Ross Scott

Well I successfully drove from California to Virginia. Driving in a straight line for days gave me plenty of opportunity to go insane, but here I am. I have a new problem on my hands however. I

I'm going to be leaving soon and heading back to Virginia, which will be quite a drive. I'll be driving through a lot of desert, you may want to watch the movie "The Hills Have Eyes" to get an idea of what it should be like. Besides getting ready, I've been catching up on a lot of things the past couple weeks, though you probably won't see the results of it until at least January. I'll be away for about a week travelling, but I'll get back to work on the videos as soon as I'm done. I'm going to try and get another video out before Christmas as it's mostly edited. This will be a surprise one and won't be very long, but I think there's a good chance you'll like it. You won't see any new machinima videos until at least January, though I've got a lot of things brewing, I anticipate releasing more videos for 2010 than I did this year. - - - In other news, the subtitle situation is still a mess and I've come to the realization that the scope of it is too big for me to handle and work on other things. I have hundreds of emails related to subtitles, most of which I haven't replied to yet, and I'm unsure how to deal with it all. My latest idea is to see if anyone would be interested in assisting me with organizing and processing the subtitles. I would lay out the guidelines for him or her, and you could email that person instead of me to help get them processed. I would still approve all the English ones myself, as I'm the final authority as to what words are being said, but for all other languages, there's no reason someone else couldn't help me with this. I would probably hand off the emails I've gotten so far to that person and let them follow up and organize everything. I realize this might seem kind of impersonal for the people who have contacted me, but I feel like it's the only way I'll make any progress. This is my fault for not realizing just how much time this was going to take. I'd rather hand the job off to someone else who will do a better job than abandon the goal entirely. If you are interested in being a "subtitle manager," please email me. My requirements are that you have good communication and English skills, have a lot of time to devote to this, be familiar with Subtitle Workshop or similar software, have your computer able to read non-English characters, and be more organized than I am. Since I'm going to be gone soon, don't expect any reply from me until at least a week or so. I can't afford to pay you, but you would get your name on the site here. Also, it's probably worth writing a paragraph or two just so I can confirm your grammar and spelling are above that of the average internet user.

(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!

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.

Hey, for the people who still know about this site, something's happened to the Accursed Farms website. The timing is pretty awful too since the next Freeman's Mind episode just came out too. I've contacted everyone connected with the site, hopefully this will get resolved soon. In the meantime, here's the link to the new episode:

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.

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?

Download 672x384 WMV (70MB) Here's another new episode. This one has a new introduction for the titles I made. I originally made this to go with the Machinima.com opening logo to try and better integrate it into the show, but after being told that should be fine, it was shot down (that caused a delay with the last episode actually), so I decided to redo it and integrate it into the regular titles. Even though it's a few seconds long I'm a little hesitant to add something like this since I know many Youtube viewers have extremely short attention spans and this on top of the Machinima.com logo and the titles might be a little more than they want to wait through, but I decided to include it anyway. If people like it, I'll probably leave it in for a few episodes then change it to something new to maybe reflect Freeman's progress in the game. This episode is another wandering episode, there's no enemy conflict in this one. I'm guessing for that reason people won't like it quite as much, but I'm still trying to keep it interesting. The episode after this will have more action and that will be out pretty soon. Making these in a rapid-fire fashion is cutting into my time more than I'd like (I'm working weekends, but not more than about 8 hours a day), but it's sort of interesting to see how fast I can do them since I've never made multiple episodes of Freeman's Mind where that's ALL I was working on before. I think they might come out a little better if they were done more slowly, but not substantially so. Regardless, this is an experiment. I'll be going back to work on Civil Protection by the end of the month. EDIT: Even though the Youtube version will be forever screwed up, I finally fixed the downloadable copy so the intro plays correctly and the sound is in sync.

Download 672x384 WMV (49MB) Well surprise, here's the next episode of Freeman's Mind. This one isn't the best since it's mainly just backtracking through the level, but I thought the ending came out well enough. There should be several more coming out this month. I've stopped working 70-80 hour workweeks because that simply wasn't sustainable and now I'm basically just focusing on FM for the next couple weeks as kind of a break. Unfortunately this means Civil Protection will be getting stalled because the longer hours were the only way it was getting made in light of the other stuff I was doing. I plan to resume work on it during Thanksgiving break. I am by no means dropping it, but I'd say right now it's looking to be more like a December or January release due to everything else that's going on.

Download 672x384 WMV (44MB) Here's the newest episode. I was pretty liberal about using cheat codes this time, though my justification is for the places I use them, I'm simply doing what I personally would do if I was in the same situation Freeman happens to be in (though I doubt I would end up in the same situations myself). I think this one may be one of the better FM episodes in terms of writing, though the voice acting probably isn't as good as it could be in areas since practically everything I've been producing lately has been a bit of a rush job. I still need to upload episode 2 of FM here since the downloadable copy has been deleted by Machinima.com for a little while now. I've misplaced the disc where I've burned a copy of it, but I'll find it and try to take care of the link tonight. As for the downloadable copies, I'm undecided what resolution is best. I'm trying to strike a balance between higher resolution and keeping the filesize low. The series has actually undergone a shrink, though you won't notice it on your end. I recorded old episodes at 800x600, but usually had to encode to 832x624 to avoid encoding errors. For widescreen I've been recording at 848x480 and am currently releasing at 672x384 since that's pretty close to the original aspect ratio and will have a comparable download size to the 640x480 clips. If you have any preference about the resolution, leave it below, just be aware that a larger resolution increases the filesize and time to download. I'm not going any higher than my current resolution for Freeman's Mind, the detail just isn't there for Half-Life 1 to justify it, plus these are just gameplay videos. I'll continue to do Civil Protection at 1280x720. Also I'm still releasing using WMV format only because it keeps hundreds of people from emailing me asking how to play the video. Next to MPG, I think it's probably the most compatible format there is. It's by no means the best though, I might look into releasing higher quality copies in the future. It's not as simple as picking a format, I have to have an understanding of the encoding settings to keep a reasonable balance between size and visual quality. I'm also far behind on responding to email, but that's something else I hope to get caught up with soon. In the meantime, I'll be spending all my time on The Tunnel, though I may let up a bit because the hours I've been putting in lately just aren't sustainable for me.

Machinima.com streaming Download 1280x720 WMV (13MB) Okay, here is the GOOD version of the trailer available to watch or for download. I'm kind of boycotting the old Youtube version simply because it's unfinished. The visuals are the same on both versions, though they made me add a pumpkin graphic to some contest they're conducting, I removed that for the downloadable copy. The real difference between these trailers is in the audio, which can be crucial to setting mood. Thanks goes to Otto Beumelburg (I frequently misspell his name) for the great sound effects and most of the audio mixing and Craig Kesicke for composing great custom music for the trailer; both of whom had extremely short notice on this. You'll be hearing more of Craig Kesicke's music in the future as there are situations that I require custom music for, plus there's some drama going on surrounding my use of game soundtracks, but I'll save that for a separate post. Now about the trailer itself! This is NOT the best trailer I could have made, however it's one of the safest. While it's impossible to make a trailer that's spoiler-free, I took pains to make sure this one didn't reveal too much about the episode. There are major scenes of the episode that aren't shown at all here and there should be plenty of surprises throughout the entire episode once it gets completed. Not only that, but I wasn't really ready to begin filming, so I just dropped the work I was doing and made a lot of snippet shots. There's a high probability almost none of the exact same shots you see here will be in the actual episode. On top of that, I changed a line or two of the dialogue so it would flow better and the joke at the end was made up for the trailer as well, it's not even part of the episode (because most jokes are less funny once you've already heard them). While the plot and theme will remain the same, several lines are delivered in completely different areas or context. My goal here was to give you a reason to watch the actual episode if you've already seen the trailer (and vice-versa once it comes out). So if you want NO spoilers, don't watch the trailer, but if you do, rest assured it doesn't spoil much. When the episode does get completed, it will be both comedy and suspense and will likely be the longest episode of CP made so far, probably at least 15 minutes. While there will be humor throughout the episode, the jokes won't be as constant as some others because there will be more emphasis on developing the story. And while the episode will start out in the same location as "Shadow of a A Doubt" it is not meant as a sequel to it. I honestly don't know when it will be done since I've been so busy with other work, but I can guarantee it won't be rushed out the door.

Things are a mess at the moment, but I should probably give a news update. I was recently asked by Machinima.com to make a trailer for "The Tunnel" since it's not going to come out before Halloween because of everything else I've been doing. I surely agreed, as this is going to be a long episode and I thought I could make a trailer without spoiling much. I ended up having very little notice on this however and ran into some bugs, so I did everything humanely possible to get this out in time (I worked about 32 hours between Monday and Tuesday night). Unfortunately this wasn't fast enough and Machinima wanted it released TODAY, so this comes at a sizeable expense to the quality. I've never rushed anything out the door this fast and I can say right now this is not going to happen again. I compromised because I can live with a trailer being subpar, but I would never allow this for a full episode. Anyway, it is available on Youtube now, but I don't want to link to it, since the audiowork should be finished for it before too long and the final one should create a better impact. The version that's out there now has no sound effects and consists only of Half-Life music that I arranged in about 10 minutes. The "good" one will have sound effects and hopefully some custom music composed for it. It will be available on Machinima.com and here when it is. I'll make a new post when that's done. I don't want to discuss anything about the trailer until the good one is out, so I'm not answering any questions related to it or the episode right now, I'll give the details on everything once it's out (hopefully quite soon). I just wanted to give an update for people wondering what was happening. Watch it now if you really want to, though I recommend waiting a day or two for the better version.