Archive Page 2
Screen Testing
We’ve been doing some screen testing for a new movie we’re developing. As you can see from the picture it’s a romantic comedy set deep in the South American Congo. It’s amazing how hard it is to find good full-sized anaconda’s in Second Life. But anyway, the film is tentatively scheduled for completion sometime in January – good thing I didn’t say which year.
Filed under: Sci-fi, Second Life, film-making, machinima | Leave a Comment
Free Movie Music
Moby is offering some of his music to student and independent film-makers for free just as long as it’s not-for-profit. Even for commercial work you can apply for – what he calls – an easy licence with any money generated going to the humane society. While I haven’t tried to obtain a licence yet the music is absolutely awesome – as you can usually expect from Moby. Check it out at Moby Gratis.
Filed under: Music, business, film-making | Leave a Comment
A Matter of Trust
Recently we had a potential client come to us through an unusual source. While it’s nice to be able to expand our client base the source of it created a potential problem: trust.
There is always a problem with trusting a new client. Just as they have a problem with trusting you. Until the relationship is established and there is a successful and mutually beneficial consideration both sides are somewhat wary. Many clients think that only they are at risk when entering into a transaction, but those who have been in business know the contractor also runs the risk. That goes double for freelancers and it multiplies again every time a client fails to pay. After a while you start to get a nose for the dodgy ones. It’s not foolproof by any measure but it’s close.
One of the ways we tell is how they came to choose us. Usually this is a referral or as a result of our advertising. There are lots of other ways but if you’re pleading for contractors on an obscure and unrelated forum, while claiming to be a big-player in the industry, then we’re going to be a little suspicious. Then there is what they want, and how they plan to achieve it. If they want the world – 5 camera coverage of a 2 hour show 3 times per week – then it starts to raise alarm bells. Especially if they believe a fair price is in the tens rather than the tens of thousands per week. Finally, there is how they behave. Especially around others. If a potential client introduces us to others as ‘our video guy’, while we’re still negotiating (or, as happened recently, before the job was even discussed) that’s usually another red-flag.
That doesn’t mean that we won’t do a 5 camera coverage of a 2 hour show 3 times per week for someone that pleaded on our blog while referring to us as their video guy. It just means that we’ll be wary and we’ll do some checking as to your bona fides. To see if you are in fact the Vice-President of a major recording label. And if you check out and accept our price then cool, we’re only too happy to do business with you. But if, like this new potential client, our search shows major discrepancies then chances are we’ll deem you too much of a risk. Sorry.
BTW all those are real world examples from the last 6 months.
Filed under: First Life, business, film-making, rant | Leave a Comment
Movember – My first six days
Please sponsor me by clicking the picture. My number is: 71709.
Filed under: First Life, Misc, Second Life, charity, movember | Leave a Comment
Movember
I’m doing Movember this year, and while I don’t expect to be able to equal the vibrissa growths of those closer to the simian tree roots than I, I do hope to be able to raise a few bucks for a very worthwhile cause. If you’d like to sponsor us, then pop over to here. Rego number is 71709. All donations over $2 are tax deductible. We’re also looking for team members – both boys and girls – so if you’re interested leave a comment and I’ll forward you the details.
Filed under: First Life, Misc, charity, movember | Leave a Comment
Where’s The Respect?
In case you’re wondering why there hasn’t been anything posted here since July it is because we’ve been busy. Most of what we’ve been doing lately is under NDA so I can’t reveal any details, but I can tell you about a tale of woe and major crapworthiness.
It’s mid-August and we were called in to do a 30-sec commercial for a vendor. The brief was brief – exceedingly brief: make a viral video about the vendor to be distributed via YouTube and the other usual suspects. Fine. It was a rush job. A week to write the script, get it authorised, and then film, edit and deliver. More time is better but it was doable. We were promised a quick turnaround on the authorisation.
An hour later we delivered the script and then waited 3 days for a response. Apparently the employees of this particular company don’t seem to work on weekends (or Fridays for that matter) even when there is a tight-deadline. The response was negative. It was too naughty for the brand. So we tried again – quickly writing 2 more scripts and delivering them. Another couple of days and once again the response was negative. It seems they didn’t want a viral video after all. They wanted a traditional commercial. Fine. So we wrote them one, delivered it and they then promptly disappeared for close to a week. Do the maths and you’ll see by now the original URGENT ‘must-do’ deadline has been shot to pieces.
They eventually get back to us and say that the client doesn’t like the script and that they’re going to write the ad themselves with the client. Fine. No problem there. Probably should have been done like that to begin with. Occasionally they ask us for information and we supply it.
About four weeks later they deliver the script to us. It’s banal. It has no conflict. And it’s clear that whoever wrote it has never spent time in Secondlife. But they’re the ones that are paying so they get to call the shots. The project gets greenlit. The deadline is a week away.
It takes me 2 days to scout the locations and do the storyboards and I tell them if we’re to meet the deadline they need to authorise the storyboards and make any changes by the close of business that day. Any later and it becomes problematic because of all the sfx that the shoot will require. Close of business and no reponse. I decide to go ahead anyway because otherwise we definitiely won’t make the deadline if we wait another day (or two – it’s the weekend after all).
I hire the cast and do the rest of the pre-production and prepare to shoot in two days time. 48 hours after the storyboard deadline has passed they deliver a long list of changes. Most are cosmetic, but there are some major changes too. One of the major changes is location. The script required a special need and it took me most of a day to find the one we had. They hadn’t offered an alternative so any change would mean a miss on the deadline. I informed them of this and rather than wait around another day or two for a response I continued work.
Since the project has been greenlit I’ve been asking for a copy of the vendor, so I can film it. It’s not until the day before I’m due to shoot I receive it. I test it myself and everything works fine. Or so I thought.
Shooting day comes and there are a couple of hitches. There always is on a shoot. One of the stars is unavoidably detained for 30 minutes and SL Voice has died a horrible death. It’s the latter that poses the biggest obstacle. Having to rely on text slows a shoot to about 10% the speed it does when using voice. But nonetheless we soldier on.
It takes us a couple of hours but we shoot everything we need right up to the point where the actors need to interact with the vendor. Problem is that the vendor doesn’t work. It still works for me, but anybody else it delivers a script error. Unfortunately this means that we can’t shoot anymore until that problem is fixed. We call it quits and I go deliver the bad news. It is now 4 days until the deadline.
It takes them nearly 20 hours to respond and another 10 or so to deliver a solution. I manage to arm-twist my stars into being available for a reshoot that night. Unfortunately the support cast is unavailable and there’s no time to recruit others. We do without. We shoot.
Nearly 4 hours later we’re done. Most of it went well but the ending requires some flying work. After an hour of shooting on location we have about 5 seconds of usable footage and there are problems also with the greenscreen flying sequences. But we don’t have time to waste, I’ll come up with something, so I edit until the early hours of the morning cutting together a rough cut. Then I crash.
First thing the next morning I’m back at it. It slowly comes together and it looks quite good. But the flying sequences are a problem. I can work a solution but it doesn’t match the script. Unfortunately there’s no time to reshoot, and I spend the rest of the day doing the sfx and then delivering the draft. I send a note explaining the problem with the flying, and then crash again.
It is the day of the deadline and my morning email is filled with complaints. One of the complaints is about the flying sequence but there’s nothing I can do. However, the major complaint is about the colour of one of the minor attachments that one of the avatars is required to wear. In the video it is black. They insist it must be white – but completely failed to specify that in the script, pre-production notes or storyboard response. They demand I change it. I tell them fine, but I need to reshoot the entire video (the attachment is seen throughout) thus missing the ‘must-do’ deadline – ie. today.
While waiting for a response I make all the minor changes they request, clean up the edit and output the final video. When they do respond they seem resolved to the inevitable so I send them the final video.
Now that should have been the end of it, but it isn’t. 24 hours after I sent the video I get two emails. The first stating that there is a problem with the video and the second telling me to ignore the first email and everything is a-ok. Even that should be the end, but it isn’t. Next morning I awake to ‘IT DOESN’T WORK’ as the subject line in my email inbox. I contact them and find out the details. It seems that it does work for my liaison, but the others can’t seem to download it from the site. I’m not much good at tech support – especially on sites I don’t control – but I suggest that he copy the file from his computer and give it to the others. It seems that none of the two-hundred or so people (no exaggeration) that spent 20 hours attempting to work a solution came up with that.
Now the story kinda ends there. Or it would if it weren’t for the fact that a week later it emerges that the end-client isn’t happy and wants a reshoot. So it seems the ‘must-do’ deadline wasn’t so must-do after all. This nearly 2 months after the original deadline. So the question is, why would anyone fuck around their clients and sub-contractors that way?
So that’s the story. Or part of it. Of course it’s missing the parts about the music and more about the vendors and a few other juiceys, but it provides you with some of the reasons why we’ve been absent here recently. Of course the good thing about the story is that we were too busy to do the reshoot so someone else has to deal with them now. I wish them luck.
Filed under: Second Life, business, commercial, machinima, rant | Leave a Comment
Finally we’ve put together a promo for ourselves.
Filed under: Second Life, business, commercial, film-making, machinima | Leave a Comment
The Sun Never Sets
A friend of mine asked me to make her some video art for her Secondlife gallery. I’ve been wanting to do some Secondlife machinima drama because frankly I’ve never ever seen it done before. There are loads of comedies, road films, documentaries and the like but never any drama.So I thought it was high time that I did one. Two birds, one stone sort of thing.
So we’ve done a drama, but in keeping with the artistic requirements of our friend we’ve made is quite avant-garde and while it is drama it it’s actually more of a soap opera. But don’t let that deter you. It’s fun.
Please enjoy The Sun Never Sets.
Filed under: Second Life, art, avant-garde, machinima | Leave a Comment
Today I chose to submit Mine! to Revver. I’ve had one film there for about a year but frankly didn’t feel it was worthwhile uploading any others. I don’t think much of their revenue model nor the number of hits they were generating. So what’s the point? But, on a whim, I thought what the hell and uploaded my 20-second action film anyway. Foolish me.
Of course after you’ve uploaded your film it goes to a ’so-called’ human reviewer. This is different from when I last used Revver. There was no reviewer. It was like Youtube or Blip.tv. You uploaded and once the conversion was completed the vid was live. But, oh how things have changed.
I’d been warned that the review could take up to 24 hours, so I went and did other stuff before returning to discover this in my inbox:
Dear skribe,
Your video “Mine!” was rejected because our reviewers found it to be in violation of the Revver Member Agreement, which prohibits users from uploading hateful content. For more info on content upload guidelines, please review this section <http://one.revver.com/go/tou#17> of our Member Agreement.
If you have any questions or feel this video has been rejected in error, please respond to this email.
Visit the Revver blog for updates – http://blog.revver.com
The Revver Team
review@revver.com
Now, I’ve tried thinking of ways that Mine! could be hateful, and the only thing I could come up with is that it casts emo boys in a bad light. After all, the boy needs to be rescued by his girlfriend.
What do you think?
Filed under: Second Life, machinima | 4 Comments
Who’s Envoy?
A few days ago I joined up to Second Citizen and part of the sign up process involves making an introductory post. So as part of my intro I said I was a kickass machinima maker. Well shortly after my post went live somebody by the name of Envoy Costagravas wrote back (as a joke) that he could make a kickass wooden cube and that I shouldn’t get cocky. Well, it’s a little late for that sort of advice so I wrote back (also in jest), that only I could make it look good. He replied doubting that assertion.
So I decided to prove him wrong. All in good fun.
What do you think? Have I succeeded?
Filed under: Second Life, commercial, machinima, spoof | Leave a Comment
