Ross Scott

Hey everyone, big news, I'm being hired to work full time for Machinima.com! While some of you may not care about that, this is likely to be good news for everyone who's a fan of the videos. My official job title will be "segment producer" and will entail a lot of what I've already been doing (making my own videos), and also acting as a technical advisor for Machinima.com's other projects, especially those that use the Source engine. Some may consider this as me selling out, and that could be, but I don't think it will impact the videos negatively. I've discussed the job offer with them at length and I'll still get to write and direct my own material and have final edit, and you'll still get to watch the videos for free. The only real limitation they may impose on me is to have my longer episode ideas (which I haven't gotten to yet anyway) split up in more of a mini-series format. However, they're also cool with me distributing the final, unsplit version of those episodes to be watched as I would have intended, so I see this as a non-issue. In case it's not clear, Civil Protection WILL continue, as will the pilot episode I'm working on, as will Freeman's Mind (though this one is more up to you, FM has become more of a fan-service for me than something I would continue without your interest), so none of this should jeopardize more videos coming out in the future. While nothing is quite certain, Machinima.com is offering me support to produce the more involved episodes like CP. I may actually have animators assisting that I can work with locally, which could be worth its weight in gold to me. While I think it's possible I may actually have less time to work on the videos than I've been putting in, the additional help may make up for that. Part of this job will entail me moving near Machinima.com's headquarters, which is located in Los Angeles, California. I've currently been living in semi-rural Virginia, so this move may be similar to "The Beverly Hillbillies", except that they were rich. I'd like to make it known that just because I'm working for an official company now, does NOT mean I'll be getting rich from it. On the contrary, the cost of living in LA is monstrous. I anticipate a 1 bedroom apartment in the region will take up roughly half my income, and I'm going to be giving up my car and taking the bus to economize further. Also I can't say LA is my first choice of places to live as I prefer forests, fog, cold climate, etc., but this could be a dream job for me otherwise. The level of creative control I'll be getting is quite rare, something even most professional directors don't get. Finally, I may find I regret saying this, but I know NO ONE in the LA region. I don't want to promise anything in case you're a psycho (and not the fun kind), but if you live in that general area (I don't know where I'll be living yet, but M.com is located in the Hollywood area), are in a similar age range (I'm 26), and are interested in meeting me, go ahead and send me an email and tell me about yourself. It could take me quite a while to get back to you as I'll be very busy initially and will have limited internet access, but I'll try and respond to everyone who can write in complete sentences. If it helps (and I guess I have to stereotype here) here are some types of people I tend to get along with: artists, philosophers, intellectuals, easygoing people, goths, metalheads, horror movie fans, and people into surreal stuff in general. Bonus points if you're willing to buy me food. Also if you smoke, I may not want to hang out with you much, simply because I hate the smell of cigarettes; it's nothing against anyone personally. As for my own personality, I'm not sure how to describe myself, I'm maybe a little bit like a watered down cross between Mike and Dave from Civil Protection. Freeman's Mind is more just acting. If you just think of me as some sort of goblin in a workshop, I think it's hard to go wrong with that image. And for those that care, here's a picture of me from last year, though lately I'm looking more like a musketeer or Guy Fawkes. That's all for now! There will be a delay on all videos while I relocate, but hopefully things can pick up soon after that. Ross P.S. I'll try and get the broken download links for FM back up when I get a chance.

Filefront 640x480 WMV (49MB) Here's the next episode finally. I was originally hoping to have this done sooner, and even after it was finished a couple days ago, there was more of a delay on getting it uploaded than last time. Unfortunately, I think this one might be one of the weaker episodes since despite this one taking longer to come out, I was putting myself under the gun to get this one out as fast as possible. Thus, some lines that maybe should have had retakes I left as they are. I think the writing is more or less on par though. In other news, the subtitle page has been repaired, though I'm still horrendously behind on reviewing and uploading all the volunteer submitted subtitles. It will still be a while before they're all up I'm afraid, just be aware that I haven't forgotten about them. Also check back in a day or two for more news.

I'm letting people know the next FM episode is going to be a little delayed. I've had sort of a perfect storm of things go wrong. First, Otto, the audio editor that assists me, had his hard drive completely fail on him, so he was unable to help on this episode, which adds to the time for me to do it myself. Second, my system got hit by some sort of virus that hosed my whole OS. I spent most of this weekend just trying to fix it. I didn't lose any important files, but I still have a ton of software I need to reinstall, so I'm trying to catch up. For those that are interested, I've had this sort of thing happen before using AVG as a virus scanner, this time I was using Avast. Since it failed me, I'm going to try out Antivir this time, which is supposedly one of the better antivirus programs out there. This is actually an extremely rare occurrence for me, I can count on one hand the number of times a virus has taken down my OS before. Anyway, I'll get the next FM episode done as soon as I can, then I hope to catch up on some of the subtitles after that.

Just a quick note to let users of the "Google Reader" know that I have added an "Autodiscovery" link in an attempt to satisfy this application. There were reports that this particular reader was not working with the feed, and anonymous users suggested that this addition would solve the problem. If you have "Google Reader" please test the feed and provide any feedback as comments to this post. As I don't have this reader, please be as descriptive as possible, not just 'It don't work'. Also, any users that wish to be credited for providing useful suggestions to the site should take the time to register, at which point you will be mentioned by login name. Curently the suggestion for the "Autodiscovery" addition is credited to "Anonymous" - I guess you know who you are.

A new Freeman's Mind episode is up + RSS has been added to the new site, so now you guys have less of an excuse to keep coming here. Here some links: new episode RSS stuff

Machinima.com streaming 640x480 WMV (99MB) Well here's the latest episode, this is a longer one, I can almost guarantee the next one will be shorter though. To everyone who's sent me subtitles, I'm outrageously behind on that (in some cases weeks), but I haven't forgotten about any of them. I constantly end up in a situation where I feel like by working on one thing I'm neglecting something else. Lately I've mainly been concentrating on making more videos than email. Hopefully some day I'll catch up to everything.

I have activated an RSS 2.0 Feed for the site today. It's basically tracking the news posts, sending the full news text and links to the posts. I don't know anything about what the previous 'Blogspot' page was doing, so feel free to give an opinion on whether the feed should give an abbreviated description, or any other comment concerning reading content with whatever news readers you have. If you have an opinion concerning RSS 2.0 vs 1.0 or Atom, we can entertain those as well. I tested the feed with Firefox 'Live Bookmarks' and IE 8's news feed reader, and it seems to work well.

Well here's the interview link for those that are interested: http://www.podcast17.com/transmissions/c15257 I was able to grab Craig (the voice of Dave) and Ryan (one of the animators who's been with the show a while) at the last minute to come on the show as well. Unfortunately I was kind of low on sleep at the time, so I remember it as kind of a disjointed dream sequence. There are multiple spots where I completely lost my train of thought and topics bounced around all over the place, but the hosts tried their best to keep it in line I think. So sorry if I sound like I'm drugged when you listen to it. Also my internet connection can be rather horrid, it disconnected me entirely at least 3 times during the interview. In other news, I'm working on the next Freeman's Mind, though I confess I simply took some free time this weekend where I wasn't working on anything, something I haven't done in a very long time. As a result, I'm behind on everything, but I'll keep working on things.

Machinima.com 640x480 WMV (50MB) Well here's the next Freeman's Mind episode as promised. This one is a little short, but my original cut was about 12 minutes, which makes it a potential problem with Youtube, so I cut it down to the next stopping off point. Half-Life purists will be upset with this episode, as I'm continuing to act under the assumption that Freeman can do a pull-up. Unfortunately the release was a little wonky for this one, so only the Youtube version is up, the streaming and download copies probably won't be up until tomorrow. I'll get the episode page up soon. Again, I plan to pick up the pace on this, so you can expect another one sometime this month too. I plan to make this the priority for now, but my secondary goal is to release the pilot episode I talked about next. I'll reveal what it is once it gets closer to completion, so it won't be a total surprise. INTERVIEW: Also since I'm having to bunch news together, I've been invited to appear on an audio show called Podcast 17. Each week they talk about everything related to Half-Life or the Source engine, focusing on mods in particular. I originally postponed these guys because I was working on the Civil Protection episode and didn't want fans to think I was just screwing around talking to people. After I released it, they had to postpone me because of scheduling, but now it looks like it's on again. Anyway, I'll be appearing on the show live on Sunday, July 19th. It will be broadcasted at 10am (GMT -05:00) Eastern Time. They'll also release an mp3 of the broadcast the following Monday or Tuesday, I forget. Here are some links: Live broadcast link (on Sunday) Podcast 17 homepage I really don't know what they'll be asking me, but it will probably be tamer than something like The Howard Stern Show. EDIT: Looks like there was a limit on the live streams that no one knew about. Try this link instead if you still want the live feed: http://www.justin.tv/henley

I have some updates and minor news for people. First off, I screwed up the credits for this video. I forgot to mention the Quake 3 music I use for the title theme, though that's mentioned in every other episode, so it's not a huge deal. What is a big deal to me though, is I got the name wrong for one of the models I used. I was looking at the readme.txt file that came with the custom model I downloaded and going by the credits listed in that, which was "Silverlan." Turns out that's not really the guy who made that model, he just did some entity work on it that I didn't even use when making the episode. The real author is "SideEffect." I'll update the episode page to reflect this. My apologies to him, I usually try my best to give everyone credit for their work. Speaking of the episode, this one has a few Easter Eggs in it that you may have missed: -Did you spot the G-man appearance? -I found the billboard ad entertaining -(at least one user noticed this already) Pay close attention to the path of the black car. This was an accident I noticed very late in the production that I decided to keep, but minimize the impact of. There will be more subtitles coming out this week, it's a slow process for me as I've had about 90 different people contact me regarding them and I still haven't replied to everyone. Thanks for your patience in all this. I've been informed that several download links to both series are missing. I'm not sure why they've gone down, but I've contacted Machinima.com about this and hopefully they'll get them back up soon. I hope to implement mirrors for the videos sometime in the future as well. Finally, I'm continuing work on Freeman's Mind, so just hang tight. EDIT: I screwed up somebody else's name in the credits (Vecima) who did mapwork in this episode I wasn't even aware of. Due to multiple credits errors, I've replaced the download links with the updated version of the credits and will be adding annotations to Youtube later to reflect this. This is what happens when I don't get enough sleep.

Machinima.com streaming (sound now in sync!) 800x448 WMV (77MB) 1280x720 WMV (188MB) Well here's the new episode finally. This episode is meant to be a "normal" episode for the series, something I'm not sure I've even done before. You should understand I'm always about 10-12 episodes ahead of where the series is actually at in my mind. After the last episode, I felt like I really owed you guys a normal episode, so you didn't have any misgivings as to where I was going with the series. I plan for there to be some variety in the episodes, but if you ever wonder what direction I'm taking the series in the future, just come back and look at this one. It's meant to be an anchor point in terms of style and tone for the series. While I plan to make some episodes that are scary, have a lot of action, more surreal, require a longer attention span, have a much more involved story, etc., the series will eventually come back to episodes similar to this one. It's not my most impressive idea or even original one (I steal a bit from my own material as far as plot), I think it's one people will like who are a fan of the series. I'm very pleased with how it came out, though it still kind of sickens me how long it took to make. Animation is really a black hole in terms of time when it comes to these videos. Also just to clarify, I have not been working on this nonstop since the last episode, if I had, it probably would have come out sometime last year. On that note, Freeman's Mind is next, I'm going to do everything I can to make sure Episode 12 comes out next week.

Hello... This is Mike Southworth, the web developer responsible for coding the web site (and owner of LD Computech listed in the sidebar). I wanted to thank everyone for the positive comments to Ross's initial launch post concerning the site, and provide some additional details about the site. It is my intention to provide any site related news updates myself, independent of Ross's video updates, in order to allow him to focus on creating video episodes rather than answering web site related questions. Please add any of your site related comments to this or any future site update posting. First, the site has been coded entirely from scratch, utilizing PHP, JavaScript, and AJAX. With the exception of some YouTube and other small snippets, the site contains all original code and no 'off the shelf' material. It was created according to the plan that it would be updated regularly to add new features according to a schedule, and any major changes would be separated into specific versions to keep it organized. I have noted a great number of comments about RSS, even to the extent of users inserting code as user comments related to it. Realize that RSS was not 'omitted' from the initial site version because it was 'rejected' or we don't know how to code it. Actually RSS has always been on the feature list, however due to the amount of code required to launch the site was moved to a future version. RSS is comming soon, however it must be pointed out that there are at least as many administration pages as the public pages you can see as regular users, and there are a great deal of additions to be completed to these first. It is much more important to complete every function required for Ross to more easily enter videos, posts, screen shots, and other material than it is to enable RSS, so please be patient. Bearing this in mind, please feel free to provide any feedback or suggestions either by site comment or email to Ross's address listed in the sidebar. EDIT BY ROSS SCOTT: Sorry everyone that the commenting system was broken all this morning, I guess that doesn't bode well for Mike's first post. Andrew Theis, the host of the site, was able to fix it for us, so it should be working again now. EDIT BY MIKE SOUTHWORTH: Sorry that we were not able to record comments. Unfortunately we are using a manual version control process and that one file was not uploaded as it's correct working version. The file is now syncronized and working properly. Please email Ross if you see a problem like this and we will fix it immediately.

Hey people, here's what's going on: The new CP episode is completely done except for adding some sound effects and volume balancing; however this can be pretty involved. For this episode I've unloaded almost all the sound effects work to someone else (Otto Beumelburg) and a few of the sound effects he's provided are better than what I could have come up with myself. So it's a time savings for me personally and I think our combined work is improving the audio quality of the episode. Between this and the delay in uploading new episodes, it may be a couple more days before the episode is done, but I think it will be out sometime this week. At this point I've done all I can do on my end, so once I get caught up on sleep and maybe reply to the 30 or so emails I've gotten lately, I'll go ahead and start on the next Freeman's Mind episode and keep them coming. I realize it's been a while since the last FM episode, but I promise to make up for it soon. Also I could use one or two more English subtitle transcribers for Civil Protection especially. (international people: just hold tight, I still need to reply to a bunch of emails) I've gotten some offers already, but several people have either not replied back or may have become too busy to continue working on the rest of the episodes. If you're interested in helping out with this and have a proper understanding of spelling and grammar, go ahead and contact me. EDIT: I've gotten many emails of people offering to transcribe, thanks. I'm trying to respond to all of you and we should have all the remaining English subtitles up before too much longer.