NEW ASTRALIS VIDEO UNDERWAY

Last night Dan Dobson and I spent a few hours capturing gameplay footage from the latest build of Astralis.  The game is looking better than ever and we managed to pull about an hour of footage into 55 files, more than enough to get me started. Dan will be on hand to do any extra videos I need and send them to me using Dropbox.

The files themselves are huge so I'm going to use a trick that Alec (Astralis art director) taught me, which is to have a highly compressed version of the video loaded into Final Cut for when I am editing and building the video. The compressed version will be much smaller and easier to manage, reducing CPU strain and render times. Once the video is finished I find the source file for the videos on the hard drive and overwrite the compressed videos with the uncompressed videos (importantly, using the same final name). Final Cut then assembles the video using the full quality files.

The final render will be the only one that takes a little time. The hundreds of renders I will be doing before that will all be many magnitudes quicker. A simple trick, but one I never learned until now.

But first I need to compress all the full-quality videos. Once this is done I'll be ready to go!

Let's squish those files!

NEW LOOK

New look courtesy of the one-and-only Steve over at stevethone.com.

Steve is a professional graphic designer with eight years experience and is the mastermind behind the new visual theme across my blog, Twitter and Facebook pages. Steve, it's been an absolute pleasure working with you to get this new design up.

I commend this great man to you all without reservation.

HELLO WORLD

Well, a very long time after this "small easy project" started, I finally have a first draft of "Where's My Milk You Bastard".

It's terrible at the moment. It needs lots of fixes and to have the running time chopped down by a sizeable fraction, but it finally actually resembles a short film. A little bit of polish and maybe I'll finally share it with the world.

Now the first short narrative is out there it's time to start thinking about the next one! Possibly some dark drug infused nightmare of a short film, a collaboration with a brilliant mind. Say no more, for now.

Coming up - lots of work on a new video for Astralis! We've got some really good footage incoming and the game is looking it's best. Watch this space!

TIME MANAGEMENT

My time management is terrible right now. I'm so tired. I'm working ten hours today and I have been exhausted all week. After getting home from a full time job, making and eating dinner, an hour walking the dog, feeding the animals and getting a basic level of housework done, I don't have long before I need to drag myself to bed for less sleep than I'd like every night. I haven't been able to get anything done all week.

Obviously, as someone without children, I don't know how easy I have it. I should try and remember that.

Then there's all the cycling. My cycling commute is great for keeping me out of the crowded trains, but 20 miles a day is exhausting, plus the bike maintenance this week has been really time consuming (punctures, swapping tyres, idiotically causing a hydraulic fluid leak from my brakes).

Diana's mother is with us for a little while, hence the recent house re-organisation and wardrobe building that has taken up a few weeks of spare time. The "editing suite" is now her room and the recently repaired iMac now resides in the living room on the dining table near the TV (our house is small and crowded) which isn't the best location. I can still get some work done, hunched over it's blue glow with my headphones on while Dee and her Mum try and watch television in the evenings and Mugatu tries to snooze on the warm keyboard. Hopefully soon we can pick up a cheap desk from Ikea so we can relocate the "editing suite" into a dark corner of the bedroom and I can hide away once more, dragging timelines and drinking tea with bags under my aching eyes. The unfortunate effect is that we will be displacing the cat's play towers. Mugatu - I'm so sorry. Digby - you never cared for them anyway, you smug little guy.

Add to all this that money is just falling through our fingers. We account for every penny but for a long time now our outgoings exceed our incomings. Things will get better, we have some debts that will be clear by the end of 2013 and then we can finally balance our books. Just got to hope we can keep going til then!

It's been an especially tiring two weeks. Trying to elevate this hobby to the point where I can start getting paid work while also holding down a full time job at the moment seems imp.. improbable. Nothing is impossible. It's just about motivation. Strangely, writing down how tiring I find everything is motivating me to try harder and find more time for it. This blog has become some strange text-based self-administered talking therapy. Working hard and sleepless nights are part of the package, aren't they? I'm obviously expecting too much for too little effort. Come on Dan, step it up a gear!! I just need to make sure I can get at least half an hour of video work under my belt every day. That shouldn't be too hard! Let's do this!!

But not tonight... tonight I get home from work at 10pm and I'm going to curl up in a ball and sleep. Look at this, I'm relapsing already, one sentence later. Hopeless!

MUGATU VS PRODUCTIVITY

Got the iMac back, everything is running smoothly!

I got all my recent DV tapes uploaded and I am assembling the first draft of the Tug Of War video from  this recent weekend shoot.

However I have hit a bit of a wall.....

Thanks Mugatu.

EXTERNAL HD DAMAGE - THE RESULTS ARE IN

That is all.

25% CLOSER TO FINAL CUT X

We get the iMac back tomorrow, at which point we'll be able to see how much damage I inflicted upon our back-up hard-drive. I'll keep you posted. My fingers are crossed super-tight. Typing is very hard.

On the right of these pages you'll see a green and red donut. This is my little interactive fundraising graphic (go on, hover!) that shows how close I am to having enough money to afford Final Cut X, the new and powerful video editing software which would replace my outdated and buggy version of Final Cut Express. The money is made through my Amazon associates account and youtube views. I recently pipped the 25% mark! A really big sweaty uncomfortable hug to everyone who has navigated through my blog when buying anything on Amazon.

It's true that Final Cut X is hardly bank-breakingly expensive at £200, if anything the price is eminently reasonable given the price of previous instalments, but as I'm living a financial hangover of debt clearance (we're succeeding!) a purchase like that is not really possible, so I'm putting my blog proceeds (which always go towards filming equipment) towards the goal of affording the software.

For those who have no clue what I'm yammering about, you can search Amazon through the box on the right hand side of my blog. I also review and link any products I use as a budgetless filmmaker that I buy through the site. If anyone gets to Amazon via my blog and makes a purchase (of anything at all, not just things I review/recommend) then I get a 5% commission which goes towards equipment  for filming projects. It's a small and infrequent revenue stream (a trickle really) but every little helps.

If you're ever interested in helping out a struggling videographer, you can start your next purchase on Amazon from these pages. It won't cost you a penny, just a mouse click! You can even bookmark me for future purchases. I would be totally cool with that!

Ah, now to await the fate of my data. Tomorrow will reveal all.

.....


Is it bad that I just want to coccoon myself in a duvet for a week and play Borderlands 2?

THE DANGER OF IDIOTS

So, here I am, without my computer while it is in the repair shop having it's hard-drive (and motherboard!) replaced. We have the hard drive and everything on it (including all my video projects past and present, such as the almost-finished videographic paeon to life alone with felines - Where's My Milk You Bastard - backed up on a precious external hard drive that holds the entirety of mine and Dee's digital life.

 Meanwhile, our house is in a disarray of reorganisation (for reasons I won't go into here) as Dee and I spent over 6 hours assembling an absolute monster of an Ikea wardrobe in the bedroom. The second room (previously my "editing suite" aka room with desk and sometimes biscuits) is full of bits of stacked furniture, busted old wardrobes and ungainly piles of generic home-fodder as we struggle to erect a chipboard stonehenge next door using only the power of blunt drill bits and swearing.

While moving lumps of stuff from one room to another in an attempt to maximise space around our new Godless monolith I found myself in the second bedroom manoeuvring a huge cuddly stuffed gorilla across a chest of drawers towards a chassis of an old wardrobe.

Blammo crash bang, said the external hard drive as he toppled off the chest of drawers that some utter imbecile had left it sitting upon. The imbecile began hopping up and down in a stupor flailing an inanimate primate around as it slowly dawned on the increasingly panicked imbecile what was ON that hard drive. Everything. Every edit of video work. Every piece of footage. Every colour correction, every fade, every exported movie. Every photo ever taken by the imbecile or by Dee. Every song we had. Every document, every program. We put our digital lives in a box for safe keeping while our computer was being repaired and an imbecile walked by and smacked the delicate vault to the ground within 48 hours.

Until the computer is returned and we attempt to reinstall our data we won't know what the damage is. But a google prognosis carried out at work is not encouraging. The drive shows no physical damage but they are delicate complicated things that can be utterly destroyed internally without a single crack to the exterior.

It's entirely possible that I have just wiped out several years work. It's true that the original DV tapes sit in a drawer undamaged. I could start from scratch. But the very idea of undertaking so many hours upon hours of work without any references or notes is distressing.

It's not just the work that galls me. It's the pictures, the personal little videos, the photos, the memories.

I'll keep you updated when I know more. For the next few days you can find me hiding under the carcass of a dusty decommissioned wardrobe, repeatedly punching myself in the face.

COMPUTER OFF FOR REPAIR AND A FILM RECOMMENDATION

General Comings and Goings:

The iMac was taken away today for repair, but not before I managed to finish the video work I was helping a friend with first despite the delays due the slow computer. Once we get the new hard drive we'll be good as new and I can finish up my other jobs! In the mean time I've been sketching out some ideas with an old friend I've always wanted to work with. We're going to do something together that may or may not involve two naked arses with faces painted on them kissing each other for ten minutes. I say it may involve this. He says it may not. Time will tell.

Quick Film Recommendation: 

Speaking of naked dudes rubbing each other, I saw a film a while back called Warrior
  with Tom Hardy and Joel Edgerton as estranged brothers from a broken family (one is a marine, one is a physics teacher) who both find their lives falling apart and drift into a big-bucks mixed-martial arts tournament. It's basically an MMA version of Rocky and came out at the same time as the similarly themed (and better publicised) boxer-brothers film The Fighter, which overshadowed Warrior at release. The film ended up making a loss at the box office, which I think is a crying shame.

It's actually a cracking film and you should check it out. It's a classic sports blockbuster in the Rocky mould which is never going to appeal to everyone but it definitely transcends the the scope of an MMA movie with great characters and a genuinely gripping story, plus some brutal fighting scenes. I don't know a thing about MMA and that didn't impact my enjoyment one bit. Dee loved it too. It doesn't steer entirely clear of cheese and sentiment, but sometimes you just need a good movie that makes you fist-pump the air and spill your nachos.

Help out the poor buggers that worked so hard to make this film and give it a rental or get the DVD for a few quid online.

Trailer:

WHADDYA MEAN WEBSERIES & HD REPAIR

After the elation earlier this week I am very sad to report that the new Battlestar Galactica series: Blood and Chrome will be a webseries totalling two hours over ten episodes and not the epic new television series I was hoping for. Feeling a little bit gutted! Happy and sad at the same time. I guess I should have followed events more closely.

The iMac is booked in for a hard-drive replacement. Luckily it is covered by the warranty and we won't have to pay a penny. Even small tasks have become nearly impossible. I am helping a work colleague by doing a very simple bit of video editing but just rendering the videos within Final Cut takes up to two hours. A ten minute job has so far been spread out over three evenings as the render and export times are so very long that my evening is over before the work is finished. I can only assume the computer has somehow filled with quicksand. Hopefully the warranty covers that.

Once we get it back, I can finally get back to work on my backlogged videos, namely the Three-Sided Football (can't wait to see how that came out) and the final stages of Where's My Milk You Bastard?.

Should be seeing a friend next week to do some research regarding a story I want to write a screenplay for. I'm prepared for it to be pretty bad as it's not an area I'm very experienced in, but we can't just give up at the first hurdle, can we?

Have more for you soon, stay awesome :-)