tools. They have so much money it could operate at pure loss directly, but would help solidify their long term future on yet another front. If they DO have people like that, they're either bad at their job, understaffed, or too hamstrung by someone else. Source is a mess for the kind of resources they have backing it. Almost every major update I've seen to the engine since HL2 came out has been more about eye candy than making life less like hell for devs. I'm calling them out, I think if I had access to those kinds of resources I could have more games out that are just as fun AND better tools for people without making everyone hate their life, like at Electronic Arts. It would take management, but you can have managers that aren't assholes, that could be a company policy. I have ulterior motives though, I get frustrated with having to take care of hundreds of different elements in a video where the right tools could have saved me thousands of hours over the years, but the people I'm at their mercy for seem to operate like they're not sure what they're doing. Anyway, I've lost weeks to Source Filmmaker and this video. I'd say it wasn't worth it, but I'm pretty happy with how it came out. It could use some improvement, but I'm not letting Source steal any more of my life force. I'm never using the Source engine again for anything major (Freeman's Mind doesn't count, that's just playing through). I could using it for some simple 30 second videos, but nothing I really cared about. That way lies only pain. Pain. I know this will piss people off, but the month of Freeman was completely robbed by this side project that took way too long. I plan on doing it, but this video took so much out of me, I'm going to take a break for a few days before I start anything again, I still promise a FM spree at some point. To put it in perspective that all of you can understand, I haven't even had a chance to play Black Mesa yet, I have literally been that busy since when it came out. I did a lot of lip sync work on it back in 2007, but I ended up flaking out timewise and made more civil protection instead. I'm wondering if they kept my name in the credits or purged me from the project, probably with lots of others, I can respect their decision either way. So I'll be chilling out, but I'll try and catch up on emails. I'm going to sleep. ADHD version: I haven't slept in a while. EDIT: It turns out public schoolteachers on average make about 56k a year, so I should have said I probably should have said "grocery bagger" instead.

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 0 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!

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.