Spiffworld | Blog

Woo!!!!! I am going to Blizzcon after all! Oxhorn’s tip paid off and I’ve got a ticket waiting for me at will call when I get there. I am so stoked.

It’s going to be kind of a bummer to wander around the convention floor by myself, so I’m totally going to cover myself in “Hi, my name is SPIFF” stickers and “You know, CODE MONKEY?” stickers and see if I can find someone to pal around with. If you’re going to Blizzcon and you see a guy covered in stickers, be sure to walk up and say hi.

Now all I need to do is get a hotel last-minute, and get out of work on Friday and Monday (driving days to and from the Bay Area). Oh, and I’ve got a midterm for my Java class on Monday (no lie). Somehow I’ll figure out a way for it to all work out…

There was never any promise, nor even any kind of mention of an invitation to this year’s Blizzcon for machinima artists like there was last time. Still, I know I was hoping for one, and I’m sure the others were too. But here it is about two weeks before Blizzcon starts, and I haven’t received an invitation. I contacted Oxhorn, and he says he hasn’t received one and neither has any of the other machinimists he’s in contact with. So I guess that’s that.

After putting out “Bacteria” and “Live” in rapid succession, I had hoped to take “The Captain’s Wife’s Lament” nice and slow, savoring each gag and taking my own sweet time to put the whole thing together. I had a vague idea that it would be nice to release the video in time for Talk Like A Pirate Day, but I didn’t actually know when that was.

Then my nephew told me TLAP Day was Sept. 19. He told me this on Sept. 13. My leisurely video was suddenly going to have to be a Bataan Death March if I wanted to get it done in time. So I threw myself into it and actually got the video posted two whole days before TLAP Day. I must be some kind of video-making superhero or something.

This one was simultaneously easy and tough. It was easy because it’s relatively short, and the whole second half of the song is just a series of quick sight gags, which (as long as I can come up with good gags) aren’t that difficult to put together. It was tough because the first half of the song is all build-up that I had to work hard to keep interesting so that the viewer didn’t stop watching before the rousing second half. Also, many shots (especially in the first half) have many characters on screen at the same time. Each element in a shot adds time to composing the shot and to rendering the shot, and those couple of shots that have a screenful of pirates in them took over 30 minutes to render the couple of seconds of video you see in the final product.

In the end, like all of my videos, there are a couple of shots I wish I’d spent more time on, and a few that ended up being better because I was in a rush and so kept them simple (and funny).

In the ending scroll, I put a couple of pirate riddles that Paul and Storm use in their live show when they sing this song. The answers to the riddles can be found on my website.

The WeGame August Machinima Contest is over and the results have been announced. My “Live” video got “honorable mention”, which is honestly better than I had expected. There were a lot of really good entries in the contest (about 120 in total, I think), done by people with lots of actual talent for the technical and storytelling aspects of machinima, and I’m lucky to have gotten any kind of top mention at all. I also get a ThinkGeek.com gift certificate and a t-shirt.

I’ve posted “Live” to my YouTube channel, so it’s now in the same place as all the rest of my videos.

The other winners in the contest:

• Grand Prize: The Robber Baron of Warsong Gulch by Pinkhair (an old-tyme silent movie)
• First Place: Joust Venture by Sedrin (machinima using the old Joust video game)
• Second Place: Divided Soul by Martin Falch
• Third Place: The Way of Life by Johan Vagstedt
• Honorable Mentions:
  • The Murlock Tale by Calixworld2
  • The Forgotten Legend by Funk
  • The Islanders - Happy Birthday by X-Cross
  • Live by me
  • Asteroid Truckers by JimRage
  • Outlaws of Azeroth by RedEyeLobine
  • Le Terroriste by Olibith
  • Von’zul by Erunno

I didn’t mention this before, but I should give credit where credit is due — I was having a hard time coming up with a good ending for the video, and it was my mom who suggested that Dr. Skullcrusher (or whatever the gnome’s name is) die so that The Bride could live. Great idea, thanks Mom. Also, I was originally going to have the video just end with a big bloody fight scene, but my wife suggested having The Bride and Igor want to bring Dr. Skullcrusher back to life with the dead villager’s body parts. Awesome.

Seeing as how “Live” is my first non-Jonathan Coulton video (sort of), I’m hoping you all scoot over to www.paulandstorm.com to check out Paul and Storm’s site and their music. They’ve got similar comic sensibilities as Coulton but go at it in a slightly different way. Be sure to check them out.

I’ve got a new video, but I’m not posting it to YouTube just yet. It’s for the song “Live” by Paul and Storm, and you can view it over at WeGame.com. That’s right, I’m trying my hand at another machinima contest. I want to see if I can win two in a row, which would indicate a trend, as opposed to winning just the Machinima.com contest, which would be just a fluke.

This is my first non-Jonathan Coulton video, although you can be forgiven for thinking it actually is a Jonathan Coulton song. It was written for the “Masters of Song-Fu” songwriting competition. The challenge put to both Jonathan Coulton and Paul and Storm in that round of competition was to write a song that sounded like it had been written by the other guy. Both of them did fabulously (here’s Coulton’s imitation of a P&S song, “Big Dick Farts A Polka”). P&S’s “Live” was such a great song that I just had to make a video for it. And it was so spot-on like a Coulton song, that I had to make my video reference an earlier Coulton video too (guess which one…)

I’m not going to post “Live” to my YouTube channel until after the WeGame contest is over, which should be early September (I don’t need an army of fans to go vote for me this time, but thanks). That should give people plenty of time to obsess over loving/hating my “Bacteria” video a little longer.

The results from the Machinima.com contest are in, and… WE WON!!! To celebrate, I’ve posted the video on YouTube (not much of a celebration, I know).

First of all, let me answer this question — “what’s up with the dialogue in that video?”. I’m glad you asked. The dialogue came from a Kentucky Fried Chicken new employee training video that Jonathan Coulton found online somewhere. Something about it struck him, so he decided to turn it into a song, which I have now turned into a video.

For completeness’ sake, let me reiterate the story of this video in this blog post, even though I’ve mentioned parts of it elsewhere. Machinima.com UK held a video contest where the contestants could make a machinima video for either of two Jonathan Coulton songs, Bacteria or Todd the T-1000. Oddly, given how many Halo videos there were, there were only a couple of “T-1000″ videos; most were for “Bacteria”. Mine was the only WoW video.

Now, since it was a Machinima.com UK contest, you had to be a resident of the UK to enter a video. I am not from the UK, but I emailed the Machinima guys to find out if the video maker had to be from the UK, or just the video enterer. They said, “As long as the person entering the video is from the UK, that’s all that matters”. That’s clear enough, so I contacted Kerrin from the Jonathan Coulton Project (who is from the UK) to see if he’d post my video in the contest. He said yes, so I made the video.

It was not a smooth contest. There was supposed to be a full week of online voting, but the voting mechanism on the site didn’t work and it took them four days to finally fix it, leaving only three days for voting. I had initially planned on doing no special promotion of my video, figuring I’d kind of fly under the radar and see if my video could win based on its own merits. That plan got derailed a bit when a video was posted by a guy named ProudN00b, and it immediately got almost 300 views in the first 24 hours. That made me realize that there were other machinima artists who had fanbases of whatever size, and that since they were obviously sending their fans to go view and vote on their video, if I didn’t do the same thing, I’d get crushed. Not wanting to get crushed, I whipped up a “please go vote for me video” and posted it to YouTube once the Machinima.com voting problems had been worked out.

That ended up working pretty well. In addition to voting my video up pretty high, my fans (that’s you guys. thanks!) also seemed to have not really dug Proudn00b’s video and voted his down, which upset him a bit. On the Machinima.com forums, he and a few others began lamenting the fact that the voting system was essentially a popularity contest (which is true), and demanded that Machinima.com change the way they scored the contest (there was never any chance of them doing that though; they wouldn’t even change the voting period after having lost over half of it to broken voting functionality). There were even claims that we (Kerrin plus me) were cheating, having people artificially jack with the scores by giving my video high marks and everyone else low marks. For the record, we never even asked people to vote 5 stars for my video. All we ever said was, “please go watch the video and give it as many stars as you think it deserves”. We certainly weren’t encouraging people to crater other people’s videos.

In the end, our video ended up on top, so we won! The prize is a sweet Alienware gaming laptop, which Kerrin gets to keep. Shipping electronics overseas is a pain in the butt, and I don’t really need a PC laptop (I’m a Mac man), and I couldn’t have won it without Kerrin’s help anyway. Besides, there’s maybe a little bit of justice in the fact that the prize at least will be staying in the UK.

Bi0man22 turned me on to a set of video tutorials made by Oxhorn, the guy behind some of the best WoW machinima on the Interwebs today. They cover the basics of making machinima, as well as walking you through techniques like motion and color keying that can help take your videos to a new level. They’re really good, and I’ve learned quite a bit by watching them. I’ve put links to the videos on my “How To Make WoW Videos” page. If you’re interested in making machinima videos, check ‘em out!

The voting problems seem to have been worked through for Machinima.com’s Jonathan Coulton video contest, so if you’re so inclined, I would love it if you would consider going to the contest site, viewing the only WoW video (it says it’s posted by “kerrin”, but it’s really my video. long story.), and giving it as many stars as you think it’s worth.

Thanks for your support.

My video for the Machinima.com UK contest is finished (has been for a while), but while voting for the contest was supposed to start Aug. 2, here it is Aug. 5 and they still haven’t managed to get it to work. Everyone’s complaining that no one can vote (although, mysteriously, votes are appearing for videos and no one can figure out how they got there), and we’re all worried that the end of the voting period is coming up fast (Aug. 9) and no one’s been able to vote yet. It’s quite a clusterf**k.

So I am planning on asking everyone I know to go vote for my video, but I don’t want to send anyone over there until they can actually vote. Stay tuned for that. Hopefully the Machinima.com folks will figure out how to get their site working so we can all go there and crash their servers with hundreds of votes for me!

I got an invitation to join the Wrath of the Lich King beta the other day. At first I was afraid the email was a phish because it said I’d have to enter my account name and password to upgrade. And besides, I didn’t remember signing up to be invited to the beta. But then I started hearing that lots of invites were being received around the Interwebs, which helped me feel more comfortable that my invitation was legit.

Even so, I wasn’t sure I wanted to even do it. I’m not a big fan of beta software. I don’t want to have to stumble through bugs and unfinished content. I want to experience it when it’s good and done and ready for my consumption. But then a buddy of mine said he’d gotten an invite too (he went with me to Blizzcon last year, so that must be how both our names got on the list) and that he’d already downloaded the beta client and made a Death Knight and it was awesome. That was enough for me. I’m in!