BRINDLE FISH

Astralis - gameplay trailer

2013-04-01T15:49:00.000+01:00

The gameplay video for the upcoming Foxhaut Games release is here! Astralis (HD youtube link)

Tim Hurley at The XBLIG has written up a review of the game so far, click here to jump to his excellent blog and get the inside scoop.

Astralis will soon be coming to Xbox Live Indie Games marketplace.

Next post - a behind the scenes write-up of what went into making the trailer.

Houdini Tonight @ Cable Street Electric

2013-03-18T16:52:00.004+00:00

Working (at the day job) today but heading out to Limehouse to record Houdini live tonight at the launch for their new single Into The Woods. They are playing a set in Cable Street Electric and I'll be there to do one of my favourite things - video a kickass band up close and personal.

I'm off work tomorrow to finalise the Astralis video after spending close to 12 hours in that awful wooden chair on Saturday in a prolonged and satisfying edit (comfort notwithstanding) and with a bit of luck get the Houdini video assembled, exported and hosted online. That's the plan at least, but I do know that it only takes one hiccup to derail an edit for several hours, so cast a penny in the well and wish me luck.

If you're in London and want to start your week off with a bang then come and join us in Limehouse tonight.

The venue is Cable Street Electric (within the Cable Street Studios complex) and the nearest tube is Limehouse. Houdini will be on around 10pm.

Bring your own beer.

To get us in the swing of things, here's Houdini's video for Into The Woods. The clever bastards done did dis demselves. Enjoy!

New editing suite and Astralis

2013-03-16T15:49:00.000+00:00

My editing suite (small spare room with desk, darkness and - when God is smiling benevolently upon me - tea and biscuits) has been permanently repurposed and is no longer available for my editing needs.

In order to continue my work, I bought a cheap desk on gumtree and carried it home with Dee from an apartment about fifteen minutes walk away (fun fact - it becomes 25 minutes when carrying a desk while walking the dog) and I have relocated the computer to the bedroom, in what can only be designated as a nook between a monster wardrobe and the patio door to the garden (maybe this bedroom is supposed to be a dining room? Fuck it).

It is at this rickety desk I now sit, on a folding wooden garden chair that I had to de-muck and de-spider thoroughly. On the plus side I can keep the back-breaking discomfort down as long as I constantly monitor my posture and I do have a hot cup of tea and a bacon bagel.

Right now I'm working through a backlog of Astralis footage trying to get the video ready for completion. New sample footage is coming in all the time and I've hit a bit of a wall with the editing because the codec of the video files means that the footage edits very slowly in Final Cut. Rendering 30 seconds of footage can take 30 minutes so I'm trying to seek a way around it. I'm running some exports of various footage to see if it works better. It's all putting quite a strain on the computer so there is not much I can do in the meantime except write this blog post. Or idly browse the net, but that's a death sentence to productivity.

I've only got the one day to get as much done as I can as I am at work for 8 hours on Sunday and filming a gig on Monday night. The good news is that the file conversion seems to be working. When it comes to codecs, file types and compression, it's all a strange voodoo as far as I can tell. I just cross my fingers and pray to the Lords of Kobol. I know that's not exactly a professional thing to say but I'll be the first to admit I have a lot to learn about that kinda thing. If all goes well you should be able to see Astralis in action very soon.

EAT LEAD YOU ALIEN BASTARDS

Well, this batch of files is going to need some time to export before I can continue. I wonder if Dee is up for another game of Carcassonne?

*blog update - she was up for a game and the video exports worked!

Filming with Houdini

2013-03-07T13:50:00.001+00:00

On Monday 18th March I will be filming Houdini playing live. I really enjoy getting stuck in with live performance, moving around the throng of the crowd with the main camera to get nice close angles on the performers, with a camcorder set up on a tripod getting a good angle of the band and crowd to use as cover shots.

Sometimes I manage to convince someone to lend me a second camcorder so I can get two angles as cover which gives me a few more options when putting the final cut together. It's good to have more than you need when filming something live and unrepeatable.

Until the 18th I will continue to plug away at a new Astralis video. It was only yesterday that I finally got all the footage labelled, catalogued and inserted. So now I have my ball of clay, but I definitely don't have a sculpture just yet.

I'm still working with Final Cut Express as I haven't quite saved up enough for Final Cut Pro X yet. The difficult part will be the changeover, for simplicities sake I want to completely finalise all my projects with my current editing software before moving over. This means finishing Where's My Milk You Bastard and the Three Sided Football footage as well. The former is being polished up and added to on a weekly basis, the latter has been sadly sidelined while I wrestle other projects but should be receiving some attention soon.

Projects... so easy to start so hard to finish. Must be more disciplined.

NEW ASTRALIS VIDEO UNDERWAY

2013-02-24T15:51:00.002+00:00

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

2013-02-22T16:16:00.001+00:00

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

2013-02-21T15:52:00.002+00:00

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

2012-12-07T18:01:00.000+00:00

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

2012-11-27T22:14:00.001+00:00

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

2012-11-24T10:37:00.004+00:00

That is all.

25% CLOSER TO FINAL CUT X

2012-11-22T16:55:00.001+00:00

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

2012-11-18T18:59:00.003+00:00

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

2012-11-15T14:56:00.002+00:00

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

2012-11-08T11:49:00.002+00:00

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 :-)

BACK FROM HOLIDAY? BLOOD AND CHROME?!?!

2012-11-06T10:29:00.002+00:00

BLOODANDCHROMEBLOODANDCHROMEBLOODANDCHROMEBLOODANDCHROMEBLOODANDCHROMEBLOODANDCHROMEBLOODANDCHROMEBLOODANDCHROMEBLOODANDCHROMEBLOODANDCHROMEBLOODANDCHROMEBLOODANDCHROMEBLOODANDCHROMEBLOODANDCHROMEBLOODANDCHROMEBLOODANDCHROMEBLOODANDCHROMEBLOODANDCHROMEBLOODANDCHROMEBLOODANDCHROMEBLOODANDCHROMEBLOODANDCHROME

Got back from a much-needed week of peace and quiet locked away from the world in a New Forest cottage (with Dee, Louie Ad and Jen, love you guys) and I found out the new Battlestar Galactica series comes out on friday!

Battlestar Galactica - BLOOD AND CHROME!

Set during the original Cylon War a few decades before events of the current series, and featuring the captain of Galactica, Will Adama as a young fighter pilot. I cannot hide my excitement.

If this post means nothing to you, I apologise! Trailer here:

Original blood-pumping teaser from months back, before Syfy dropped the show (BOOOO!) and Machanima picked it up (Yaaay!)

http://www.thegetawayvan.com/2012/03/movies-cometh-blood-chrome.html

If you never got round to catching the re-imagined Battlestar Galactica, give the 90minute pilot a shot and see how you feel. If you love fearsome robot baddies, intrigue, world-ending warfare, enemies walking among us and crazy space battles, you'll dig it, I swear.

HOPELESS ORGANISATION AND TO-DO LISTS

2012-10-25T16:40:00.000+01:00

It's important to stay organised and motivated when you're working towards something big, especially if it falls outside the realm of your day-job and requires a lot of time management, which I am historically bad at.

A while back I decided that I needed an easily accesible To-Do List.

Far from being mundane, a good To-Do List enables you to break tasks and jobs up into tiny chunks that are quickly dealt with and far easier to handle. The beauty of an electronic list is that you can drag tasks around, set up sub-tasks and separate lists for different projects. After some searching I found a website that I liked, signed up (for free), and created several tiers of lists for my projects to help me stay organised and see my progress. Being browser-based I can access it from any computer, which means less stuff for me to carry around - an important consideration for the heavily laden no-budget filmmaker.

Before you know it, I'm easily on top of my projects and making progress. It saved me from that drowning sensation that makes me want to give up and play Skyrim for 6 hours rather than do anything productive (that shit went down a lot).

Fast forward several months to now and I've let myself go. Feeling a little overwhelmed I decided to dig up and refresh those old lists, only I couldn't remember the name of the website. Not if my life depended on it. Several dozen Google searches later and I'm fucking stumped.

So I'm starting from scratch. I'm now signed up to Wunderlist, a multi-platform To-Do List which you can download for your computer or use via your browser or phone. It's nice to feel organised again. Empowered rather than adrift. I've already managed to tick a box or two!

Why am I telling you this? Mostly so I'll have a record of what the bloody thing is called, so when I forget the name of the website again in 6 months I'll have more luck finding it.

Now... time for tea.

BIRTHDAYS AND BICYCLES

2012-10-22T15:55:00.003+01:00

I spent so much time counting down towards my birthday that I can't believe it's gone by. Back at work now after a really nice weekend of trappist beers and stroganoffs.

Still no action with the three-sided football footage I captured until the hard drive problem gets fixed. I have to confess, not being able to work on this is like having an itch I can't scratch.

I picked up my new bicycle (thank you workplace bicycle loans!) the other week from the rather excellent Vaidas Bicycles in Honor Oak and have been absolutely loving it. My last bike was a little too heavy and noisy but my new one is a simpler machine and flies like a bird.

Just over a year ago I had decided to make a big change in my life and buy myself a good bike, enabling me to ditch the hour of tubes and trains travelling across London and to become a cycle commuter. It was a decision borne of financial strife and unfitness, one that Dee and I were making together. I made this decision despite not having cycled since my teens save for some jelly-leg inducing stints on the London cycle hire bikes. To be honest the notion originally terrified me, especially cycling in London during rush hour, but after my first ride in, I was pretty much settled. Now I happily do my commute 5 days a week, 20 miles a day. I'd recommend it to anyone. I'm losing a bit of weight doing this too, as I'm burning about 1200 calories extra a day with the riding. I still eat like a pig though, that's probably going to be the next step towards being a bit more healthy.

I wonder if I could find a way to combine my love of cycling with my video work?

In the meantime, while unable to directly edit my work I've been drawing up a shortlist of people that I want to work with in the near future. Small businesses, exciting local shops, bands, performers, venues. New ideas for screenplays have been popping through my head lately too, or new angles on current ideas. I really would love to write one. The hardest part is always starting so it's about time I stopped dreaming and started to knuckle down.

I'll keep you posted as to how it goes.

Sunday's Filming @Plumstead Common

2012-10-16T16:29:00.000+01:00

Sunday was exhausting! We arrived at Plumstead Common at about 10:30am and met with Owen at the rugby club pavilion where we got some general taping (scenery, location) done. Transportation was taken care of by Lauren "wheels" Carnall who drove myself and the gear down, along with Dee and our dog, Louie, who bounded around the common like a mad thing while I discussed events with Owen. Here's how it all went:

The Tug Of War

Shortly after we arrived two fire engines (sorry, fire appliances) from Plumstead Fire Station pulled in, the occupants forming one of the main tug-of-war teams, facing off against members of the Greenwich Rugby Club. The rope was laid out, the markers were set, and several rounds of ferocious tugging were underway! Lauren "wheels" Carnall took a camcorder and I took the Canon XL1S and we filmed every round, while poor Dee had to do her best to relax Louie who was sent into a barking frenzy whenever columns of beefy men started roaring and pulling. As the afternoon chill began to set in, the firefighters reigned supreme and took a trophy home for their efforts and thanks to Owen's excellent supervisory skills no-one lost an arm.

The champions in action: photo by Sarah Harper

The 3-Sided Football

With the tug of war settled the hexagonal pitch beckoned. Dee and Louie made their way to the train station for home (I'm a sap but I missed her immediately) and Lauren and I set up our cameras on tripods to film several rounds of 3-sided football. There were 5 teams, each wearing a different colour which made things much easier to follow. The teams would rotate after every ten minutes so that everyone had an even number of games. The pitch was set up with proper goals rather than cones and the games flowed beautifully. In between rotations I was able to do a few small interviews with some of the players that I hope I will be able to incorporate into the final video. Filming a football game from the sidelines is hard, any zooming in you do invariably ends up with you losing the ball in your viewfinder and anything zoomed too far out looks a little poor. Sadly this means the best footage is not usually the bits displaying the most skilled players, but rather the moments when the drama of the game coincided with moments when the camera was pointing the right way and wasn't shaking around.
By switching the f-number with the frame speed I was able to jump between differing depths of field, a deep DOF to capture everything smoothly and a shallower DOF to get better looking shots (at the risk of losing focus) but the change would take a few seconds during which nothing usable is being recorded. I did get better at adapting my settings on the fly and by the last rotation I was getting much better footage than the first. With Lauren filming on the camcorder as backup I should hopefully have more than enough coverage of the game.

Coming Home

Shit got real when I got home. Our persistent little computer errors over the past week have been identified as a failing hard-drive. I somehow doubt that I will have any joy uploading the five hours of footage I captured on Sunday.

Five hours is an excessive amount of footage for two short videos, even though it is across two cameras. The mistake was mine as I made assumptions about everything. Having never witnessed a tug of war, and knowing that there were two main teams, I had assumed it would have been all over in one tug (like so many things in life). I soon learned that there would be several runs with varying team members so I recorded everything for the sake of coverage only to find that by the end I had recorded a shedload of footage (of both the tug of war and the football) and I should have been a lot more selective. By recording too much footage I have made the task of sifting through it all more difficult than it needs to be. I have my notes to guide me, but they are largely hasty and non-specific owing to the bustling nature of the day and the fact that the two camera operators were on opposite sides of a football field.

It would have been good to get started on the footage capture straight away, while my memory is still fresh, but the hard drive failure is setting me back.

Lessons learned? Always make time for note making and write them obsessively. Find out exactly how everything is going to play out so you can record appropriately.

The footage should be pretty good so I look forward to getting it together. I'll put up some stills once the editing begins and put the videos up once they are done!

Thanks for reading!

Check out more of the Plumstead Make Merry and their excellent community events here:
http://plumsteadmakemerry.co.uk/

Three sided football this weekend.

2012-10-11T12:26:00.000+01:00

I've managed to draft in a good friend who has volunteered to help and most importantly, drive! We'll head out in the morning for Plumstead Common with all the gear and film the guys setting up the hexagonal pitch. If you're reading this and thinking "what the fudge is three sided football" then check out this earlier post. We'll also film some talking heads and hopefully have enough material to put something half decent together!

I grew up around Plumstead Common although I have not been there in many years. I'm curious to see what has changed and what has stayed the same! I remember the view from Winns Common, which is just next to Plumstead Common and is at the peak of the uphill road I grew up on. I used to go up there every weekend in the late 80's and early 90's to climb on the tumulus - a well preserved bronze age burial mount, and to the Northern tip of the common where I would gaze out over the flat expanses of North East London all the way to Essex. You can clearly see the grounds of Belmarsh prison and I would always count the number of gas holders and towering chimneys on the horizon, sometimes with a pair of heavy, grown-up shiny new binoculars my grandfather gave me for my birthday. Within a year the binoculars were destroyed by water damage and condensation when I foolishly tried to use them to see underwater in a playground paddling pool on Winns Common, a source of stomach churning guilt for many years. I never threw them out, even though they were essentially useless and I never told my grandfather.

The view from Winn's Common

But back to modernity. Once we're filming on the common we have a rather sizeable problem in that we will be in an open space for many hours with no access to power points. I'm going to fully charge my batteries before we head out, and then I guess I'll need to need to take a break halfway through to take a short drive back to Owen's house to wait for the batteries to charge, which could take an hour or two. Not exactly ideal, but short of hiring out some sort of generator, we're stuck with it. We'll miss a chunk of the day but we should still end up with enough footage to make a nice little video. We're not there to document the whole match, just to assemble a short video about three sided football and about the Plumstead Make Merry, the people hosting the match.

Right now, the ever unreliable weather forecast for Sunday is bucketing rain all day long. As I look out my window, it's much the same right now. Fingers crossed for good weather on the day. We'll have no cover.

Indie Game: The Meetup + Three Sided Football

2012-09-30T12:48:00.000+01:00

This is a busy weekend! Right now I'm getting ready to take the camera to a park in New Cross to videotape a game of three-sided football as practice for the real event in a few weeks. There's no way I'm going to be able to get the kind of coverage you see on television, not with a single main camera and no elevation, but today will be a good chance to see what kind of footage I can get and a chance to see how a three sided football game flows so I can be better prepared for the big day.

I'm still a little sleepy today because last night I attended a convention for independent game developers in Central London called Indie Game: The Meetup, an opportunity to show your game, play others and network among like minded developers. I was there with Vince, Dan and Alec to show an alpha version of our game Astralis. We had a laptop set up and were inviting attendees and fellow developers to play the game. I brought the camera (and large tripod which didn't get used) and we videotaped our part of the event.

This made me feel very cool.

The venue, a small basement bar in Brewer Street was heaving with people. From profit turning indie developers to one-man teams showing their games, it was a really positive atmosphere. The bar lighting was dim and ambient which made any kind of video work difficult (digital video needs a lot of light to look good) but I brought my LED lighting panel which I attached to the camera shoe. It gave me a little bit of portable floodlighting which certainly made filming easier. I switched between using the light and cranking the gain up on the camera when the light was too intrusive. The gain gives me a brighter but far grainier image so it is always a trade off between visibility and image quality.

The event was a huge success so the booths were cramped and crowded which lent the whole evening a wonderful sense of camaraderie and encouraged conversation, but it did mean I was filming from a very close range whenever gathering footage. If I had stepped back for a wider shot I would have been lost in a sea of people and probably knocking over someone else's laptop! You couldn't deny the enthusiasm and talent on show at the event, it was great to meet and talk with so many like-minded people and to get them to play our game and hear their feedback.

Vince discusses Astralis with a co-developer at the event

A great night and I was glad that I could capture some of it. Now I just need to decide how I'm going to use this footage. But right now, I'm grabbing the camera and dashing out the door to meet Owen for some three sided football! Batteries charged... new tape ready... fingers crossed I haven't overlooked anything.

Thanks for reading!

Post foley session

2012-09-17T12:37:00.003+01:00

Dee and I took a few hours out yesterday to record a list of noises for an upcoming project. We needed things like doors closing, fridges humming, bottles clinking. Nothing too exciting.

I have no devices specifically for recording audio so I used the Canon XL1S camera. I dedicated a miniDV tape specifically for foley purposes. Basically I'm capturing video but with the lens cap on, as all I care about here is the audio. I didn't use the onboard microphone that comes with the XL1S but instead a nice sennheiser boom/shotgun microphone that was donated to me a few years ago. It has a pistol grip and rubber dampers to prevent sound or vibration travelling up into the microphone and a removable fluffy windguard so it can be used outdoors

I used my recently bought headphones plugged into the audio output of the camera so I could hear everything the microphone was picking up. I'm always suprised by the intense sensitivity of the microphone. You can hear everything, from planes and vehicles going past to neighbours squabbling, cats meowing from the other side of the house and boilers running. If the microphone cables knock or drag then that is picked up as a loud noise. It's imperative to be as graceful as possible while holding the microphone, constantly being aware of the cables of the microphone and of the headphones, which are all plugging into the same area on the back of the camera so they do tend to tangle with one another and create noise. Then there is the camera itself, it's heavy and cumbersome and at times it was difficult to hold the camera, operate the microphone with care and also to keep an eye on the audio level meter which is on the camera body. It never became impossible but it was frequently tricky.

My favourite moments - standing with Dee in the sunny garden recording outdoor ambience. We took turns with the headphones and you could hear distant birdsong, rustling leaves, and bees buzzing past the microphone in flight. It was really beautiful. We weren't even recording at this point, we were just listening. I also loved recording the freezer - once the door was opened you could hear all of the ice shifting and crackling as the room temperature air mingled with the cold air. It sounded like being inside an iceberg. You can't hear it with the naked ear, but with the microphone it sounds amazing.

We got half the list recorded and uploaded. Next step is recording the rest of them, then getting the sounds into the short film.

I'll keep you posted!

Foley day! And where's my milk, you bastard?

2012-09-16T13:42:00.000+01:00

Let's open the blog post with a big reveal. The title of the long-gestating new project is:

Where's My Milk You Bastard?

I've got the first edit a little tighter. It's not quite ready for public consumption yet but it is getting a bit better with each pass. Now it's time to fill in all those audio gaps, which means...

Today is foley day! Dee and I will be arming ourselves with our trusty microphone and recording footsteps, fridges, ambient noises and background audio.

As for how I am going to capture the audio, I will be recording from the microphone directly into the camera as I have no separate sound recorder. I am going to dedicate one DV tape as my foley tape, which will always be used for this purpose on any future shoots. Re-recording over a DV tape can eventually cause the audio and visuals to creep apart and no longer run in time with one another, but as I am only recording audio I will likely leave the lens cap on for most of it, so I'm not too worried.

I should probably keep a separate foley folder for all the sounds I capture, some may get re-used for other projects.

You can actually buy or download a lot of these everyday sounds, but I prefer to capture my own. I am able to use the same equipment I capture dialogue with and choose the same settings, so that acoustically everything sounds in context. It's harder work, but it's satisfying and the end result should be better because of it. Plus I get to learn!

Wish us luck, we've got a long-ass list, hopefully we can get a fair bit done today.

Three sided football

2012-09-14T17:28:00.003+01:00

Well, the showreel was assembled but sadly the opportunity that lurked on the horizon has darted off into the distance for now, but never mind! While the current project slowly bubbles away in the background a new video-making opportunity has come knocking at my door.

Owen - friend, librarian, beard owner and all-round good guy - is a member of the team behind the Plumstead Make Merry festival. They also have a hand in other events such as the upcoming Three Sided Football tournament and it seems that the tournament is a great opportunity to get some video up on the website. It's also a great opportunity to answer the question: What the hell is three sided football?!

For those not familiar, three sided football is a game in which the typical "us against them" confrontational nature of two-sided football is replaced by a strange mix of game theory and tactical play. It is played on a hexagonal pitch with three goals and three teams.

The winner is not the team that scores the most goals, but the team that concedes the least. As one team starts to gain a lead on the other two teams, it is in those team's interest to team-up against the current leader. Allies become enemies become allies, with allegiances constantly switching as each team tries to keep the ball out of their own net. It's a fascinating concept and I can't wait to see a game in action. As a video project I imagine it will be a lot of fun to create and I'll be working closely with Owen at every stage to bring it together. We're going to film the tournament and also some talking heads so that we can not only show you the game, but also put it in context and explain how it works!

For more about the philisophical roots of the game, check the wikipedia page.

For now, it's time to crack on with the short film for Mark and Frazer, I need to finish that first! Ah, projects, so easy to start, so hard to finish! It never quite feels perfect.

Showreel... complete.

2012-08-31T11:37:00.002+01:00

It took me until 1:00am but I made my showreel and left it uploading overnight.

I awoke around 7:00 to find the upload complete, but the aspect ratio was out of whack so the video was letterboxed on all sides, argh. I made the necessary changes and reuploaded the file in the morning.

It's probably too late for the people who wanted to see it, but I've learned my lesson, I should always have a showreel ready to go. You never know when you're going to get an amazing short notice offer.

In all honesty this video isn't great as it was quickly hobbled together (if quick equals six hours) without access to a lot of the original files. I will take some time to craft a nice showreel for future opportunities. I tried to stick to the areas that were relevant to the project I was offered and I tried to keep it brief because, well, that's the idea, right?

So here it is. You've probably seen all this before.

I need a showreel...

2012-08-30T19:52:00.001+01:00

I've been contacted with a great opportunity to be involved in a project in late October. But I need a showreel to secure a position on the group and I need it... well, yesterday.

I had never planned for this eventuality.

Tonight I'm quickly putting together a showreel of my projects. It's not going to be great, I can tell ya that. I've also found that all my old projects, once finished, have had their original files deleted from the computer after a certain number of months to free up space for newer projects, so I don't have access to a lot of the original videos. I never thought I'd need them again and I needed the HD space. I still have the final exported self-contained files so all is not completely lost.

Well, let's get cracking and see what I can come up with.

Someone get the kettle on.