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One more step takes you down the rabbit hole.

Monday, April 11, 2011

Videos, Art, PROGRESS!

This "approximately two months between posts" thing is almost a pattern now, isn't it?

That sucks and is made of fail. I hate that I've let myself do that and I have every intention of making every effort to make sure it doesn't continue.

Anyway. On to actual news.

Item One:
I've got a regular gig now with a fellow called Tony. On his dime, I'm a title card artist for 3 Fat Guys and a podcaster with the Random Odds Oddcast. I've also been receiving and filling art commissions like a mad thing. Details on how to commission some art from me can be found here on my DeviantArt page, along with my most recent commissions in my gallery there.

And now, to the videos!

Item Two:
A brief April Fools joke!

When these four jokers posted a thread to the forums on thatguywiththeglasses.com about taking control of the site and making demands for certain props and characters related to various producers' shows, I though it would be a hilariously good opportunity to do a bit of casual screwing around with these folks. My video reply is the second entry on page 2 of the thread, or you can just click here. I do recommend teaching the whole thread, though, and watching the videos made by the first four guys. They're all very funny.


Item Three:
Where Is Doctor Steel??



I have been a memeber of Doctor Steel's army of Toy Soldiers since 2007. For those who are not familiar with this person -- he's a guy who plays a steampunk mad scientist character and makes hilarious videos and really fantastic music, all in character. Rather delightfully, in my opinion, nobody knows who this guy is outside of his Doctor Steel persona.

Part of his schtick is that he wants to take over the world, and his fans are organized into an "army" to help him do it. The Toy Soldiers actually do organize regular "invasions," mostly of conventions and occasionally of theme parks, where large numbers of them show up in costume and distribute "propaganda" related to Doctor Steel's vision of spreading creativity and building a utopian playland.

It's all quite silly, but at the same time, it's also quite inspiring. The thing is... while the good Doctor used to post regular videos to his YouTube account and update the forums and such, he's been AWOL for something between 9-11 months now, from anywhere he has ever officially posted material. He's just... gone.

Toy Soldier Ven is concerned about this. Yes, deeply concerned.

The character in that video is actually a character, and not me/"Ven." I have unofficially named that character Detective Jude Grimlin. I had originally intended to play the Somaturge for this video, but after twisting my hair up under my hat so only my red bangs were visible, I decided that was a really good look and played with it.

On a related note, my satisfaction with the look of the character happened to coincide with my discovery that an artist whose style I especially like on DeviantArt was open to doing commissions for a rate even lower than mine -- and her art is at least thrice the quality. So on a whim, I commissioned a picture of this character from her. This is the collection of screenshots I gave her as a reference. Some four or six hours later, she E-mailed me this:



Impressed. I am it. I mean... other people have drawn me. Other people have drawn me magnificently well and I'll probably do an entry on their stuff here eventually. But none of them have been quite on THIS level of astoundingly professional, clean quality.... not to mention having something this good done in SIX HOURS or so. Jeezus!!


THE TECHNICAL SHIT:
I'm still having issues with video quality, which annoys me. A lot. I'm pretty sure now that my camcorder doesn't actually take HD video... but I DO have it set to the highest quality it's capable of and MY WEBCAM STILL TAKES BETTER VIDEO. This is pissing me off. I'm probably going to sell this piece of shit and try to save up for a proper HD camera. I believe my still-camera is able to take HD video, but I don't think I have enough ,emory on that thing to record for very long, plus there's no way for me to see myself if I stick it on a tripod and try to film myself. I blew 2 hours on testing distances from that thing to see if I could record with it before I decided it just was not worth the effort. I don't have that kind of time to spend testing the angle and distance I have to be from the camera every time I film myself on it. Frustrating.

But aside from video quality issues, at least my AUDIO is fine. Mostly. I'm aware that it might be a bit loud on the Doctor Steel video. The thing is, that audio wasn't recorded in one take. That's at least six different audio files, attached to dozens of video clips, transitions, effects, text, and background audio. I just couldn't quite figure out a good way to get all of it balanced at a lower volume, so I figured... you morons have volume controls on your computers, use them. :P

The podcast for Random Odds is the major audio thing I'm doing right now. It took us three attempts to record our first podcast due to none of us knowing how to use the recording software and messing it up twice beyond any ability to fix. HOWEVER, our first interview with Linkara from Atop the 4th Wall apparently went well and will be posted soon.... Tony, sadly, was stricken by food poisoning which prevented us from getting anything done this week. We also have another interview with Doug and Rob walker, two founders of thatguywiththeglasses.com, scheduled for late May or early June, which is exciting as hell. And by then at least we'll know how to make sure we're recording. XD

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