The Blog of Glen Moyes

Jazz Jackrabbit Review and Documentary

2011-10-01T13:21:00.001-06:00

I found out about this video by way of Jazz2Online (yes, I do still keep tabs on some of my nostalgia). It's a documentary by Lazy Game Reviews about Jazz Jackrabbit, a video game that was quite possibly the most influential piece of my pre-adulthood.

And yes, I own a Gravis Gamepad too.

Jazz Jackrabbit is the game that got me into music composition while I was in Junior High School. That was the start of my creative endeavors, which eventually led to creative writing, illustration, and finally starting our company Lumaglyph. Jazz Jackrabbit isn't my favorite game of all time (that honor goes to Descent), but it is certainly the defining moment that pushed my life in the direction it is going today.

So how did Jazz Jackrabbit lead me to music composition? For one the music in the game rocked. In retrospect it was probably a combination of the music, setting and characters that made me love playing the game (it certainly wasn't the gameplay). At the time my brothers were really into the demo scene, so I knew about Scream Tracker and I used it to listen to sound modules (a music file format). After buying the game I read in the manual that they used Scream Tracker to compose the music! Wait. You can use Scream Tracker to actually compose music? I had no idea! After that I started learning Scream Tracker like crazy, and started making my own songs, many of them had samples from the Jazz Jackrabbit soundtrack. That's what started it all.

The video does a good job talking about the video game and the history behind it. At the 12:50 minute mark the video features a clip of the soundtrack. So if you want to quickly hear what got me into music composition, that's what did it.

If you are wondering after reading this why I don't compose music anymore, the short answer is that I'm a better artist than musician, and I've found that every hobby I've ever had always had story telling as the root of it. Every song I wrote was based on a story in my head. Every doodle I did was based some story that I had in my head. Even my game designs ended up being more about the story as opposed to the gameplay. I realized that I liked writing stories more, and illustration seemed to be the best way to do it.

Also there are flaws with how I learned music as opposed to learning art, which prevented me from becoming a better composer. But that's a topic I might write about later.

Fixing Wacom Driver Problems in Windows 7

2010-09-16T16:42:00.001-06:00

Just a quick post about my adventures/misadventures in Windows 7. There's been reports about problems with the Wacom drivers not working after restarting Windows 7, and I've ran into it as well. When going to the Wacom Tablet Properties it'll show a scary message saying, "THE TABLET DRIVER WAS NOT FOUND." This happened to me on my Cintiq 12WX. Reinstalling the driver made it work again, but once I restarted it stopped working. I researched a fix for the issue but it was either too complicated for me to bother trying or didn't work at all.

This behavior began about a month after I installed Windows 7, and I think playing around with the tablet PC features in Windows 7 (which, by the way, has really good handwriting recognition), may have been what caused it, like Windows 7 was taking over the tablet driver or something.

Anyway, suspecting that Windows 7's Tablet PC stuff was causing the problem I tried this and it fixed the problem:

Reinstall the Wacom driver again so the tablet works (no need to uninstall the driver, in fact I'm not even sure if this step is actually necessary).
Load msconfig
Go to the Services tab.
Find the "Tablet PC Input Service" (sorting the services alphabetically may help you find it easier) and then hit the checkbox to disable it.
Restart Windows 7.
Tablet should work!

Of course if you actually use the Tablet PC features in Windows 7 then this won't be the fix for you, but it's straightforward and got rid of the offending service.

The Difference a Preamp Makes

2010-08-21T22:08:00.002-06:00

Or to put it another way: Making a free internal sound card record like a $150 sound card.

This blog post is about achieving good audio recording as cheaply as possible, so I'm going to kick it off with an audio file so you can actually hear the difference that I'm talking about.

Here's the story.
I don't use a headset to talk to people on the computer; those things are uncomfortable and the audio quality sucks.

For the longest time I used a dynamic mic (which was the Shure PG58), attached to a tripod stand, and the mic plugs into my Sound Blaster Audigy 2 ZS Platinum, which has a 1/4 TRS jack socket and a built-in preamp which did a great job at recording my voice (compared to the headset). Over the many years I've used it to record video tutorials and recently I've been using that microphone constantly on Skype writing for Hackberry Hollow.

A few weeks ago I bought a new computer. The computer that I've been using (the one that was bought to power the Touch the Table project) started to die. And actually my timing was impeccable because 4 days after I built my new computer the old computer died completely, forcing me to move all my work over to the new computer.

But I wasn't going to move my Audigy over to my new computer. So what's the problem?

Creative Labs went down the tubes.
The reason why that's a problem is because A) the sound card is really old and has already been in 2 computers so far, so it's probably going to kick the bucket soon anyway, B) a while back I noticed that their most recent drivers were more annoying to use and were also more buggy, so I ended up installing the old drivers I had on the CD instead, and C) there was the Daniel_K incident from two years back. (The short version is that Creative Lab's Phil O’Shaughnessy admitted that their company intentionally crippled its Vista drivers as a business strategy, Daniel_K modded the drivers so they would work in Vista, and then Creative Labs went after the modder), and since I'm trying to get an Audigy to run on Windows 7, that could be an even bigger problem. Yes, it's possible that they've gotten their act together since then, however I haven't heard anyone recommend Creative Lab cards recently. I suppose the point is that I'd rather not risk put my trust in a company to have good driver support on 64-bit Windows 7 for hardware that is seven years old.

Why not get a new sound card, like an M-Audio one for example?
I've been a big fan of M-Audio's products. They are great for multi-track recording (very good actually), but their cards are specialized for music production and don't have some of the consumer-grade features I was wanting. For example there's no green, black and orange 3.5 mm TRS jacks for surround sound speakers, or even headphone jacks for that matter (it is expected that you have a mixer and are using speakers to monitor your sound).

I can use one sound card for recording and another for playback, but having two soundcards on a computer can be a big pain. Music production software has no problem with it, but in the past I've had big problems with your normal everyday Windows programs sending sound to the wrong device, even when the default device is set properly.

Also, since I've decided a year ago that I won't pick up music composition for a while (maybe when I retire as an artist/writer), a pro M-Audio sound card is not on my priority list. However I do want to record good clean sound because I still do video tutorials and the occasional podcast, and of course I use Skype all the time, so having crisp sound would help there too.

What about USB microphones?
I've been impressed with the USB microphones actually, even though I originally scoffed at the concept. The Samson mics are pretty good, but I need to monitor my voice as I talk because I do occasionally wear headphones—those big headphones that cup around your ears and are affectionately refereed to as cans. I need to be able to hear my voice through the headphones when recording videos and podcasts to make sure I'm not breathing into the mic, that the volumes is right, and to shut out noises that could otherwise be coming out of my speakers.

The problem with wearing these kinds of headphones is that they are so big and comfy they block out all other sound that is not coming from your headphones, including your own voice. If you'd like to know why that is a problem, talk with your hands pressed against your ears, and that's what it sounds like when you talk wearing those headphones. It is surprisingly hard to talk if you can't year your own voice.

Monitoring your voice with a USB mic may not be possible, and you can't have any latency (sound delay) because that's more annoying than not being able to hear my voice at all. I will note that the Samson G Track USB microphone does have a headphone jack for no-latency monitoring that addresses that issue, but it does have another issue that I'll get into later.

Since I'm the A/V guy for Animation Nation it would be nice to have a microphone that doesn't have to be plugged into a computer to work. So a USB mic was out.

Plus they are more expensive than normal mics because they are basically a condenser mic and USB audio interface in one.

So I still needed to come up with a solution for my picky recording needs.

The solution: buy a preamp.
Simple, right? The core problem with plugging a microphone into your computer (or anything else for that matter) is that you need a preamp to amplify the sound being recorded from your mic. You know how you have to turn on the 10 dB boost for your headset microphone to work? In the case of a nicer microphone like mine, even a 30 dB boost isn't enough. However, with a preamp you don't have to do that; it'll be full power like plugging your MP3 player into your computer or car using the line-in jack; the audio comes in loud and clean.

After reading some reviews on Zzounds (which is the best online store ever for music/audio gear) I picked the M-Audio AudioBuddy preamp because it hardly introduces any noise into the signal, it's a brand that I trust, and was the best bang-for-your-buck selling for $60. If nothing else I can still use the preamp for Animation Nation Night, allowing me to add a second microphone to our speaker system.

I got it in the mail, plugged it in, and heard the results. Here's what was stunning. There wasn't any audible background noise. Where did it go? I could have sworn I could always hear the noise that—I assumed—was from the fans in my computer running in the background. Maybe it was the new mic? I tried my old one. Same thing. No background noise.

I had some recordings from video tutorials that I used to compare my Audigy with its preamp, and the internal Realtek soundcard with the new M-Audio external preamp. The difference was night and day. My internal Realtek sound card, the one that is integrated into the motherboard, the sound card that I got for free sounded better than my Audigy, a $200 sound card (which I also got for free but that's another story). And the preamp has the added benifit of letting me quickly mute my microphone by pushing the power button on the preamp.

So as it turns out my Audigy's preamp wasn't very good at all, and the recording quality with the integrated Realtek cards isn't bad provided that you don't use their 10-30 dB boost option either.

Adapter plugs and the mic only coming in the left channel.
This will be pretty obvious when you do this, but you'll need an adapter to plug the microphone into your computer. Microphones generally have an XLR connector, and many microphones come with a free XLR to 1/4 TS cable (1/4 TS is the standard cable used for audio equipment, like mixers and amps.) So you'll need to get a 1/4 TS (mono) female to 3.5 mm TRS (stereo) male adapter so you can plug that into the microphone port on your computer. The one I bought was the Hosa Technology GMP-386.

I just happened to have had a 1/4 TRS (stereo) to 3.5 mm TRS (stereo) adapter lying around, so I used that initially. It worked but when I was monitoring my voice it was only coming out of the left speaker. (This is also a problem with the Samson G Track USB microphone, and since it uses a USB connector you can't fix the problem with an adapter. Yet another reason why I decided not to get a USB mic.) The one-channel issue is a little annoying to work with. It doesn't interfer with voice communication (like Skype, etc.) but it does when I monitor my voice, and can be a pain during audio editing if I recorded a track in stereo. So that's why I got the mono to stereo version of that adapter (and a mono to mono one as well just to see what would happen, and that adapter gave the same unsatisfactory left-channel-only results).

The drawback with the mono to stereo adapter is that the volume gets cut (per channel) because it's splitting the signal strength between the two channels, which makes sense of course. In my experiments however, recording mono tracks in my software brings both channels together to the original signal strength anyway, so in the end it's not a problem.

Conclusion
If you want to record great quality sound on that integrated Realtek sound card, all you need is a $60 preamp, a $60 microphone (or that $130 Audix OM3 that I just bought, which only has slightly better sound quality because it's not as bassy as the Shure PG58), and that will let you record some great quality voice work with it.

I will add though that getting a sound card, like the M-audio one, should have a much better signal to noise ratio over the Realtek sound card. So if you are serious (and I'm not that serious), the M-Audio cards are probably always the better option, and you won't have to buy an external preamp (which in total would only cost $60 more or so).

News Flash: Klok 2 released

2010-05-15T20:44:00.003-06:00

Klok 2 just barely got released! Go download it at getklok.com.

Previous articles about Klok:

Dynamic Range Day 2010

2010-03-20T00:14:00.003-06:00

Just so you know, today is Dynamic Range Day.

Music is getting louder - and sounding worse.

Over the past 20 years, the recording and mastering of recorded music has been increasingly plagued by an industry-wide practice of making recordings as loud as possible, while crushing any dynamics contained in the original performance.

The result is music that sounds flat, two-dimensional, distorted, and is exhausting to listen to.

This self-defeating race to be "louder" than anyone else has become known as the Loudness Wars. You can read more about it at Wikipedia - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Loudness_war - or see an example at YouTube - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3Gmex_4hreQ .

Well... March 20th 2010 is Dynamic Range Day !

This is our chance to fight back and raise awareness.

Massively Useful Software (follow up): Klok

2010-02-18T13:37:00.003-07:00

Did you know that Klok has a beta program? Neither did I until today. Sure you can download a beta version but it's not the current version of the software. Thank goodness because I've been using the public beta for a year and with no software updates I was worried that the project was dead. Luckily I found frequent and recent posts about Klok on their Twitter page and blog.

You can be a part of the beta program my making a donation (anything greater than $0). I of course donated because as you might have read on my original post on Klok last year, Klok is totally worth using!

Quick update: Hackberry Hollow (and other stuff too)

2010-01-18T17:59:00.006-07:00

Just checking and reminding everyone that Hackberry Hollow is still in steady production. Here's some recent concept art, showing a sneak peak of Chapter 1. Be sure to check out the blog for more concept art and updates on the project.

Yes, I haven't been posting on my personal blog very much, but we do post on the Hackberry Hollow blog every Tuesday without fail, and the content is far more interesting. So subscribe to the RSS feed to get updates on what I'm working on.

We're all extremely excited about the project. We got the story nailed and the script is being written (we are almost done with the first volume out of five). The reactions to the script have been overwhelmingly positive, so we definitely feel that we have a winner and can't wait to get this project released.

The Animation Academy
About 5 months ago I enrolled into The Animation Academy down in Burbank for character design classes and wow, has it been a big help. Also today is The Animation Academy's 12 birthday, so that's pretty cool.

Massively Useful Software
I've been using LyX for most of my word processing needs recently. It creates beautifully typeset PDF documents with table of contents, indexes, and so on. I've been using it for my personal and production journals, and it saves them in the TeX format so they'll be readable forever.

I may do a full post on it eventually but I figured I'd at least make a quick mention of it now. It really is a nice piece of software for making multi-page text documents like books.

Massively Useful Software: nLite and ntfsclone

2009-08-14T18:06:00.006-06:00

I recently reinstalled Windows onto my computer, a ritual that I have done for years to keep my operating system running nicely thanks to Windows bit rot. I usually do it about once a year, in this case it's been two so it really needed a fresh install. The problems with regularly reinstalling Windows are downloading and installing all of the updates, which takes forever since my original Windows XP Pro disc is Service Pack 1. Luckily there's software that makes the process easier.

nLite
I wish I knew about this program earlier. nLite is an easy to use application that allows you to make a backup copy of your Windows install disc, slipstream the service pack and updates into the Windows install (google for the Windows XP Service Pack 3 Network Installation Package for IT Professionals and Developers; it's an EXE file that nLite will ask for to do that), install drivers such as my SATA drivers that I needed to install Windows on something other than my old soon-to-fail IDE hard drive, and then finally burn the new customized Windows install disc as a bootable CD or DVD.

ntfsclone
Another useful program is ntfsclone. It's a command-line Linux program that can clone an NTFS partition to a single file as a backup. This is useful because now I have a disk image of a fresh Windows install, so I don't have to reinstall Windows if I want a fresh system. It's also a nice way to make save-states for full system recoveries just in case something bad happens, or if I decide to—um, experiment, and want a way to recover my system if I screw something up.

Speaking of fresh installs, I'm adding a new series to the blog.

Massively ANNOYING Software: Adobe Product Activation

For the love of all that is holy, BE SURE TO DEACTIVATE YOUR ADOBE SOFTWARE BEFORE YOU WIPE YOUR HARD DRIVE!

This is the second time I've reinstalled Windows while having CS3 installed on it. Remember how the Adobe license only lets you install the Adobe Suite onto two different computers? Yeah. This was the third time I tried to install CS3, and both times prior I forgot to deactivate the Adobe software before completely wiping my hard drive. It never crossed my mind.

So, add that to your reinstall ritual. When you are making sure that all of your files are backed up, load up any Adobe program, then go to Help > Deactivate before you reinstall Windows. Otherwise be prepared to be on the line with Adobe Customer Support with a good excuse. Luckily I was able to activate over the phone, but boy was that a pain; having to call and ask permission to use my software.

Sadly this is not limited to Adobe. Other software/media that requires online activation to keep track of how many computers you've installed it on may also require you to deactivate it as well. So keep that in mind and tell the folks at Adobe to read this article because seriously, activating and deactivating software is a pain.

Lumaglyph Project: Hackberry Hollow

2009-05-07T14:33:00.003-06:00

You know that top secret Lumaglyph project I've been mentioning recently? Well, it's not a secret anymore. Here's the announcement.

Hackberry Hollow is our first internal project at Lumaglyph, and we've recently launched the site at HackberryHollow.com. We set up a blog so we can post new concept art and other cool stuff as the project develops. The blog is updated every Tuesday afternoon.

We've been writing the story for about a year now. Both Adam and I are really excited with how the story has developed, and so far everyone we've shared it with loves it. Now that we have a solid outline for the story we are going into high gear working on the concept art. So be sure to subscribe to the Hackberry Hollow RSS feed for updates on my new work.

Here's some of the artwork I've posted so far.

So that's what we've been working on: Hackberry Hollow.

Visit the site, post comments on the artwork, and soon we'll have an epic webcomic for you to read.

Massively Useful Software: Gobby

2009-04-26T12:59:00.003-06:00

Celtx is a great and all for writing stories, but when it comes to online collaborative writing our team uses Gobby. Gobby allows multiple people to work on the same text file at the same time. You don't have to designate one person as the scribe. You don't have to take turns. You can type where ever you want when ever you want, and any text you insert will be highlighted with your user color, so you always know who wrote what.

Gobby was created with programmers in mind, so it features line numbering, auto indenting, and syntax highlighting. As writers we ignore those features except for the line numbering. Our text documents can get quite long and it's easy to say "look at line 2053," because they can press Ctrl-I and enter that line number in to zip them to the same line you're looking at.

The user highlighting has also been useful for us to tag sections that need attention with bright red or some other obnoxious color that you can't possibly miss. We just open up a new instance of Gobby, log in as another user, change the highlight color for that user to something obnoxious, and off you go. One of the text documents we are working on with Gobby is the outline for our previously top secret Lumaglyph project (I'll make the announcement for that in a week or two) that is currently over 2000 lines long. To give you an idea about how long that is, a paragraph still counts as one line, and our outline would be 72 pages long if we printed it out. So needless to say that the line numbering and creating multiple users with loud highlighting colors has been a godsend in helping us work with gigantic text documents.

Even though Gobby has no rich text support or undo (be sure to save often!), it has still been a great tool in helping us collaborate in real time on the same document even though we are all in different states. And even if we were in the same room we'd still use Gobby; it's simply that useful.

For those that are curious, there are alternatives to Gobby out there that we have looked at. EtherPad is a web app that works a lot like Gobby, but if you are concerned about having your work unencrypted on their server you may want to use something else, but EtherPad does have undo! SubEthaEdit has some nice features like showing what area of the document a user is currently looking at on the scroll bar, but unfortunately it's OSX only and costs money too. Mozilla Labs is working on a new web based editor called Bespin that has a really slick and promising interface, and a lot of neat features that are definitely geared for programmers. That might be a project to keep an eye on as it's still very experimental at the moment. MoonEdit is also worth a mention (Windows and Linux only, free for non-commercial use).

But out of all the alternatives out there, Gobby has worked the best for us. It works on Windows, Linux and OSX (however getting it to work in OSX is a huge pain), Gobby is encrypted over the internet, password authentication is supported, and it's free and open source.

The Triad of Collaborative Writing
As with all real-time text editors, voice chat and secure online storage for your work is still a necessity. We use Skype for voice chat and our own MediaWiki server for storing and organizing information about all our projects. The wiki has been, and still is, the keystone of our collaborative work. The best way to explain how we use the wiki for this particular project is that it's a series bible, filled full of backstory, character profiles, a milieu encyclopedia, and of course the outline and scripts, all cross linked to each other and full of reference and original images, just like Wikipedia (in fact Wikipedia runs on MediaWiki). Our Gobby documents are done in wiki code so that we can copy and paste them right into the wiki so these documents are easy to find and read.

We originally used Gobby for taking meeting notes during our brainstorming sessions, which we would then copy and paste into a new meeting notes page in the wiki to be sorted sometime later (usually weeks later). When we did finally get around to that, we'd go through all our meeting notes and sort them into the wiki, making new wiki pages as necessary. It was pretty tedious. Now, this happened during the initial brainstorming phase of the project, so everything was kind of a mess in terms of categorization anyway. But when we came to the point where our main focus was the outline, we were working in Gobby pretty much most of the time, and usually with just 2 documents in the Gobby session: one document for our outline and then the other for our random notes, which we could then sort directly into the outline or into the various pages on the wiki. With those smaller non-outline related notes we'd often make those changes directly in the wiki. Once we started doing that process our lives became easier and we spent more and more of our time just writing and coming up with ideas. We save the Gobby session locally on our computers so we can keep all the user highlighting until we are ready to clean the slate again. And we've made an aggreement to not edit the outline on the wiki because of all this.

Conclusion
Until Celtx—or even better MediaWiki, once they've added a few more dream features of ours—ever gets around to implementing real-time collaboration, Gobby is the best solution we've found as writers working together online.

What I've Been Playing: Braid

2009-04-12T18:24:00.002-06:00

A couple of days ago Braid was finally released on Steam. I bought it, played it and enjoyed everything about it: the puzzles, the art, and especially the story telling mechanic in the last level.

I had already decided to buy the game long before because Jonathan Blow always gives such good talks on game design, so I was more than happy to send money his way as soon as a PC version was available. Anyway, check the game out. A free demo is already out in the wild so you can it a whirl.

News Flash: Celtx 2.0 Released

2009-03-03T09:40:00.003-07:00

Celtx 2.0 was released this past week. For going from 1.0 to 2.0, Celtx doesn't have a whole lot of new features. The two big changes are Celtx Studio, which is their $50 yearly subscription version of Project Central with a free beta until March 24, and the ability to add Extensions/Add-Ons to Celtx, which I'm really excited about.

Photoshop Brush and Tool Presets 2009.03

2009-03-01T20:53:00.005-07:00

You'll be hearing a lot more about illustration from me in the future as our project develops, and to kick it off here's the brushes I use for most of my illustration work. I didn't include any of my special brushes for things like trees and water; most of those brushes are created on a per-project basis and I only ever used them once, although I did go ahead and include my fur brush. Anyway, these are the brushes I use all the time.

Glen Moyes 2009.03 Brush Presets – 85MB
Glen Moyes 2009.03 Tool Presets – 85MB

Here they are in action.

Many of these brushes have a narrow tip like a calligraphy brush, and they use the pen tilt of the stylus to rotate the brush tip, so you really need an Wacom Intuos tablet or better to take advantage of these brushes. I'll get into the advantages of a narrow brush tip when I start doing video tutorials on painting with Photoshop.

I've provided a Tool Preset and Brush Preset file for these brushes. You should download both so you can use the Brushes Presets for all the Photoshop tools that use brushes (like the eraser and stamp tool), and the Tool Presets so certain brushes will already have the correct flow amount set so they work properly, and so you can have the Tool Presets window up easily access brushes and the special smear brush Water Color Blender brush which has become my favorite next to the Nupastel brush.

Speaking of the Nupastel brush, that brush is the one largely responsible for the 85MB file size. The nupastel texture is huge, scanned at 1200ppi so you can increase the texture size of that brush to fill the canvas with big chunky texture without blurring. I thought about decreasing the texture size for public release but that would be doing the nupastel brush a disservice. Many of the other brushes have overscanned textures as well, like the graphite textures which are 600ppi, so you can scale them up for different effects. The texture scale for each brush is set so that if your document is set to 300ppi the texture will be to scale, so adjust the texture size accordingly.

Another unusual thing you'll see about this set are the symbols I used for the brush names. I had a really hard time trying to find brushes with names like "Acrylic - Round - Sketchpaper" among similarly named brushes with no dividers and all sorted alphabetically. So I numbered them, found some high-bit characters to use as shapes to replace words like big, round, light, hard, rough, and put a big divider between each section (which if you do happen to click on brings up a generic caligraphy brush). The symbols are pretty self explanatory—to me anyway. They do help finding the brush you want.

I'll be updating the brushes as I create more in the future.

Note to Windows XP Users
I recently did a reinstall of my computer and I noticed a potential problem for Windows XP users (not sure if this problem applies to Vista).

If you load the brushes into Photoshop, the high-bit characters may not display properly; they'll appear as boxes instead. To fix this, you need to go to your Control Panel > Regional and Language Options > Languages (tab) > and check the two check boxes for "Install files for complex script and right-to-left languages (including Thai)" and "Install files for East Asian languages." You may only need one of those installed, so if you want to experiment go for it. For some reason that fixes the problem, and upon reboot (or for me two reboots because Windows Explorer crashed out of the gate the first time) the high-bit characters will show up.

Massively Useful (Life Changing) Software: Klok

2009-02-22T21:21:00.010-07:00

EDIT: This article has a follow up post about the beta program that was written a year later.

And yes, I do mean life changing.

Ever wonder how much time you actually spend on a project? If you bid a 40 hour project are you really sure it's going to take that long? How much time does each stage of the project take? How many hours do you spend emailing the client? What about other activities during the day like visiting websites, recreation, and cooking food? Where is your time going?

I've wanted to know the answers to those questions for a very long time. I thought I had a pretty good idea, but I could never know for sure without an easy to use timeclock program. In the past I've searched for a free one that does not require a web server and is adequate for single person use, but I couldn't find one.

Luckily a week and a half ago I found a very promising candidate thanks to an article on Webdesigner Debot. It's called Klok, an Adobe AIR app and therefore multiplatform application.

A Week with Klok
I would have blogged about Klok sooner but I wanted to show what a full week of using Klok looks like. I've replaced the names of some of these projects so I could show you a screenshot of my schedule. So here it is: what I actually did throughout the week. No guess work, no calculating, just dragging and dropping a task into the "Currently working on" area every time I switched tasks.

By looking at the Week View I can see when I woke up, when I went to bed, how much work I got done that day, and so on. Every project is color coded so I can get a good idea about what I did that day at a glance.

The Reports are also very informative. I can see a percentage of how much time I put into each activity throughout the week. And if I wanted to get into more detail I can click on the piece of the pie chart to bring up the subtasks for that project.

And lastly, another important function of Klok is knowing how much time you've put into a project compared to how much your estimate was. You can give the project an overall hourly rate, as well as rates for each subtask, so things like emailing the client can have a lower hourly rate than actual design work if you want. If no hourly rate is set for a subproject it'll just assume the hourly rate you set for the top-level project. Klok can then calculate how much the project was actually worth based on the combined hourly rates to help you better bid projects in the future.

Accountability
Another thing that's great about using Klok is the accountability of having to record everything you do throughout the day. In the same way that people who keep a food journal are much more likely to loose weight than those who don't, you'll become more likely to be productive when you can see how much time you spent goofing off instead of working. If there's too much turquoise or neon green in my Week View—turquoise representing my non-essential daily tasks and green representing recreation (i.e. video games)—I'll be compelled to start working more because I'll have irrefutable proof that I've wasted too much time.

Learning and Trying New Things to be More Productive
Based on the information I got from the Week View and the Reports I was able to make some observations about my work and non-working habits.

For one, I spend a lot of time visiting websites, which includes reading news, insightful articles, and comics. To give you an idea I spent about 23 hours this past week working on freelance stuff and 11 hours visiting websites. Last year I realized that I spent a ton of time visiting websites, so I started using Google Reader which has saved me a lot of time, but even with Google Reader I've found that I still need to come up with a way to make that part of my life more efficient or reduce the number of sites I visit because it's a non-essential part of my life, even though I do find treasures of information on those sites occasionally (like Klok for example). So this coming week as an experiment I'll check the same RSS feeds, but instead of logging into Google Reader as a break-time activity I'll log in only once throughout the day to see if that reduces the time I spend reading articles. And after the week is done I can pull up the report and make a comparison. [Update: It worked. I spent a few less hours visiting websites when I did that.] Klok makes it really easy to use the scientific method in your time management.

The other thing I was also surprised about was how much of my time was spent writing emails to clients (about 10%). Depending on the length of the email it can take anywhere from 30 minutes to a full hour to write each one. The reason for this is I'll proofread each one and make sure I word everything just right and have no spelling or gramatical errors. I'm convinced that it's time well spent to sound intelligent to your clients, and I know they've appreciated it because I've gotten comments saying how informative and thorough my emails are. I'm not sure how I could speed that up except by becoming a better writer and proofreader, but it's still nice to know how much time is spent doing that when I make bids for future projects

Conclusion
If you are a freelancer use this program. The ability to keep track of your daily activities to the to the minute, and do it easily, is extremely valuable. I was able to use this program to keep track of everything I did throughout the day, which was easy for me because I'm at my computer all the time. So even if your life doesn't evolve around the computer you can still use it record what you do when you are at your computer working.

Be sure you download (and read the information for) the beta version because it has a lot of really nice features that the "stable" version doesn't. And the beta is not that buggy.

And while we are still on the topic, Randy Pausch gave a great lecture on Time Management which I'd strongly recommend you watch if you haven't already.

Oh, one last thing. Observant readers may have noticed from the screenshot that I've been spending a ton of time on a Super Top Secret Lumaglyph Project. I'll be sharing information on that—eventually.

Massively Useful Software: FontForge and YourFonts.com

2009-02-15T22:27:00.012-07:00

[EDIT] Scruss provide some information on how to do this under Cygwin (and Linux I'm sure) at http://scruss.com/blog/2010/05/09/creating-a-truetype-font-from-your-handwriting-with-your-scanner-your-printer-and-fontforge/ I haven't tried it out yet, (when I do I'll post it here) but this could very well come in handy. Thanks for the tip!

Many of the designers I know are typophiles. We live and breath type and will search for hours trying to find the right typeface, and when we are not doing that we'll spend weeks trying to create one. Here's a couple of font tools that I've used in the past: YourFonts.com automatically creates a TrueType font from a scan of your handwriting, and FontForge allows you to create fonts from scratch and of course edit existing ones.

YourFonts.com
[EDIT] YourFoints is not free anymore. It now costs $12.50 + $6.00 if you upload both template pages.

For years I've wanted to create a font of my own handwriting. Originally my motivation for this was out of novelty because having your handwriting as a TrueType font is just plain cool. But now that I'm doing more concept art I wanted my handwriting font because using a font like Myriad Pro for notes just doesn't fit well with the loose sketches and paintings. Even though it takes some time to set up the gridlines and write my notes on screen using my tablet, I do it anyway because it just looks right as opposed to using a refined font.

For a while I've put off making that font because of how long it would take for me to make one, but now there's YourFonts.com. After about 20 minutes of writing my font into the template they provided (which I did in Photoshop so it would look like I wrote it with a tablet) I was able to create a TrueType font of my handwriting!

The raster to vector conversion was good, and aside from some kerning issues (which I'll get into in a second) the font was perfect. So it was a good thing I waited because this site saved me a lot of time.

FontForge
So about those kerning issues. YourFonts.com creates a TrueType font with the left and right bearings at a fixed distance away from the glyph. And as any type designer would know this isn't always desirable, and I definitely wanted to change the width of the space character, so to fix all of that I used a powerful open source program called FontForge.

FontForge isn't always a super easy program to install. It's originally a Linux program, and if you are using Ubuntu you simply go to Add New Programs, search for FontForge, and it'll download and install it for you automatically. Mac users will have a harder time installing it, but for those of you using Windows you could have a frustrating experience; you'll need to install Cygwin.

Now, I've installed FontForge on Windows before so I knew what I was getting into. I do have it installed on my Fedora partition but having to reboot just to edit a font is troublesome. I thought that I could sidestep the Cygwin nightmare by installing andLinux which is basically Ubuntu running on something that is kind of like a virtual machine (in that it needs dedicated RAM) just so I could install FontForge without problems. Unfortunately, it crashed a lot and FontForge ran slowly too, so I decided to go ahead and install Cygwin anyway which I do still recommend if you are going to be running FontForge in Windows.

Here's some tips about installing it because the documentation on the FontForge site on how to install Cygwin properly is lacking.

From the server list select mirror.kernel.org. It's a fast and reliable server. When you go to select the packages that need to be installed, first make sure that the checkbox on the bottom that says "hide obsolete packages" is unchecked, as FontForge needs some obsolete packages. And I found clicking on the view button so it's set to "full" helped my find everything too.

The good news is that making sure that all of the packages are selected is the hard part. The rest of the steps on how to install it are pretty straight forward.

I will add though that FontForge, even though it's probably the best font editing software out there, the program is pretty ugly. But hey, once you install it and go through the tutorials they have on the FontForge site it's a pretty nice program.

After I installed FontForge I started to adjust the kerning between each pair of characters. Yes, you can set the kern for any pair of characters that you want and have the kern amount stored in the font so it's kerned automatically as you type it; it's just a matter of typing the letters into the Metric Window and drag and drop the lines between them.

But first you need to create a lookup subtable for the kern amount. And again, I do suggest you read the manual because I'm not going to write a huge tutorial on how to do this, but here's some hints: If you try to adjust the kerning it'll bring the New Lookup Subtable dialog for you. The subtable type should already be set to "pair position (kerning)", click on the "" button, change the feature to "horizontal kerning", and maybe change the lookup name to "kern" just so it's shorter. When you click OK it'll ask you for a name. Just use what it put in already. After that's set up, anytime you change the spacing between any two characters that you type out on the Metrics Window it'll save the kern amount, so you'll want to try every combination of letters if you have time to.

And again, FontForge is a serious program so please read the manual before you use it. You'll be glad you did because FontForge is a great program for blooming type designers.

Massively Useful Typography Books?

Sure, while we are on the topic. "The Elements of Typographic Style" by Robert Bringhurst. A must book for typographers and type designers.

A Quick Design Test

2009-01-25T19:10:00.003-07:00

If you have 15 seconds I'd like you to participate in a quick test for one of our graphic design projects. The test is at http://toastbusters.net/?p=16&v=11. Thanks in advance.

Color Wheel Swatches: Shades

2009-01-07T14:54:00.006-07:00

NOTE TO CS5 USERS: I've gotten reports that in CS5 (and maybe CS4 but I haven't heard anything yet) that the minimum width of the Swatches panel in the default workspace is 17 instead of 16. The Swatches panel must be 16 swatches wide, otherwise the circular swatch pattern becomes slanted.

The culprit is the Layers panel which can't be as small as the Swatches panel, so if the Swatches panel and the Layers panel are put on the same column the Swatches panel will be wider to fit. The fix is to undock the swatches panel, at which point you can dock other panels below it that aren't wide.

Three months ago I released a set of RGB and CMYK color wheels. After some user feedback I fixed the CMYK wheel so it has richer colors and pure CMYK data for the Adobe formats that supported it. The files are updated there so go ahead and get them.

In addition, also at the request of a user, I made a color wheel with shades instead of tints. The special thing about this palette is that it uses Don Jusko's Real Color Wheel theory of pigment overloading. If you've used yellow food coloring or watercolor before you'll know the color shifts to orange with the more yellow pigment you use. I included that effect of pigment overloading in these swatches. The nice thing about this is that dark yellow will not be that ugly olive color, and dark cyan will have some blue as it goes darker.

Here's the links to the files. For the CMYK palette only the ACO and ASE palettes have pure CMYK color information, the rest are CMYK safe RGB colors.

ACO Files (Adobe Photoshop Swatches)
RGB Color Wheel: ACO
CMYK Color Wheel: ACO

ASE Files (Adobe Swatch Exchange)
RGB Color Wheel: ASE
CMYK Color Wheel: ASE

ACT Files
RGB Color Wheel: ACT
CMYK Safe RGB Color Wheel: ACT

PAL Files (Jasc Swatches)
RGB Color Wheel: PAL
CMYK Safe RGB Color Wheel: PAL

TXT Files (Corel Painter Swatches)
RGB Color Wheel: TXT
CMYK Safe RGB Color Wheel: TXT

Guerrilla CG: Subdivision Surfaces

2008-12-06T20:35:00.007-07:00

I just barely finished my first video for The Guerrilla CG Project on Subdivision Surfaces.

Guerrilla CG: Subdivision Surfaces from Glen Moyes on Vimeo.

This video was quite unlike any other project I've done before. All but one animated sequence in this video was rendered by playblasting in Blender. I had to do some tricks like forcing Blender to use anti-aliasing in my graphics driver settings, and using chroma key to remove the background from each render so I could composite other elements together, which is something I usually never have to worry about. Anyway, the results turned out very well. I used After Effects for compositing and editing. It took me about 3 days to put the video together.

The next video I'll be doing do will be on topology.

The GuerrillaCG Project

2008-11-08T10:47:00.006-07:00

Guerrilla CG is finally online. It hosts amazing videos that explain the fundamentals of computer graphics in a fun and easy to understand way. The videos are not software specific either, so you can watch them and take that knowledge to your 3D application of choice.

During college I taught Blender workshops for two years, and prior to that I did video tutorials for Blender. I learned that in order to teach people how to use the software I needed to spend quite a bit of time teaching the fundamentals first. So in my later workshops more than half the workshop concisted of myself doing a PowerPoint presentation. It turned out to be more effective, but we only had two hours of class a week, so I continued making video tutorials as part of the class so they could watch them at home. I put those videos on ShowMeDo so other people can watch them as well.

I was later contacted by Andrew Silke about a project he was working on called GuerrillaCG. He saw the stuff I did on ShowMeDo and wanted someone to help him out with the Fundamental Videos and put some Blender videos tutorials on there as well. I was blown away by the concept of the site and the quality of the videos, and felt flattered that professionals from places like Animal Logic actually got a hold of me to help them work on their projects. So I gadly accepted, and I'll be releasing video tutorials and concept videos for it soon.

What I've Been Playing: Far Cry 2, BG&E, and S.T.A.L.K.E.R.

2008-10-24T13:43:00.019-06:00

A week ago I had 4 games on my wish list: Far Cry 2, Mirrors Edge, Left 4 Dead, and StarCraft 2. No one has any idea when StarCraft2 is going to be released, but the other three games are all coming out weeks apart from each other. I can't recall a time when 3 games I've been committed to buying for being so creative, well produced, and all-out awesome have all come out within a matter of weeks. There's one less game on my wish list because I'm now a happy owner of one of them, and the holiday season for gaming is looking bright.

Far Cry 2
I'm so happy I got this game. After my not so pleasant experience with S.T.A.L.K.E.R. (read below) I was really hoping for another open world first person shooter. I usually wait until after the game is released before I buy it, but I've read good previews about Far Cry 2, and I wanted to save $5, so I went ahead and preordered it on Steam. I'm glad I did because the game rocks.

Visually the game is superb. The art direction goes for realism, so I can't say anything on artistic creativity, but they did it right (even has reflected light) and it runs faster than Crysis. It also has some really fun brush fire simulation that becomes an awesome and extremely entertaining battle strategy once you have the flame thrower. Just make sure you're not downwind when you start one. Even without the flame thrower fires can still be started by Molotov cocktails, exploding gas tanks, and the backblast from rocket launchers which I found out the hard way. Seriously, the fire simulation adds a whole lot to the game both tactically and viscerally.

They went through a lot of trouble to make the game immersive. The interface is minimal, healing is visualized by injecting yourself or pulling shrapnel out of your limbs, old weapons can jam which can happen at some hilariously bad times, and all the while you are fighting malaria, so occasionally the screen will go all sick-looking until you take your medicine. The music is well produced with acoustic instruments and African beats. The voice acting is also good. The accents can be thick so I feel like I should depend on the subtitles, but you can turn them off if you want.

The game world is huge, and they seem to want you to remember that because you have to do a lot of traveling. Sometimes a mission will be all the way across the map, and it can take you 10-15 minutes to get there with a vehicle. There are buses that will "teleport" you closer to your destination, but with most missions it doesn't help a whole lot. At least in S.T.A.L.K.E.R. the quests are closer together, but in Far Cry 2 they can be anywhere, usually far away, and when traveling to your destination you will encounter several guard posts and maybe a random encounter or two, so that will slow you down. However, you can find hidden breifcases which contain diamonds and clear out safe houses so you can use them as save game points along the way so it's not all wasted time, but it does pad the game somewhat. It's a good thing that the game is as immersive as it is and that the combat is fun, because otherwise the travel would bug me. However, to my pleasant surprise after completing Act 1 there's appears to be a new area/county for each act, so you don't spend the whole game backtracking over the same locations. The game took me 37 hours to beat.

You pick up and purchase new weapons as the game progresses. At first the weapons are pretty basic, but you can then get things such as mortars, sniper rifles, stealth gear, flamethrowers, and other specialty weapons. You can only carry 3 weapons, one from each class, at a time in addition to your machete, so your choice in weapons completely changes how you play the game, which is how variation in combat is addressed.

The game also comes with a really simple and easy to understand editor for making multiplayer maps. So there's hours of fun ready to happen there.

Recommendation: Buy it. The game is huge, immersive, and fun. The story is pretty intriguing, ending is okay, wanted something more climatic considering how long the game was, but the ride was awesome.

Beyond Good and Evil
Beyond Good and Evil for $10 on Steam? Why not. It's one of those critically acclaimed games that didn't do well commercial for whatever reason (advertising most likely), and I hate it when games suffer such a fate. Because I feel the way I do about video games, I can't live with myself until I play it in it's entirety, which didn't take long (12 hours).

It's an old game so the graphics technology isn't impressive by today's standards, but the art direction and execution is. Great use of color, great character design, and I'm really impressed with how they handled vertex lighting in the environments. The music is also really good too. The game plays pretty well as far as performers go. The melee combat is nothing special but at least it's easy, and there's not a whole lot of combat to do. In the later stages it's mostly sneaking. The animation is good which is especially important when the game is in third person. The story is good but it had a couple of, "What? That made no sense," plot moments, but it wasn't bad enough to be a deal breaker.

If I could say anything bad about it, it might be that it's a adventure/platformer game that doesn't break a whole lot of new ground as far as gameplay, but it was solid nonetheless. The art direction, story, and use of a strong female protagonist is what set this game apart. It's worth getting just on those merits.

Recommendation: Great game, awesome art, awesome music, good story, plays like a platformer, has some wonderful story/action moments, and worth the $10. I recommend buying it so you can play through it once just so you can join the cool intellectual gamer crowd.

S.T.A.L.K.E.R.: Shadow of Chernobyl
This game has been recommended a lot of people and it was only $20 on Steam, so I gave it a whirl.

It's rather complex as far as first person shooters go. There's a lot of dialog, quests, inventory management, encumbrance (meaning that if you carry too much you'll slow down), hunger, bleeding, radiation poisoning, stamina, and other mechanics that give you a sense of urgency and realism. Adding that and the open world nature of the game with dangerous people and mutant wildlife really makes you feel vulnerable in a dangerous world, which emotionally pays off when you arrive at towns to turn in quests where things are relatively safe.

The big problem with S.T.A.L.K.E.R., which was a deal breaker for me, is that the game is buggy. Very buggy. So buggy in fact that even after applying all of the recommended fixes which included editing my Windows registry, I couldn't even play more than a few hours because I got so frustrated with the crashing that it would eventually crash every single time I entered the underground zone. I was going to wait for S.T.A.L.K.E.R.: Clear Sky to see if they fixed that, but reviews said that it was still buggy. To be fair it's very likely that it's my system configuration (even though it's all top-brand parts), and most people after applying the fixes had no problems. It appears that I'm a very small percentage of unlucky ones.

So thank goodness for Far Cry 2 for my open world fix because S.T.A.L.K.E.R. was a breath of fresh air and complexity that I've been wanting from a game for a while. I was about to ask for a refund, but to be honest I don't mind because I vote with my money and I want people to make more games like it. So they can keep my $20.

Recommendation: Wonderfully bleak atmosphere, worth it if it won't crash your computer and you'll have to read up on some fixes that may work, and there's a prequel available, S.T.A.L.K.E.R.: Clear Sky. I can't whole heartedly recommend the game because of the bugs, but I give it points for doing something different, and it's another one of those intellectual gamer crowd favorites.

* * * * *

And just to let you know, I updated the previous article on TrackMania and Painkiller with recommendations. I did in fact purchase TrackMania and I feel a little bit gypped, so read the end of the TrackMania section for my thoughts on that.

Color Wheel Swatches (For Photoshop and Other Programs)

2008-10-07T03:21:00.018-06:00

NOTE TO CS5 USERS: I've gotten reports that in CS5 (and maybe CS4 but I haven't heard anything yet) that the minimum width of the Swatches panel in the default workspace is 17 instead of 16. The Swatches panel must be 16 swatches wide, otherwise the circular swatch pattern becomes slanted.

The culprit is the Layers panel which can't be as small as the Swatches panel, so if the Swatches panel and the Layers panel are put on the same column the Swatches panel will be wider to fit. The fix is to undock the swatches panel, at which point you can dock other panels below it that aren't wide.

Edit: I've created a new swatch set with shades instead of tints.

In the past I've used the VisiBone2 swatches in Photoshop, and I've been meaning to make an improved set of swatches for some time now, one that's organized like an actual color wheel. So I did. Here it is.

The special thing about this swatch layout is that the color wheel is actually accurate! It's not the VisiBone-style color wheel that uses red, green, and blue as the primary colors, where cyan is the complement of red. This uses the primary colors of pigments: red, yellow and blue, and displays it in full RGB gamut. It also takes into account that monitor green is not the same as reality green, and monitor blue is not the same as reality blue. So you can effectively use this as an accurate color wheel, making it great for working out color studies.

In the palette I've also included 3 value scales: simple grayscale, warm to cool, and cool to warm, which I use for my under paintings.

In the bottom right corner there's a small palette of colors that's already harmonized and CMYK safe for multipurpose use. I use that palette for line drawings, sketches, notes, and incidentally the Structure of Man Primer.

There's also a CMYK version of the color wheel (updated from the old one) if you plan on doing stuff for print. The ACO and ASE files are actual CMYK palettes, whereas the other ones are just CMYK safe RGB color palettes. So if you use that palette of colors you can be confident that the image you used them on will print predictable without having to work in CMYK mode because RGB mode performs better in Photoshop.

You can download the RGB and CMYK palettes here in multiple formats:

ACO Files (Adobe Photoshop Swatches)
RGB Color Wheel: ACO
CMYK Color Wheel: ACO

ASE Files (Adobe Swatch Exchange)
RGB Color Wheel: ASE
CMYK Color Wheel: ASE

ACT Files
RGB Color Wheel: ACT
CMYK Safe RGB Color Wheel: ACT

PAL Files (Jasc Swatches)
RGB Color Wheel: PAL
CMYK Safe RGB Color Wheel: PAL

TXT Files (Corel Painter Swatches)
RGB Color Wheel: TXT
CMYK Safe RGB Color Wheel: TXT

Aesop's Fables

2008-08-05T16:05:00.014-06:00

I've waited for a while to talk about this on my blog; I finished this project four months ago, and if you've looked at my Vimeo page within the past two months you may have noticed a new video on there called Aesop's Fables. That video only showed the completed animation with the background overlay and not actual footage of the gallery installation in action. Well, today I finally uploaded a video that does this project justice, and I went ahead and updated the older video by adding the same music by Kevin MacLeod that I included in today's video.

>> Watch Aesop's Fables streamed in HD (720p)

>> Watch Aesop's Fables: Complete Animation streamed in HD (720p)

Aesop's Fables is my first 2D animated project. And by "2D animated" I don't mean animated with After Effects or Flash, I mean actually animating a character frame by frame. I loved it. It was a lot of work, but I loved it.

This project was an experimental motion design piece designed by Shane Janz that I did the illustrations and 2D animation for. The concept for the project was to mix printed design with motion design across multiple projection surfaces. The background paintings were printed onto three four-foot high panels with the animations being projected onto them using two projectors, meaning that the final resolution for the video was 2048 × 768.

Once we decided on using Aesop's fables for the concept and established the art style, we quickly realized that the characters needed to be animated frame by frame in order for the style to be consistent; we couldn't use 3D rendered characters. Fortunately I had recently been looking into 2D animation software and found an open source program that would do the trick. The 2D animation software I used was Pencil (except for the crow; that was painted with Photoshop). Compositing and other animation elements were done with After Effects and Blender. Blender was also used to do the pixel-perfect keystoning for the installation, which allowed the projected characters to interact perfectly with the printed artwork, and illuminated only the panels, making them appear to glow without any immediate indication as to why (the computer and projectors were hidden and the panels were only 1/4" thick).

The exhibit opened in the Spori Gallery on March 24, 2008. The response to the installation was extremely positive. One person described it as the coolest thing they had ever seen.

Unfortunately, I had to head back to Utah so I didn't get to spend more than 30 minutes with the final installation or attend the open house, but it was still an unforgettable experience.

I've been delving heavily into 2D animation as a result of this project. In fact I now own six books on the subject. I'm even more grateful for Riven Phoenix's Structure of Man series (which I'm still yet to finish in its entirety) because I was able to animate that human character without any motion or photo reference. I've been so used to doing 3D and Flash-style animation that being able to bring a character to life without being limited in any way, or needing to create a 3D model, texture, rig, or anything else prior to animating, was something that I hadn't experienced before.

I want to do a lot more of it.

News Flash: Dr. Horrible's Sing-Along Blog

2008-07-16T01:12:00.012-06:00

A friend of mine pointed me to this today, and this is something that I definitely want to make an announcement of. Come to think of it, I've been doing a lot of announcing and not a lot of creating.

Anyway, it's show written by Joss Whedon—yes, the same guy that did Buffy and Firefly—called Dr. Horrible's Sing-Along Blog. I've watched the first part and it's hilarious. It's an experimental project that Joss wrote during the Writers Guild Strike to show what can be done with very little, released on the web, and get compensated handsomely for it—hopefully anyway, but that's part of the experiment.

So check it out. Watch all the episodes as they come out throughout the week; Act 2 comes out Thursday, Act 3 comes out Saturday, and after the 20th it won't be available for free anymore. [Edit: You can now watch it for free on their website. However the video will have a few ads.] If you want to support what they are trying to do—and you should—go buy their stuff so they'll know people like it and will make more of these kinds of things.

News Flash: Celtx 1.0 Released

2008-06-10T11:28:00.003-06:00

Celtx 1.0 finally got released today. Go check it out at celtx.com.

What I've Been Playing: TrackMania and Painkiller

2008-06-04T11:03:00.011-06:00

I have a habit when it comes to playing newly purchased games. It's basically a planned splurge of my free time. For about three days, or how ever long it takes me to beat the game, I'll use all my free time to play it until I've completed it, at which point I'll move on with the rest of life. For this reason I usually buy games on a Friday and then play it through the weekend.

If it's a really good game I'll play through it twice to relive all the good moments or to find/unlock things I've missed. If it's an exceptional game I'll play it often for a few months or even years. This doesn't happen very often, and I can only recall doing it with Descent and Unreal Tournament 2004.

This habit lets me play plenty of games and gives me a pretty uninterrupted experience of the entire thing. I've also found that I can get through games faster this way since I don't have to remember what it was I was supposed to do when I left off.

Thanks to Steam I can buy games on an impulse and play all kinds of different and interesting titles from big studios and indies. Steam has recently become my primary source for games, so here's what I've been playing recently that are worth talking about.

TrackMania Nations Forever
I'm a big fan of games where you can create stuff. Yes, a lot of games have external level editors or other modding tools, but those usually take a long time to learn. I like simple and robust editors that are built into the game. Customizing the appearance of my character/vehicle is fun and all, but I like it when they let you take it a bit further.

TrackMania Nations Forever has a few good things going for it. First, it's not a racing simulator, or a racing game with realistic driving physics. Those are the kinds of racing games where the vehicles will spin out if you turn too fast and you need an analog steering wheel to play it properly, along with 2 weeks worth of stunt driving courses. The only racing simulator I've played that I liked was Need For Speed: Carbon for the Wii, probably because the steering was analog, and it had this unrealistic bullet time mode that slowed time down and made your vehicle more responsive, making difficult maneuvers possible and a lot more stylish. TrackMania is a simple but challenging racing game. There's no handbrakes, no gear shifting, no spinning out or drifting physics, just four buttons for left, right, go and stop.

Now, TrackMania is no F-Zero GX or Rollcage Stage II as far as being an off-the-hook awesome racer, but it's solid, has really fun tracks, and comes with a good level editor. TrackMania Nations Forever is also free. So if you have Steam check it out. You can also get TrackMania United Forever for $40, which has more tracks, cars, content, and so on.

If you want to kill some time by being creative, like racing games, and have no money, give TrackMania a try.

2008.10.24 Update: I did in fact buy TrackMania ($40), and I will say that compared to the demo you may feel gypped by the price, but if you didn't play the demo it's worth it. Let me explain.

The full game comes with 6 new environments: desert, rally, snow, island, coast, and bay, all in addition to stadium which the demo came with. The kicker is that each environment has it's own vehicle type that handles completely different from each other, and most steer so sharply that your need an analogue steering wheel to effectively control the vehicle. And because I use a keyboard, driving became very difficult. And then you have the coast environment. The sports car feels so heavy and drifts so much that it doesn't feel like the same game anymore.

The good news is that it comes with all of the demo tracks and about twice as many additional tracks spanning all 7 environments/vehicle types, and three new game modes: platform (obstacle course), stunts (getting points by doing tricks), and puzzle (combination track building with limited pieces and time trial), all of which are fun modes.

So, if you do decide to buy the full version of the game, think of it as buying the full game and the demo, then the $40 will be worth it.

Recommendation: Play the demo for sure. Creating your own tracks is a blast and in of itself makes this game awesome. The full game comes with cars that should be driven with a steering wheel controller. The entire package is well worth the $40 if you like racing games.

Painkiller
A couple of weeks ago I watched a Zero Punctuation review of Painkiller, a game which Yahtzee claims kicks the ass of most modern first person shooters. Since being let down by Unreal Tournament 3 I've been starving for some good, less serious FPS action games, so I decided to take his advice and give Painkiller a try.

The first place I looked for it was on Steam. They had the free demo, but they were also selling it for only $10. It's kind of hard to go wrong with paying $10 for a critically acclaimed game, so I bought it, played through it, and have beaten it twice already.

The game is as fun as he says it is. It's simple fun, but has plenty of gameplay subtleties to make you feel like you are being clever in combat. The different locations for each level break any kind of monotony throughout the game.

The weapons feel very powerful. Shooting the undead with a shotgun at point blank range will either send them flying 20 feet back, or 20 feet in all directions. Each weapon has a secondary fire mode, not in the Unreal sense where it's just a alternate fire mode that uses the same ammo, instead it's a completely different weapon: melee spinning blades, lazer; shotgun, freeze ray; long-ranged stake gun, grenades; rockets, minigun; shurikens, lighting; machine gun, and flame thrower. I'm always talking about wish fulfillment, and these weapons are certainly it.

What was also surprising is how quickly Steam started advertising Painkiller with Yahtzee's quote, "All you really need to know is there's a gun that shoots shurikens and lightning," the same day the review was released. No doubt it was planned in advance, but I smile every time I think that under appreciated games from four years ago are being recommended and advertised by people who are in a position to do so.

One thing that also intrigued me about playing through Painkiller was the last level: Hell. After finding the gateway to Hell to do battle with Lucifer, I was expecting fire and brimstone like what was in Doom 3 (another simple shooter which I loved), but the depiction of Hell was quite unusual. Of course, Painkiller's idea of purgatory is also unusual, which was pulling locations and themes randomly from the living world into a parallel demonized version of it, so in that context the Hell level fits right in with that concept.

The only way I can describe it is it's a 3-dimensional collage of warfare from the middle ages all the way up to the atomic bomb. Time is frozen and there are no people; weapons and debris are floating in mid air, but the screams and sounds of war are still audible all around you. You are also being attacked by demon ghosts, and you have to kill those before Lucifer comes out, at which point the scenery suddenly changes completely.

No matter what their reasoning for it was, the final stage paints a surreal and poignant interpretation of Hell.

Painkiller was certainly worth the $10, and I'm thinking about purchasing the sequel even though it's twice as much and wasn't rated as highly.

Recommendation: Simple first person shooting fun done right, creative environments, rock solid (simple) gameplay, every weapon is fun to use, story sucks, but for $10 bucks you won't be disappointed if you want something action packed and full of giblets.

Massively Useful Software: Adobe Gamma

2008-05-08T16:53:00.008-06:00

Adobe Gamma is one of those massively useful programs that many people already have installed but don't actually use. If you've installed Photoshop, it's running on your computer right now. If you haven't actually calibrated your monitor with it, you should do it right away.

At one of the places I used the work at, we used the Spyder2 colorimeter to calibrate all of our monitors to have a perfect white point and gamma. Having a calibrated monitor makes a huge difference. The colors on the screen looked more vibrant, the contrast was perfect so you could see all the colors without them being clipped to white or black, the blue tint was gone, and the colors on the screen actually matched the colors that were printed. It was such an improvement that I decided that there's no point in buying an expensive screen if you are not going to callibrate it using a Spyder or something similar. Even our inexpensive LCDs looked like high-end $800 monitors once calibrated.

Unfortunetly I have no such display calibration system at home, so I had to resort to doing the best I could with my monitor's settings. That was until I discovered what Adobe Gamma actually does. It is a calibration system for your monitor. If you are one of those people who already have it installed in windows, just go to Control Panel > Adobe Gamma, and go follow the steps; just make sure that when you do, to adjust the gamma for each channel individually as shown in the image above.

Comparing the experience I've had with the Spyder and now Adobe Gamma, I'm actually quite impressed with the results of having a software-only assisted display calibration system. I know that I'm not going to get as accurate results without the Spyder, but what I'm seeing on my screen is so close to what I've experienced with the Spyder that it's a good alternative if you don't want to spend US$169 for a Spyder3Pro. And the great thing is that if you are a graphic designer or illustrator you probably already have it running; you just need to configure it first.

Alternatives to Adobe Gamma
It's worth noting that nVidia has a pretty good Display Optimization Wizard that gave me identical results to Adobe Gamma. So if you have an nVidia card but no Adobe Gamma then the Display Optimization Wizard will work just fine. It's also worth noting that the color correction does not work in video games, so if that's your only reason to calibrate then you may not want to bother; just use the test patterns to adjust your monitor's settings the best you can.

Massively Useful Software: AutoHotkey

2008-04-24T00:41:00.013-06:00

Like most people, the first time you need to use a macro program it's for something completely immature and nonconstructive. For me, I needed something like AutoHotkey to quickly generate my 3-line Cute Bunny Giving You the Bird ASCII graphic into the game chat before someone realized what was going on—which was usually around the "( ._.) ..!." line—and then they assault it by quickly sending something like "asdf" which decapitates my bunny!

I wasn't going to take that kind of treatment anymore, and no bunny deserves to be decapitated, so I used AutoHotkey to create a macro that creates the bunny immediately without having to type it in by hand. No one could stop it and no more bunnies ever died again. Well, that's not entirely true. There were a couple of stray lines of text that killed a few Cute Bunnies Giving You the Bird, but the mortality rate was much lower.

Of course macros are useful for constructive things too. This neat little open source Windows program is extremely robust. It uses a powerful scripting language that not only lets you create simple keyboard macros, but you can also run programs, manipulate files, receive input from joysticks, control the mouse cursor, modify variables, and then save it either as a script file or an .exe file so AutoHotkey doesn't even have to be installed to use the script.

But for me, since I don't want to learn the scripting language that much, the only thing I really use it for is entering high bit characters, HTML entity references, and of course Cute Bunnies Giving You the Bird. Creating a script is simple, and there's a tool that comes with it that makes it easier.

Here's a script that I made that lets me use Unicode punctuation marks in the name of good typography: the en dash, the em dash, the ellipsis, and actual left/right quotation marks instead of the ambidextrous quotation marks that are on your keyboard (which are called primes actually, and they are only supposed to be used as inch and foot marks). The script is lovingly called "typography_nut", and it's in response to one of the things that I love about Macs.

The Mac already has neat shortcuts like Option-Hyphen to create and en dash. In Windows you have to hold down Alt, type 0150 on the numeric keypad, and then release the Alt key to create one. Once again AutoHotkey comes to the rescue, and this is one of the many reasons why it's one of my massively useful programs. I'll even go as far as saying that this is a must-have script for graphic designers that use a PC.

Anyway, here's the script:

; Script: typography_nut

; This AutoHotkey script lets you quickly input typographical characters without
; having to memorize the Alt code number. The glyph, Alt code number and hotkey
; are listed below. You are welcome to change the hotkeys to whatever you feel
; comfortable with. - Glen Moyes

; Em Dash - Alt 0151
; Ctrl-Hyphen

^-::Send, {ALTDOWN}{Numpad0}{Numpad1}{Numpad5}{Numpad1}{ALTUP}

; En Dash - Alt 0150
; Ctrl-Alt-Hyphen

^!-::Send, {ALTDOWN}{Numpad0}{Numpad1}{Numpad5}{Numpad0}{ALTUP}

; Ellipsis - Alt 0133
; Ctrl-Period

^.::Send, {ALTDOWN}{Numpad0}{Numpad1}{Numpad3}{Numpad3}{ALTUP}

; Left Single Quote  - Alt 0145
; Ctrl-[

^[::Send, {ALTDOWN}{Numpad0}{Numpad1}{Numpad4}{Numpad5}{ALTUP}

; Right Single Quote - Alt 0146
; Ctrl-]

^]::Send, {ALTDOWN}{Numpad0}{Numpad1}{Numpad4}{Numpad6}{ALTUP}

; Left Double Quote - Alt 0147
; Ctrl-Alt-[

^![::Send, {ALTDOWN}{Numpad0}{Numpad1}{Numpad4}{Numpad7}{ALTUP}

; Right Double Quote - Alt 0148
; Ctrl-Alt-]

^!]::Send, {ALTDOWN}{Numpad0}{Numpad1}{Numpad4}{Numpad8}{ALTUP}

The script has all the documentation so you can read what the hotkeys are and what they do.

If you want to use this macro, just copy and paste it into a text file called "typography_nut.ahk" and double-click on the file after you've installed AutoHotkey. There will be an icon loaded on your System Tray for every script you have loaded.

Also, make sure that whatever shortcut you choose for your macro isn't also the same shortcut as one that's used in the current application. For example, the above macro uses Ctrl-[ and Ctrl-] as shortcuts, which is an Illustrator shortcut as well, meaning that the shortcut can only be used by the macro. Changing the "^" to a "#" (representing the Windows key) in the script will fix that problem because the Windows key is not used in individual applications, so there won't be any shortcut conflicts. However, you may not like the having the Start Menu pop up when you fumble on a shortcut. And remember that you can turn the macro off at any time easily.

So have fun with this script and have fun with AutoHotkey.

Previous Work Re-rendered in HD

2008-04-11T14:25:00.010-06:00

I never intended on revisited any of my school work, but since Vimeo's HD service is so good I was strongly compelled to re-render my motion design work in 720p. It also helped that I have a trial version of After Effects installed, so this will be the only chance I'll have to do this for a while, now that I'm away from school and don't have access to the Mac Lab.

So here it is: all three projects from my motion design class, including one which you haven't seen before, in HD.

Wonder
This is the first project that I revisited earlier this week. I had to determine what version of Blender I used to make it because it wouldn't render properly with the newest version. Instead of rendering at the original 1024x576 resolution with no anti-aliasing, I re-rendered it at 1280x720 with 8x anti-aliasing. It took 2 days, but it's oh so pretty! Of course only after rendering did I noticed a couple of mistakes with the petals in the background. One would snap to a different rotation for a second and then go back again, and a couple of petals in the background would pop into existence while in-frame (I used a particle system to create the petals, and the petal's birth was supposed to happen off-frame so you couldn't see it happen).

I fixed both of those issues and had it render for another day, but now it's done and it looks awesome.

>> Watch this video streamed in HD (720p)

Sneakers
I made this one in the Mac Lab, so naturally all of the fonts were broken. Fixing that was tedious because of the crazy text animation I did. There was also a few problems in the animation that I fixed as well (at that smaller resolution I never noticed that the last S in the Sneakers title drifted down). Anyway, it's done and available for your viewing pleasure.

>> Watch this video streamed in HD (720p)

One thing I will add that is really nice about Vimeo's service is that you can replace the videos with newer ones, so I didn't have to re-link anything on my blog even going from web quality to HD.

Bad Robot

>> Watch this video streamed in HD (720p)

Now this video was HD to begin with; I was planning on having all of my projects rendered in HD. However, this video was also the reason why the rest for that class were 1024x576. First off, QuickTime is stupid. If you open a video file that's larger than the screen size it doesn't scale it to fit until you press Command-3 (and there's no full-screen mode unless you "go Pro" for $30). I was surprised that no one besides myself knew about that shortcut, even my Mac-using instructors. He didn't like having a video larger than the screen and later asked the class to send him all videos in 320x240 for concerns about frame and file size (some students used a raw codec to save the files). I of course rebelled, and made the videos just big enough to fit on screen, and encoded it properly so the file size was reasonable. There weren't any complaints though.

Anyway, I revisited Bad Robot just so I could get a clean rendering of the video and in a format that I like. I've been using Blender a lot to encode videos because it has good ffmpeg support (in Windows anyway). Since revisiting these projects I've now used Blender to encode all of the files that I uploaded to Vimeo so far (except for the Touch the Table video, but that's not motion design).

I really like Vimeo. I just can't wait until embed videos, like what I have on my blog, can be viewed in HD instead of following the link to view it on their site.

Video Sharing Sites Compared

2008-03-28T11:44:00.019-06:00

You might have noticed that I started using a different service to host my videos on this blog. I've been looking for something better than Google Video and YouTube to host my videos. So I did some research, compared the services, and found a service that I really like.

I uploaded the same video to test each of these services, and here are the results.

Google Video

YouTube quality. This is what I've been using previously. The bitrate is low and the frame size is small.

Blip.tv

I've heard that these are the best guys to go through for high-quality video hosting. And they are not bad. The quality per frame is the highest out of any of these services that I've tested, and they also change the aspect ratio of the movie player so there's no letter boxing for my widescreen videos. The big problem is they dropped the frame rate to reduce bandwidth. That's a big bummer, and is why I decided not to use their service. You can enable advertising (which is off be default), and they do the 50/50 split of ad revenue just like Revver.

Revver

I've heard about these guys because of the ad revenue sharing, the 50/50 split from ad revenue they make off your movie. The frame size is really good, but I don't like the letter boxing. The big problem I have with it are the ads during and at the end of the video, and you can't seem to disable them.

Vimeo

BlenderNation uses this service a lot, so I gave it a try. The bitrate is good, the video player is at the right aspect ratio, and my favorite part is that the interface goes away shortly after it starts, only showing you the movie. There's parameters that you can set when you create the embed code that changes the way the video player looks, like the color of the buttons, if the movie title is displayed or not, and what size. They also host the original video file that I uploaded as well.

Now, this is a standard sized video. If you upload a video that's 1280x720 or better, Vimeo can stream it as a HD. Just click on the full screen button and there it is. I've uploaded one of the CMC ads so you can see how it looks.

Watch "CMC Ad 1" in HD

Well, apparently you can't embed HD content; it has to be viewed from their web site. So click on the link underneath the video to see it in HD, streamed right to your web browser. You can also check out other HD videos at Vimeo HD.

The only problem I have with Vimeo is the comments screen at the end of the video. It's florescent orange! I tried to see if there's a parameter that turns that off, or at least changes the color of the background, but I found no such option. If you watch the video on the Vimeo site the player doesn't do that; the code is the same, but if the video is displayed on a site other than Vimeo it will appear.

Regardless, Vimeo is the winner, and I've already replaced most of my videos on the blog with that service. I'm so glad I don't have to use Google Video anymore.

Sneakers Title Sequence (Redesign)

2008-03-27T22:56:00.008-06:00

This was the final assignment for my motion design class (the same class that I did Wonder for). The assignment was to create a title sequence for a movie, preferably one that didn't already have an elaborate title sequence. So I chose one of my favorite movies: Sneakers.

>> Watch this video streamed in HD (720p)

I wanted the first part of the title sequence to look like the good old days of the BBS and ANSI art. The only way to do that was to animate the text frame by frame. In After Effects you can change the content of a text layer at any time, so it was just a matter of filling a text box full of white space (using a mono space font), and then edit the text for each frame as if you were using a text editor. The funny thing is that this crude bit of animation is the strongest part of the motion piece.

I used to be an ANSI artist, so animating text in this way felt pretty comfortable to me even after all these years. It was a nice departure from all the key-framed animations I've been doing and going back to my roots of text-only graphics and animation.

Massively Useful Software: Launchy

2008-03-19T23:25:00.003-06:00

I've been using this nifty little program for a while. If you've ever used Quicksilver on the Mac and wished something like that existed for Windows, Launchy is it.

The way it works is you press a keyboard shortcut (Alt-Space by default) and start typing the name of the program. It has a memory of everything in your start menu and browser bookmarks, so as you type the name it'll show what it thinks you are referring to. For example, all I have to do to launch Adobe Illustrator is press Alt-Space, type "illu" (for Illustrator) and press enter. I don't have to use the mouse to launch the program.

I used to have a really organized Start Menu becuase that was my primary method of running programs, but now I don't have to. In fact I don't use my start menu anymore. Even things like the Control Panel are perfectly accessible from Launchy.

It's open source and apparently written in Qt, which means that there could be a Linux release soon. Yes, I know there's something called the command line interface that let's you run programs with tab-completion. But for people like me who think of the command console as creepy basement--dark and scary as hell, but it's the only way to get to the water heater to fix it--Launchy is a nice way to run programs without having to use the mouse.

Massively Useful Software: Apophysis

2008-03-18T02:36:00.013-06:00

Apophysis is an open source program that creates flame fractals. The only thing I can say about this program that contains any amount of profound insight is this: the fractals look awesome! Seriously, tinker around with the program. It comes with plenty of presets and all kinds of ways to manipulate them.

I'll probably do a series of sketches based on the designs of these fractal patterns at some point because they look so cool. I'm also planning on using Apophysis to create animated magic/sci-fi effects for use with 3D animations. And I can finally make some cool dual screen backgrounds too.

Anyway, lots of potential applications for these images and people will wonder how you did it. Expect more blabbing about Apophysis-generated content in the future.

Massively Useful Software: Celtx

2008-03-15T16:34:00.006-06:00

I decided that I'll start sharing software that I've discovered to be massively useful or just really cool. I'm not talking about popular software, I'm talking about obscure or open source programs that people don't really know about but has lots of value. So let's start.

When it comes to recording ideas and collaborating on stories and other projects, our team has used our private wiki for the past few years. Wikis are great because they're accessible online and you can edit any page you want. But that's pretty much all I find them useful for.

I have some issues with using wikis: I have to wait for a page to load, tree-like organization of sub-articles is a big pain in the neck for large projects in that you have to click and load a new page to go to the next sub-article, unless you manually create a table of contents, and when you finally get to the page you want you have to go into edit mode to make changes.

That's a lot of clicking links and waiting. It wasn't so bad when the Wiki was hosted on our network, but it's on a web server so each page takes some time to process and download. I realize that these are mainly interface issues, and could be fixed with something like AJAX. But for solo writers who don't know how to set up Apache, PHP, MySQL, and a wiki, that form of collaboration isn't an option.

This is why Adam and I came up with some designs for a piece of software which would be perfect for organizing story ideas and collaboration. The problem is that since this software doesn't exist yet we really can't use it. So, after doing some research on existing software, I came across an open source program called Celtx (pronounced kel-ticks).

Celtx, like Blender, is one of those programs that I previously downloaded but quickly dismissed because it wasn't exactly what I was looking for. But with time--and desperation--I gave it a second chance and started to like the software. In this case, I gave Celtx a try for no other reason then to see if Celtx will be a suitable substitute for my dream story-writing-program that doesn't exist yet, as well as deciding if it's worth bugging Bryan some more to get him to code it because there would be a huge demand for a program like that.

Celtx is designed for media production (film, plays, A/V, radio) and allows you to upload the project to their secure server called Project Central for collaboration. You can download the newest version of the project and upload changes. Unfortunately, it uploads the entire project at once, so only one person can be working on it at a time. It also takes a while to upload and download when you use storyboards or other large files in the project because you download the entire project as opposed to just the changes. The devs did say that they are planning on better collaboration tools, but collaboration isn't why I started using Celtx. I'm the only writer so I don't really need Project Central--heck, even on the wiki I was the only one writing--and even if we did have more than one writer we wouldn't put our work on someone else's server out of pure paranoia. If I want feedback I just send them the project or just a PDF of a script. As for realtime collaboration, VNC works just fine.

So far I've been using Celtx for two weeks rewriting the story and I can honestly say that I'm very pleased. I like being able to sort and rearrange the documents in my project however I want in a collapsible project tree, which is always visible on the sidebar. Scripts like screenplays and stageplays are automatically formated for you, and you are always in edit mode. Nothing is getting in the way of me organizing ideas and writing the story.

There's a basic storyboarding tool in Celtx as well. It's not robust enough for animatics: there's no sound or the ability to have variable timing for each frame. But it's not a bad system and we've already used it in a couple of projects.

There's one last thing I really like about Celtx. The .cetlx file format is a Zip file with each document saved as an HTML file, and any other file you've attached into the project is included as well. So if I decide to go back to using the wiki, or if we develop our own writing software, it'll be easy to convert the files. And even if the Celtx project dies, the content I've written will still be readable. There is a problem with compressing the entire project, of course. What if you are working on a huge project with tons of concept art and movie files? Decompressing a 500MB file every time you load the project could be a real drag. It would be nice if you had the option of saving the project as an uncompressed directory, only loading files when necessary.

Aside from the collaboration sucking, the primary problem I have with Celtx is how specialized it is for film as opposed to just writing. There's a lot of useless templates listed when you try to add a new document. Do I really need a list of 34 categories for things like animal handler, electrics, greenery and livestock if I'm doing a CG film? Yeah, I can see it being useful for a movie, but not for a writer. Fortunately, you can turn any of these off in the preferences, so that's not a big deal.

So instead of using these templates for various parts of the story, I've been creating folders full of text documents. It works just fine for me; I know writers who don't use fancy software at all for their work, just a text editor or word processor. I do however use Celtx's Character and Scene Details templates every once in a while because the templates may contain good questions such as, "What is the goal of the antagonist in this scene?" "How does the antagonist achieve this goal?" "What is the central event of this scene?" "How does this event affect the overall plot?" Those are some good reminders of things to consider when writing. It would be nice if I could make my own custom templates because there are other things I like to consider when writing scenes and developing characters, and I won't have to refer to my notes as much.

Celtx is designed with the assumption that you are working on a TV show or movie project. There aren't any tools that help you organize your ideas aside from the project tree on the sidebar. They do have index cards which allow you to rearrange scenes in a script, but not all writers want to use index cards in that way only.

Because I'm just writing a story and don't know for sure what the final medium is going to be, and since 80% of the documents in the project so far are just text documents, a lot of the features in Celtx seem like bloat. But again, that's only because of how I'm using it. And I don't mind.

With all of it's shortcomings when compared to my perfect and imaginary writing program, Celtx has nonetheless helped me as a writer since I started using it two weeks ago. The automatic screenplay formating has made writing dialog a lot of fun, I can finally organize files however I want, I don't need a fast internet connection to write efficiently, it works on all three major operating systems, and it's really simple and straight forward to use.

So if you are writing for film, I highly recommend using Celtx. If you are writing a novel and would like some way to organize all of these documents and have them easily accessible without using your operating system's file browser, I'd recommend Celtx as well. Now don't misunderstand, I'm not completely dumping wikis. But Celtx has been so useful for quickly coming up with ideas and organizing them that I'll probably use it for most of my projects until we need better collaboration at the expense of the interface.

AudioSurf Released

2008-02-17T19:16:00.006-07:00

Following up on my previous post about AudioSurf, the game was officially released on Steam a couple of days ago. It's $10, and a free demo is available.

So, go check it out.

Better Than Free: Piracy vs. Legitimacy.

2008-02-16T11:04:00.020-07:00

I came across a really good article today called Better Than Free written by Kevin Kelly. The article is about how something that may be free and infinitely abundant—referring to digital media—can still be valuable enough that people will pay for it, even though the law of supply and demand states that if something is in infinite supply it will cost nothing.

This made me think about how the ability to make perfect copies of digital media will affect the kind of work that I want to do. Every media industry that I can think of is complaining about piracy and how it's hurting their business: music, movies, video games, books, software, the list goes on and on. If it's so easy to get copies for free then why would anybody pay for it?

I've been thinking about this topic a lot over the past few years because our studio's primary form of distribution will be internet downloads. Trying to create the best possible product and cultivate a high level of trust with customers, while protecting our business model at the same time, is a tricky problem. If it's done poorly it can have disastrous results. Out of all the media companies I only know of a few that have done it well by our standards.

Currently the only solution to fixing the piracy problem, as far as the majority of media companies are concerned, is to make prefect digital copies harder to make through copyright protection (commonly referred to as digital rights management or DRM) and inflicting stiffer legal penalties for doing so. It's basically a lock and key approach with additional scare tactics to keep their business model working the way it has in the past. The problem with this strategy is that it only stops an extremely small amount of total piracy: casual piracy (although easy piracy would be a more accurate term). The other copyright infringers will still go through the same channels and their pirating experience will be the same as before. The copyright protection already been broken when they download it. Pirating isn't anymore difficult for them, just a little more challenging for those cracking the software.

So the only thing that copy protection really inconveniences are the crack teams who get praise and glory for being really clever, and the paying customers because of all the hoops they have to jump through in order to enjoy their media: DVDs not being playable in all operating systems, games requiring the original install discs be in the drive in order to play, 16 character CD keys, online activation, encrypted music and movie files restricted to "approved devices", PDF textbooks that expire and become unreadable after the semester is over, the list goes on an on. These are all things that legitimate customers have to deal with but the pirates do not. There's no copyright protection on the pirated copies. No DRM. There's nothing stopping you from making backups, editing, transcoding, reading or playing the file whenever you want, which makes the illegal copies more valuable than the legitimate ones. This phenomenon is referred to as the Better Than Original Vulnerability, and is why DRM in it's current state is grossly ineffective. To top it off, in order to get that more valuable product you don't have to pay anything for it.

Pay more for a defective product, or nothing for a better product. It's no wonder why piracy is so rampant.

There are however some characteristics that can't be copied. Kevin Kelly describes these as the 8 generatives: immediacy, being able to get something as soon as it's released; personalization, something that is custom made and that directly addresses your unique needs and wants; interpretation, documentation and training to make the product useful; authenticity, reliable media that is virus free and legal; accessibility, being able to access the product at any time and not have to worry about keeping back ups; embodiment, a physical reproduction, live performances or experiences with friends and family; patronage, the warm fuzzy of supporting artists by paying for their work; and findability, mind share, a work has to be known for it to be valuable.

These are all things that can't be copied that make something valuable and incidentally things that people pay a premium for. By taking a look at what the different media distribution services have to offer, you can gauge the quality of each service by how well it holds up to these generatives. So let's look at some examples in these terms.

Boxed video games contain the install discs, a manual and occasionally some extra goodies like posters or figurines. Many games use some kind of copyright protection system like SecuROM and a CD check which requires that the install disc be in the drive to be playable, even though all the game files have been copied onto the hard drive. In recent years the only way to get games on launch day from a large outlet like GameStop is to preorder it or try your luck elsewhere.

Authenticity, embodiment in the form of box art and figures, and patronage. That's 3 out of 8.

Let's compare that with Steam, Valve's online content distribution system. With Steam you can search for hundreds of new, classic, and out of print games. Immediately after purchasing you can start downloading the game from their high-speed servers, and in some cases preload the game so it'll be unlocked as soon as it's released. You can install Steam on any computer, log in, and download your purchased the games and play them so long as you are not already logged in elsewhere. There are no CD checks.

Immediacy, authenticity, accessibility, patronage and findability. That's 5 out of 8. As for the 3 missing points, the Steam Community does let you upload a custom icon representing you in online games and many of their games come with creation tools (personalization), Steam is very easy to use so documentation isn't really necessary but free support is available (interpretation). So already it's really close to having 7 out of 8 points. If Steam games had a network license, you could play with all your friends with just buying one copy (embodiment). That would give it all 8 points.

Let's look at the music industry for a minute. iTunes allows you to buy and quickly download songs and TV shows so you can play them on your computer using Apple software or other Apple devices. The price of albums is cheaper than retail and you can buy a single song for $0.99. iTunes is searchable and contains most new releases from the Big Four record labels.

Immediacy, authenticity and findability. That's 3 out of 8. The problem is that the files (except those in EMI's catalog at time of writing) have DRM, so backing them up properly is difficult and impossible if you don't know where the key file is, there's a limit on how many times you can do that, and the files are restricted so they'll only work on Apple approved devices. As far as patronage, the artists see very little from each sale.

Compared to CD Baby, the site lets you download MP3s or have the album shipped to you, you can redownload the MP3s again at any time, there's no DRM on either the downloads or the discs, the site is searchable by genre and similar (popular) bands, and the artists receive 91% of each sale. Each album on the site is also previewed and users can comment on the album, providing good feedback to help you make a buying decision, and free samples for each track on the CD are generally 2 minutes long.

Immediacy, interpretation, authenticity, accessibility, embodiment in the form of CDs, patronage and findability. That's a whopping 7 out of 8. It's missing personalization, which could be fixed by offering multiple audio format options like OGG or FLAC. The artists could also provide more instrumental versions of their songs, or even go as far as what Trent Reznor did when he released a GarageBand project file of "The Hand that Feeds" so fans could remix it.

With peer-to-peer networks you can search the database to find just about anything you want but it can be difficult to find obscure material. It can take a couple of days or even a week to download large files since you are downloading from users who are also sharing those files with others. Doing so is also illegal and it's easy for distribution companies to track you down. You may also be downloading viruses and/or malware with your pirated material. Movies are often leaked so downloading rips long before the official DVD release is possible. Cracked games let you play with friends without spending $60 per person. It is also possible to get translated versions of games and videos which have not been internationalized yet.

Personalization, accessibility, embodiment in the form of playing games with friends and findability. 4 out of 8. The only way that pirated copies can become more value is by taking out the legal risk, and I don't see that happening any time soon, and society and commerce would likely be doomed if we did.

What I've learned is that the thing most people find valuable about pirating is that it's easy to find things that are out of print, sold out, do not exist (e.g. English translations of anime) or have been repaired (e.g. CD checks removed from games, DRM free files). The fact that it's free is a plus for many people, but for those that have the money the benefits of not having to live in fear of getting caught or downloading viruses, and all the other generatives that come with buying legitimate copies are certainly worth the money and outweigh the benefits of piracy.

Understanding why people pirate media will help us understand what the industry is not offering customers and provide us with solutions about what can be done.

When there's no proper market for a certain good a black market appears. That's what happened with MP3s and Napster. Being able to download any song you want and get it in a portable digital format was not an option back then. It was a completely new method of getting music that the music industry didn't create themselves, didn't capitalize on after the technology and distribution methods where commonly used, and has been fighting the digital age ever since. The success of iTunes significantly encouraged industry adoption of digital downloads, but the record companies insisted on included DRM with the music files. Recently EMI finally listened to the many disgruntled customers (although it's more likely they listened to the open letter by Steve Jobs on DRM), and has finally starting offering customers what they've been pirating for years: a digital music file that isn't encrypted and can be played on any device.

It's hard to know how much money is lost due to piracy. It's claimed to be in the tens of billions, but it's argued that these figures are false because not every pirated copy is in fact a lost sale because many people would never pay for a copy either out of corporate rebellion, interest in the product, necessity, or available income.

It is also argued that pirating is actually good for the industry because more users will raise the popularity of the product. Pirates that "try out" the software might eventually buy it at a later time. This may be true in some or most cases, but certainly not in all, and it's impossible to really know what percentage of people will never buy a product.

Also, do these arguments have any truth or are they simply justification for breaking the law?

As someone that is planning on releasing shows, games and all kinds of other media online, here's where I currently stand on the issue. Assuming that there are people that pirate because they can't afford a legitimate copy or can afford it but won't, there's no point in going after that group. I have nothing to gain by preventing that particular group from viewing my work. Sure, we could go after them for damages and scare potential pirates from downloading our work for fear of legal action, but I don't know if it's financially worth it. I know for a fact that it would be bad PR. I can't take that chance without accurate information. The last thing I want is the same kind of customer backlash received by the RIAA as a result of their lawsuits.

What really needs to be done is to ensure that legitimate copies from our website are more valuable than the pirated ones. The first few generatives are freebies because piracy has automatic drawbacks. From our site you'll be able to get our media quicker and easier than any other source (provided our projects don't get leaked), you'll know that you are downloading the original high-quality versions of the show, you won't have to worry about viruses or malware, you can download the media in a variety of different formats that's best suited for your hardware and software, and of course you'll have the warm fuzzy of knowing that there's no middle man between your money and the artists who created it.

In addition to those freebies, our software won't have copyright protection, meaning that you can back them up and play them on your laptop without needing to worry about CD checks or going to a shady site for a no-CD crack, and you can redownload what you've purchased at any time.

We've also managed to come up with ways to address the interpretation, embodiment and personalization issues for digitally distributed media: videos, music, ebooks, games, and another significant category which I'll keep secret for now (the very name gives too much away, sorry). Those three generatives are the holy grails of digital distribution, and I haven't seen a company adhere to those values as well as they could. I'm not going to get into specifics because I like having hope for my future business endeavors, and our solutions haven't been put to the test yet so I could be giving bad advice. So I won't share with you our solutions but I will tell you the formula and part of our design process that brought us to our conclusions.

Listen to people. Listen to what they say they want, and what they don't say they want. You'll need to do some primary research and careful synthesis to understand what people want and are not getting: what their dreams are, and "what they want to do but can't," to quote part of our design process. Understand that there's more to life than entertainment, so don't design a product that's intended to be addictive. I'm serious. I've heard companies refer to that planned addictiveness as "our product will become the centerpiece of your lifestyle," and there are established methods on doing that, especially in the gaming industry. Again, there's more to the customer's lives than your product, so look outside of that field to come up with solutions to design problems. The solutions may be too unorthodox for executives and stock holders to approve, but remember that the only thing that makes a business successful is its customers and understanding their behavior.

Another important thing to consider when solving these problems is that your main competitor is not so much other companies that are in the same field as you, but what people spend their time doing. Time is not a replenishable resource, which is actually my primary concern with piracy. Even though a pirated copy doesn't necessarily mean a lost sale, people are spending their time on the pirated copy, time which could be used on something legitimate.

To me, the concept that we are in competition with people's time is a very dangerous one to consider, and we need discernment because it also means that we are in competition with healthy activities as well. Entertainment can take too much of people's lives, and I'm appalled at the overall contempt that most entertainment companies have over the well being of their patrons.

Consider what people should be spending their time doing and how your product is going to affect that. Are they going to be consumed by it? Is it going to make their lives better or do nothing for them? Can you make something that people will find enjoyable and makes their lives better? Again, learn about what people genuinely want or need and don't create a cheap substitute for it. Conventional marketing research probably isn't going to provide you with the information that you need because it's focused simply on sales, which are important, but ideally shouldn't dictate the product, just how its sold.

Going back to creating media with more value, Kevin missed some key generatives or values. One thing I believe he missed about embodiment is that data, as soon as it's decoded and displayed on the computer or played through the speakers, has actually obtained a level of embodiment. It's now information, imagery, sound, the same things that to our mind processes from events that we consider real, such as a live performance.

The social aspect of media is also important, like watching a movie with friends and talking about it afterward. The experience of a movie lasts longer than the running time of the film, and it's shared between more than one person. As with piracy, the activity is socially driven and has a strong community. So if we are going to create media that beats what piracy has to offer, then it too needs to be socially driven. Let people enjoy it with each other, allow them to share it to some extent, let them edit it, take part in the creative process, and make it clear that they have these rights. Again, consider"what do people want to do but can't."

Lastly, some of the most important values in media: the strength of concept, purpose, originality, emotional effect and aesthetic value. Is this piece of work something that people actually want to own? People are more likely to pay for something that is good than something that is artistic garbage. There are people that will buy something purely out of principle because they understand than in order to support someone's creative efforts we have to purchase it. That's why I love to buy independently created work; I want to support them so they make more.

One popular argument is that people wouldn't pirate as much if better media was being produced, saying "I would pay for that movie if it was worth buying." I think this is mostly rationalization, but people do have a habit of only buying the best DVDs and games out there. It's another issue of cost. A poorly made movie isn't worth $18, but a good one is.

While we are still on the subject of piracy, a recent Gamasutra article entitled Casual Games and Piracy: The Truth is the account of Reflexive's anti-piracy measures and how it affected sales. They claimed that 92% of people playing their games pirated it. What is interesting is they had a significant increase in sales by improving their copyright protection. From the article:

Below are the results of Reflexive.com sales and downloads immediately following each update:

Fix 1 – Existing Exploits & Keygens made obsolete – Sales up 70%, Downloads down 33%

Fix 2 – Existing Keygens made obsolete – Sales down slightly, Downloads flat

Fix 3 – Existing Cracks made obsolete – Sales flat, Downloads flat

Fix 4 – Keygens made game-specific – Sales up 13%, Downloads down 16% (note: fix made after the release of Ricochet Infinity)

From the results above, it seems clear that eliminating piracy through a stronger DRM can result in significantly increased sales–but sometimes it can have no benefit at all...

As we believe that we are decreasing the number of pirates downloading the game with our DRM fixes, combining the increased sales number together with the decreased downloads, we find 1 additional sale for every 1,000 less pirated downloads. Put another way, for every 1,000 pirated copies we eliminated, we created 1 additional sale.

What do I think about their results and conclusions? It's important to remember that correlation doesn't mean causation. Looking at the pattern, the most realistic scenario seems to be that the DRM fixes created an increase in sales because a lot of people, by that point in time, have already played the game and once it's more difficult to pirate, existing gamers decide to go ahead and pay the $20 to purchase it. The only other sales increase was when they released Ricochet Infinity before another fix, which seems to match with this theory of gamers first experiencing the game through piracy and then having to pay up.

Could it be better to have loose DRM in the game and when enough publicity has been generated by piracy we then tighten up the copyright protection, so we reap the benefits of pirated games increasing interest and giving those people that will eventually pay for the game a reason to do so by making their current copy or piracy methods non-functional?

Of course that is just a theory, and we'd have to do more research and experiment with that business model to really get a better understanding of customer's behavior. We can't trust the research that's currently being done because of bias. There are so many factors to take into account before you can know the best way to handle piracy: how easy is the media to pirate, how popular is it, how much does it cost, is the legitimate media defective by design, is it a high-quality product. All of these things have an effect, and what worked for Reflexive probably won't work for a bigger company like Electronic Arts.

So, what about making a product that is better than the pirated one? What about the 8 generatives and all those other ideas that I wrote about and kept to myself? What about your ideas? Will any of these things work?

I believe that they will, but the hard part is actually creating that kind of product. We are slowly working on that now, and I hope within the next 5 years we'll see the fruits of our labors. But we need to go out on a limb, put our necks on the line, our money on the table, and sacrifice for the first little while to create something worthy of purchasing instead of pirating because of the value it has and the additional rights it gives our patrons. Create something that the pirated copy can not duplicate, and do nothing that will make the pirated copy better.

One of our motivations for starting the studio and the ideology behind it is to set a bar for the rest of the industry. Basically, we are fed up with what's being created and how customers are treated, and if our ideas are successful then the rest of the industry will follow. We want to buy better games, better movies, and more of that special category that I don't want to talk about yet, more end user rights, and in the end a better lifestyle.

If you are already a content producer then you have a head start on us, so please use your influence to set the bar for the rest of the industry to follow. Your customers, including us, will love you for it.

The Structure of Man Primer

2008-02-07T00:06:00.002-07:00

Riven Phoenix's The Structure of Man series, which I've evangelized ever since I received my copy of the DVD set, has to be the best and most affordable (US$45) way to learn how to draw people from memory. Since leaving Rexburg I've had more time to continue watching the series--finally; I've owned it for about 9 months with not enough time to watch it until recently.

When I initially started The Structure of Man series I went through the first 19 videos with pencil and paper rather quickly, but then I realized that my final sketches didn't show much of the process of how I got to the final. All the important stuff that the video series is teaching, like the simplified angles and proportions that make up the human body were gone when I started rendering. I could watch the video over and over again until I memorized the formulas, but all I needed was some kind of primer that had all the formulas down on paper as a quick and complete reference.

That gave me the idea of creating a primer for the series. I wanted to keep more than just the final sketches as reference, I wanted to save the whole process. So I started the series over, drawing every sketch in Photoshop to use layers to save every phase of the drawing. So far it's become a massively helpful reference for me and my friends who have also been going through the series.

Another reason why I'm putting this together is that I haven't found a really good reference book that shows you the formulas of how to draw the human body in bite-sized chucks. Riven Phoenix has a great method of teaching so you'll remember all of the proportions. But it's a video series, not a quick reference book. Most books on this subject only show what the final drawing should look like, which isn't very helpful for someone trying to learn all of the proportions of the human body. Other anatomy books show too much information, so The Structure of Man has been an excellent substitute.

I probably won't release the primer to the public with respect to the creator; the primer is meant to have every step of the video series laid out on the page so that it would be possible to learn everything in the video series without actually watching the videos. So I'll have to ask him for permission. The primer does include supplemental pages of photographs and illustrations on anatomy because I'm planning on making it my one-stop resource for anatomy reference after I'm done with it.

I just finished video 38, which had a really clever way of describing the structure of the pelvic bone. Riven always shows you the concept of a structure so you can understand it before he goes into the formulas. So here's the process of how he explained the structure of the pelvic bone in it's GIF animated glory.

If you are interested, go buy The Structure of Man. He also just released another short video series called The Sketch Book of Drawing Techniques. I haven't purchased that DVD yet, but it's probably worth watching.

Humor Sketch 0001: OLPC Jolly Roger

2008-02-05T00:52:00.002-07:00

Pentagram, I apologize in advance.

Is it just me or does the OLPC logo look like an abstracted and friendlier version of the Skull and Crossbones? I just noticed that the other day, and the thought of seeing it used as a Jolly Roger was funny enough that it needed a sketch.

We've been putting more work into making fast 2D games for the OLPC. Right now we don't have direct access to the XO-1's hardware; we'd have to write some drivers to do that. For now we are going to try and see what we can do without hacking the thing. We might consider writing the driver if we feel it's going to be worth the trouble and research. As for me, I'm just glad that I'm the art guy.

Anyway, enjoy the image. It's at a decent resolution this time.

Wonder and Style Boards

2008-02-04T12:00:00.022-07:00

Here's an a assignment from my motion design class. The goal was to take an emotion and create a motion piece that included text from the dictionary definition. Blender was used for animation while After Effects where used for compositing and bloom effects. The song used is Illusion of Love (bipolar remix) by Darkhalo.

>> Watch this video streamed in HD (720p)

The main purpose of this motion design assignment was to create and use style boards. The process of creating a motion piece--after the design brief and writing is done--is to create the storyboards, key art, style boards, and then go into production. The storyboards are rough sketches showing the action of the animation, the approved concept art is refined into key art, and from there you create what are called style boards. These are still images that show what the final shot should look like. Style boards don't need as many panels as storyboarding does, but in the case of this assignment we did to get practice creating them.

This image shows what I came up with as the style boards for Wonder. At this point the rose is CG but everything else was photoshopped. My final animation needed to look like this, which actually wasn't that hard because all of the art assets were done: the rose and the aurora. It only took me an evening to animate and render the final shots. After that it was a couple of hours in the lab with After Effects to composite everything and add the bloom.

The great thing about doing style boards, aside from good production practice, is that it really gives the client a clear understanding of what the final will look like before production begins. If the final version doesn't waiver at all from the style boards the client will be happy because it was exactly what they were expecting. Also, seeing the style boards go from stills to motion is so magical that it often exceeds the client's expectations.

Touch the Table Video

2008-02-01T16:34:00.003-07:00

I decided to go ahead and start posting some of my video files from previous projects. I'll start with this one from my BFA final project called Touch the Table. It's an interactive gallery exhibit where you are encouraged to touch the art. The art interacts with your hand by projecting 6 different effects onto it.

For more detailed information about it, here's the temporary Touch the Table page hosted on the temporary Lumaglyph web site. Yup, that's the name of our studio.

Thoughts on Independent Music

2008-01-29T09:28:00.001-07:00

Before I turned to graphic arts my studies and hobbies were in music composition. Like everyone else in the demomusic scene I released music for free and competed in contests like MC6 and 30 minute compos on #trax. I don't compose much anymore but I still have a great love of music and the people who have the craft to do it well.

I've been very passionate about independent music over the past couple of years since understanding more about the current state of the record industry. I'm not going to rant too much about this, and I don't think I need to because a lot of people would agree that the situation in the industry, for both artists and fans, is pretty abysmal. This doesn't have as much to do with the RIAA, it's about what artists under a record label have to go through; the record industry doesn't try to make music as much as they try to make celebrities.

This is why I've become so passionate about the independent music scene. I still consider myself part of it, even though I've been on sabbatical from it for 6 years, and I'm thrilled to see artists, especially those that where my peers from the demomusic scene like Andrew Sega (Necros) and Alexander Brandon (Siren), continue to create music and get paid for it. And as a side note, this is part of the reason why I loved the Unreal series so much; both of those artists created the soundtrack for it.

I love to see those artists succeed. I love it when artists have the copyright to their work and can be compensated fairly for it, or release songs for free or under a creative commons license. Like most geeks with my mindset about the entertainment industry, I buy most of the things I do purely out of principle because I want to support what it stands for.

The studio we are starting is built upon the philosophy of independence, so it's something all of us here really care about. We've seen too many good TV shows get canceled, franchises getting ruined by bad films/games/etc., ineffective distribution and draconian methods of enforcing copyright law. We have come to the conclusion that if we want to make the kind of entertainment that people genuinely want we have to remain independent. We believe that independent entertainment companies and individual artists are going to become very important and more mainstream, and we want to promote good independent work in all areas of the arts. That's why licensed music from our shows are going to be from independent artists.

Going back to the indie music scene, there are a couple of problems that I've had with it, one is finding great indie music and the other is how to create better indie music.

Finding Good Independent Music
It started with me trying to find new bands to listen to. Pandora was a great free resource because I could just input a song, band or genre and it would generate a custom channel that plays songs similar to it. But most of the songs that show up in my play list are top 40 songs or have been at some point, and it plays some dud songs which fortunately are skippable up to a certain number of skips per hour.

The good news is that I do occasionally come across new bands that I like, but they are not indie. Then there's Jamendo. It's all creative commons music that you can download or stream music completely for free, and if you like the band you can make a donation through the Jamendo web site. I found out about Jamendo through Rhythmbox, which can easily be installed with your favorite Linux distro. At first I made the mistake of browsing through the entire Jamendo playlist of songs, searching by genre, to find new music. After about an hour I came across one trance artist that actually had decent sounding music. It was good enough to download but it had the same production quality as some of the better demoscene music.

My recommendation with using Jamendo is to see what's featured on the front page of their website (not the random album reel at the bottom), and browse the database sorted by popularity. Even then it's still hit and miss, but you do come across albums with high production value and are well composed. Also, a lot of the songs are not in English, which is actually pretty cool.

Lastly there's CD Baby, which has provided me with the best indie music I've heard. Every album is reviewed and searching for top sellers always turns up great music. It's not free like Pandora or Jamendo, but the samples for each song are usually about a minute or more, and you can buy the albums as MP3 or have the CDs mailed to you in a timely manner. So far I've been more than happy to dish out the money for these CDs, and knowing that the artist receives 91% of what I payed for the album is great. So far I've found CD Baby to be the best way to not only find great indie music, but also support it.

How to Make the Independent Music Scene Better
The business model for indie music is fine for the state it's in right now. Thanks to digital distribution just about anything is possible now, and any number of people can get the music. Because the indie scene is more agile than large record labels, they'll jump on better business models way quicker. Getting the word out for these bands is the best thing we can do right now. By the way, Iris' newest album Wrath is awesome. It's a hybrid of electronica and rock, sounds awesome and is totally worth the money. Oh, and Celldweller is some of the best industrial metal music I've heard in a long time. There. I did my part for today.

The thing I'd like to see is a larger quantity of great indie music. From my past experience, I would have been better off if I had some training on mastering music for CDs. It wasn't until I read an article written for professionals where I started to pick up on things like what levels each frequency band should be at, compression (dynamic range, not data), hard limiting, and other things that you need to know about making a good master. Unfortunately, by that point I had already started college and didn't compose much. I was able to remaster my songs after I learned more about it (you can listen to the remastered versions of those songs on the music portion of my website), but since some of the mixes was bad to begin with there wasn't a whole lot I could do to fix it.

Also, the tools to create good music are way too expensive. When I started composing music in High School I talked to several professional composers to learn as much as I could about the craft. Their home studios amazed me, they had so much more equipment compared to my studio at home (as shown in the introductory image for this article). I was told by one of these composers that buying gear is a monetary black hole; you can put an infinite amount of money into buying synths and samples discs but you'll never quench your thirst for new sounds. You'll always feel that you don't have enough. This is probably why I stuck with techno music because with Buzz Tracker and software synthesis I can make any sound in my head so long as it's electronic.

The only gear I had was an Alesis QS6, a MIDI controller (which I only used for live performances), Impulse Tracker and later Buzz Tracker which gave me the software synthesis. It wasn't until my first week of college where I actually bought Cool Edit Pro 2 (now known as Adobe Audition) for $300, which I still use today for all my audio work. Simply adding a great multi-track audio editor to my arsenal significantly improved the quality of my music, first in the mastering stage and now during the whole process where all of the musical parts are assembled, mixed, and mastered with Cool Edit (the CMC Ad soundtrack was done using this method). Buzz tracker and my QS6 was great and I made some pretty good stuff with it, but what I really needed was a good sound editor.

I haven't used Buzz Tracker in a while because it's outdated, had to be hacked to get it to work in Windows XP, and I haven't found a good replacement for Buzz yet. There are a bunch of Buzz clones out there but they are all in very different stages of development and activity. If I wanted a Buzz replacement, Propellerhead's Reason would be the way to go except that it's US$500. Now for finding a free multi-track editing program, Audacity is underpowered, and Ardour is--well, I haven't actually figured it out yet. Linux audio is a huge pain to set up so it's not Ardour's fault, which is a shame because Jack is such a great idea. Installing Ubuntu Studio should help, assuming that all that audio stuff is set up properly.

To my knowledge there's no completely free or at least low-cost way for making studio-quality music, unless you are creating electronica. Then all you need is Buzz Tracker and a few good drum samples which are available for free. If you don't want to do electronica and step up to the new age genre you'll need a Roland, Korg, or some other comparable synth and a few world music sample discs (about US$60-100 each). If you want to record anything acoustic you'll need to get good instruments to play on, a soundcard with a good signal-to-noise ratio for recording, dynamic and/or condensers mics depending on what you're recording, and a room with good acoustics to boot. After getting whatever recording and editing software of your choice, free or not, you've already spent a lot of money just to be able to record music that can be played from a stereo system and not sound like garbage, or at least so that only audiophiles will think it's garbage. To top it off you need the knowledge to do all of this correctly and make sure you're not spending money on gear you don't need. If you don't, then your songs will sound like recordings of music played in a bedroom with a tape recorder. And there's a lot of that kind of music on Jamendo, which is a shame because some of those musicians are great composers and performers, and I probably would have probably paid for their music if the recording quality was better.

You'll still be surprised by the quality of music you can actually produce with very little money--some people just don't know how to create good stuff with what they have. The problem is that the cost of entry for creating good music, or even creating passable techno and new age albums, seem to be the highest for music than any other creative hobby that I can think of.

Think about it. If a writer wants to publish their work, all they need is a word processor and a web site. Word processors are free (OpenOffice.org) and a web sites are cheap, not to mention there are places to submit your work like Orson Scott Card's e-magazine InterGalactic Medicine Show. For illustration all you need is pencil, paper, a $30 scanner, a $60 tablet, The Gimp, and then post your work on deviantART. For programming the GCC compiler is free and your project can be hosted on Source Forge. Even photography is pretty cheap to get into with digital cameras and sites like PhotoBucket and Google's Picasa. Even 3D animation and film are cheap to get into and share with people with things like Blender, Kino, and sites like YouTube.

I don't know what can be done to make music production cheaper, aside from better open source or "free as in beer" software. Good training resources would have helped me a lot in the beginning, and would still help me now if I threw myself back into music composition. Sequencing, soft synths, mastering, and recording are pretty complicated and have taken me years to understand even on my level. I've been working with a few sites such as the Blender Foundation, ShowMeDo, and a new site called Guerrilla CG that focuses on giving quality free training for 3D animation which is a very complex subject. I don't see why something like that can't be done for sequencing and sound engineering as well.

Something that would also be nice is to have affordable studios that you can rent. Self-service studios possibly? Software and hardware is getting cheaper, so smaller studios that can be used by independent musicians that would only cost $65 a day instead of $65 or more an hour.

A lot of things are going to change over the next decade in the music industry. I'm confident that a lot of the struggles that people have with creating music independently are going to be resolved during that time. That is unless the conspiracy theories about the music industry shutting down guitar tab sites are true, which is that they want to keep people from learning how to play guitar so that making music takes on the mystique of a black art that only the established music industry can create.

Either way, the independent music scene has a huge drive to create and release their music to as many people as possible, and I can't wait to see what the scene will come up with next.

Leaving the Moo Moo Farm

2008-01-27T10:18:00.001-07:00

Bryan and I just finished playing through Diablo II: Lord of Destruction yesterday. We even went to The Secret Cow Level.

"Moo."

This was the first time I played any of the Diablo games. I'll have to admit that I was never interested in playing Diablo until recently. Over the past few weeks I've been undergoing a sort of game education regime. We are planning on creating a strategy game in the near future (hilarious, simple, and hopefully commercially successful), and since I'm not a strategy game buff I needed to do some research, which of course means playing games. Recently I've been playing all kinds of strategy games, in particular Supreme Commander which has become our favored subject in honing the strategy/micro-managing portion of my brain.

During this time we've been simultaneously working on creating a rendering engine for the OLPC, and since most of our good game ideas would require some kind of 3D graphics or advanced 2D graphics rendering techniques, we turned to past games and demoscene demos to see what was capable a decade ago. The OLPC has a slow processor, no 3D acceleration and a lot of system overhead, so seeing what was still possible on old hardware is advantageous. We pulled out MindCandy and looked at 3D games like Quake and Quake 2 that used software rendering. During this time we had the thought of playing through Diablo II. It's not a strategy game but it was in the era of games that we were looking for in technical achievements. To top it off it was the only Blizzard game I haven't played, and from what I've heard very influential and a good game to boot.

I was actually quite impressed with the 3D-ish mode of the game. Diablo has an isometric viewpoint where all of the graphics are 2D images (sprites), but in Diablo II they also added an extra 3D mode that provided subtle perspective to the viewport. It was subtle enough to not look completely fake, but being able to see trees and architecture move past in parallax made the game fell 3D without the inconveniences of developing the real thing. It also kept the visual style of the game unified, even though the visual style was rather stale (both the characters and scenery where rendered with those lousy black shadows). But compared to games like Ragnarok Online that also mixed 2D with 3D, I feel that Diablo II, a much older game, did a better job. All of the art assets in Diablo where 2D, created and rendered the same way. Ragnarok had real time 3D rendered environments but the 2D characters were sprites drawn in the anime style. I had it's charm but it wasn't seamless. When I played the beta I couldn't help but think about the two independent sprites (head and body) that represented my character in an obviously 3D rendered world. If the world was also built of sprites, painted in the same style as the characters, and add that little bit of 3D perspective, it would have looked more unified, be just as playable and probably wouldn't have taken any more time to create, maybe even less.

The other thing I noticed about Diablo is how much World of Warcraft is like it. It was all there: the spell lists, the quest items, the inventory, the recipes, the one-click combat, the grinding--it even felt like playing WoW. Diablo II was meant to be played online, so it's not too far of a stretch to understand how the Diablo concept went MMO. And it did, but Warcraft was a better franchise to use than Diablo.

What I did like about Diablo, aside from that 3D trick, is that you can play the entire game with your friends using a LAN and have the entire game separate from all those 15 year-old Alliance r-tards. I really hope that more class-based questing games would let you play on your own private or LAN server, independent of the internet elite/degenerate, and just enjoy the game.

I guess we should get working on that.

Audiosurf: First Impressions

2008-01-20T12:38:00.001-07:00

I came across this little gem of a game called Audiosurf a couple of weeks ago. It's a finalist at this year's Independent Games Festival. Today I participated in the beta weekend so I was able to play it for the first time.

The thing that drew me to Audiosurf, aside from it being an independent title, is that it's a puzzle game where each stage is generated from music files on your computer, and the same songs become the soundtrack for the stage. The speed and difficulty change with the intensity of the music you provided, and the blocks appear to the beat of the music. This works really well when you play songs that have a strong beat and lots of dynamics.

The way the puzzle works is you have to run over a block to put in on the board. The block falls in the corresponding lane (column) on the grid. To remove blocks and to get points you need 3 blocks of the same color touching each other in any configuration. Red blocks are worth the most points while the cooler-colored blocks (orange, yellow, all the way down to violet) are worth less. So picking and choosing is an important part of the game. If you don't want to put a block down you have to dodge it while you race down the track. There are special blocks as well that can do some interesting things like paint your board all one color or rearrange them. This is the Pointman mode (shown above) and seems to be the root of all the other game modes in Audiosurf.

The Mono mode (shown to the left), is very simple. It plays more like a very shallow arcade-style racer than a puzzler, because with no other block colors placement doesn't matter; you just have to dodge the bad gray blocks. Then you have modes like Pusher, which gives you the option to push the blocks either left or right as you run over them while holding down the left or right mouse button respectively, making the mechanic of running over blocks to drop them on the board much more interesting. There are other modes, like Eraser, Vegas, Ninja and Double Vision (co-op) that I unfortunately wasn't able to play during the beta.

Because of that, it's hard to say if the puzzle aspect of the game is going to last longer than the novelty of how music is used. The public beta ended soon after I got to take these screenshots, so I wasn't able to capture any gameplay footage either (the beta requires confirmation with their server, so it's not playable now). Judging by the limited nature of the beta, you'll probably have to pay for the game because I can't think of any other reason for them to handle it that way. The game is scheduled to be released next month. I'll probably buy it out of principle because it's a great idea for a game and it's independently produced. In fact it's one of the best indie games I've seen in a while, and I'd like to see more of this kind of work. Vote with your dollars, right?

Speaking of which, if you are interested in other indie games, you should consider checking out Aquaria, and Armadillo Run. Both are great games.

Anyway, here's some video footage from the game courtesy of YouTube. For a perfect example of how the music works with the game, fast forward to 6:22 and watch what happens when the music gets wild.

Architecture Sketch 0001: Test Background

2008-01-07T21:33:00.002-07:00

Bryan and I are working on making games for the OLPC, the $200 laptop that's being sent to developing countries to get technology into children's hands. The display on the laptop is really clever. I'm not going to take the time to explain it, so you'll have to visit the Wikipedia entry for the OLPC XO-1 to read about the display. But in short, we are rendering our sprite graphics at 400x300, a third of the vertical and horizontal resolution of the display so there's no color distortion for each pixel in color mode.

Since we have just started working on the sprite engine for the game, Bryan asked me for a 400x300 test image so we have a colored backdrop to test the transparency of the sprites. I went a little overboard and spent about an hour and a half working on this. But it was fun and I got to try some architecture, which I really want to do more of.

So here it is, the first image in my Sketchbook Series. I'll post sketches that I've finished here. Of course I can't post all of my sketches, just the ones I do for fun. However, when a project is finished I'll likely start posting sketches for those as well.

Unreal Tournament 3 Disappointing

2008-01-04T21:36:00.001-07:00

I've been a long-time fan of the Unreal series by Epic Games since its debut in 1998. I can recall countless LAN parties where we played the original Unreal Tournament, Unreal Tournament 2003 and Unreal Tournament 2004. I can even attribute the Audigy2 ZS that's in my computer right now from playing UT2004 competitively. Let's just say that I'm a fan.

When I first saw the screenshots for Unreal Tournament 3 back in August 2005 I was really excited, not to mention worried that I wouldn't have a computer beefy enough to play it when the time came. Over the years I actually lost interest in UT3 and Epic Games because of their new direction to gaming that became vividly apparent at E3 2006. In the meantime Nintendo and Valve caught my interest, and I had all but forgotten about UT3 until the demo was announced a few months ago.

UT3 is out now, and as a UT fan I hate to say that I actually feel let down by the game.

There's a few reasons for this. First, the game hasn't changed much since UT2004 and has almost the exact same weapons and vehicles (with the addition of Necris set of vehicles). Epic combined the Assault and Onslaught game modes and left out Invasion, Mutant, Bombing Run, Last Man Standing, Domination and Double Domination. The art direction is explosively-ornate (which I'll write more about soon in my critique of the visual style of this and other games), and to top it off, the story mode for the single player campaign is ridiculous.

Previously you played a character competing in the Liandri Tournaments. This made the game mechanics and diverse environments make perfect sense, and gave Unreal Tournament a unique style that wasn't common at the time.

In UT3 however, instead of the player competing in a tournament, you are actually at war with the Necris. And that's where it immediately gets odd because the format is the same: you have Deathmatch and Capture the Flag games with respawning and everything. They clumsily explained why there are respawners and Capture the FLaG (Field Lattice Generators) matches in a serious sci-fi war in an attempt to tie in a paper-thin revenge plot into what's supposed to be the single player campaign for a multiplayer game.

I'm not sure why they decided to do that. The whole point of a single player campaign for a game like Unreal Tournament or Quake 3 Arena is to train people how to play it online. Maybe they wanted to somehow ride their success of Gears of War and add a macho storyline to Unreal Tournament, or to try something new as opposed to a succession of knockout tournaments.

Whatever their reasoning was, the single player campaign was disappointing and embarrassing, like the way Malcom was depicted and the FLaG gag to name a few. I can't help but wonder if they really cared about the franchise at all when they did that. I still can't get over it--capture the flag, and this is supposed to be a serious war? If they really wanted to bring in a great story into Unreal Tournament, they should have at least took some cues from other sports movies like Rocky or even The Karate Kid that made the stakes of winning the tournament higher than just the title.

In all honesty though, after keeping an eye on Epic for all these years, what they did with UT3 actually didn't surprise me at all.

Is the game bad? No. UT3 multiplayer plays almost the same as UT2004 with a new engine. But that's really all it is to me, and I've already played UT2004 to death. UT3 came to me long after I started looking for something new, which in the intermeaning time included Counter-Strike: Source and Freespace 2. But if you still like to play UT2004, you should get its sequel.

My Work: CMC Ad Web Video

2007-12-24T09:15:00.005-07:00

This gives me an excuse to try out uploading videos to the blog. Here's the ads in their squint-o-vision glory (links to HD video and soundtrack downloads are in the previous post).

Edit: I started using Vimeo, so now you can click on the links below the ad to watch it streamed in HD from their web site. Enjoy!

>> Watch this video streamed in HD (720p)

>> Watch this video streamed in HD (720p)

My Work: CMC Ad Process

2007-12-21T15:03:00.002-07:00

Here are the links to the Computer Medical Center Ad we just finished.

CMC Ad 1: 720p, MP4/H264/AAC, 23.8 MB
CMC Ad 2: 720p, MP4/H264/AAC, 24.3 MB
Music Track: MP3, 192kbit
Music Track: OGG, 192kbit

All content is copyrighted by Computer Medical Center.

Credits
Studio: Lumaglyph
Creative Director and Designer: Glen Moyes
Storyboard Artist: Shaun Williams
Animation: Adam Weber, Glen Moyes
Photography: Meggan Hayes
Music: Glen Moyes (composition and engineering), Aaron Pike (composition), Shane Hunt (guitar)

Design Process
The goal for the TV spot was to create an ad on a tight budget that didn't look local. The ad is going to be shown in movie theaters locally and on cable TV, so we wanted to create an ad that is entertaining, communicates what Computer Medical Center does and sets it apart from the competition. The game piece concept worked very well to achieve this, and all within budget.

For the second half of the ad, we decided to use photography in motion as opposed to video footage because of the cost and visual quality. The photography actually wasn't taken inside of a studio; it was at their Rexburg location. With photography it's easier to create studio quality imagery; removing a doorway here, changing the lighting there, as well as touching up other imperfections. For example, the final photo with the woman holding her laptop was taken outside while it was snowing. I used Photoshop to clean it up so it looked like a studio shot.

Production Process
We used Blender for the game pieces and After Effects for compositing and motion graphics. Each 3D shot was actually rendered in 3-5 layers. We used Photoshop's batch processing to add a thicker outline around the characters for the close up shots.

Rendering in passes let us make a lot of last minute changes to each shot. For example, the greedy character in the second ad was actually painted white, and had a orange background. There wasn't enough of a distinct connection between the character as he appeared in the first scene and the last, so we made the background black, painted him gold, added sparkles, and gave him a gold tooth all within After Effects.

The music was created using Cubasis for MIDI sequencing, Cool Edit Pro 2 for everything else, my Alesis QS6 as the instruments and Shane Hunt's mad electric guitar skills. The quality of the music was actually one of the big concerns that the client had, and it was one of my concerns because it's been so long since I've composed music, and never in this style (if you listen to my old music it's mostly electronica). We hired Aaron Pike to assist us in the composition process, which really helped us create a score with the right feel for the ad.

All of the sound effects are original. The explosion sound was actually me blowing into the mic. The computer crashing sound was created with real computer parts being dropped down onto a piece of leftover plywood from the Touch the Table project. If you listen closely, you can actually hear the tapping of the characters as they walk by. The tapping sound was created by using the same rotary lead pointer that we used a prop to illustrate how the characters would walk.

Postmortem
This was our first completed animation project as a studio, so we learned quite a bit about working with Blender.

The part of production that took the most time was the animation. We spent a lot of time making sure that the walk cycles were perfect. It did take us some time to get used to the walk cycle tools in Blender, but we eventually got it down.

We also learned some interesting things about using Blender in a collaborative environment. Linking always seemed to be an issue (typically user error by me), especially with the sequence editor where none of the links are relative. Fortunately I was the only one working on the compositing so that wouldn't have been an issue, but I decided to use After Effects for that task anyway because compositing was more direct. Note to Blender Foundation: make all links relative by default; that will solve a lot of problems. Also, being able to control the thickness of the lines in edge rendering would have been helpful. In 720p those lines are really thin, but we used Photoshop's batch processing to fix that.

Despite those small things, Blender was more than sufficient for this project, and we were able to render the entire ad very quickly on just one computer.

The music was actually my favorite part of the whole project. This was the first time I've used Cubasis as part of my process and had an electric guitar in my music, which I've always wanted to do. The final music is fantastic. That gave us a lot of confidence in our ability to produce soundtracks in the future. It made me remember what I liked about music in the first place, so I'm definitely going to pick up music composition as a hobby again.

In short, the ad was very successful, and we can't wait to see it in the theaters and on TV.

The CMC Ad is Finished

2007-12-14T01:55:00.001-07:00

It's 1:57 a.m. and I just finished making some last minute changes to the Computer Medical Center ad. The last frame has been rendered; it is finished. The ad is awesome. The visuals are awesome. Even the original soundtrack is awesome.

I'll do a postmortem on the project as well as post links to the ad because it's awesome. But for now I can sleep and life can return to normal—wait, I have to move day after tomorrow.

Crap.

Cintiq 12WX

2007-12-12T20:31:00.001-07:00

I just checked one of my junk mail accounts, and received a pleasant announcement from Wacom. They just released something called the Cintiq 12WX. It's a smaller, and much cheaper model of in the Cintiq family.

Now, it's been my illustrator fantasy to own a Cintiq, or at least be able to play with one. Fortunately at Siggraph 2007 I got that opportunity.

The Cintiq 21UX I played around with was a US$2499 piece of equipment. That's a lot of value for the bastard child of an LCD screen and a tablet to live up to. After I used it for about an hour, it almost lived up to my expectations. Yes, drawing with it is much easier, is way more natural, and the pen tilt is easier to visualize (which is really handy because I use a lot of calligraphy brushes).

However, I'm not used to having my arm cover the image I'm working on. This makes right-clicking unusual at first because the menu appears directly underneath your hand. Also, when I'm using something that resembles pen and paper, I'm expecting the ink to come directly from the stylus. If you calibrate your screen and never move your head (or the Cintiq), then that's not a problem. But you always move your head and tilt the Cintiq, so registration always seems a little off. Adding small details was a bit trickier with the Cintiq, as opposed to using my tablet, because of registration problems and my hand covering the image. After a while I learned to look at the cursor instead of the tip of the stylus, and that helped. The latency is also more apparent. There would be times where the stylus tip would be an inch ahead of the Photoshop brush. But that was only when I was drawing quickly.

Everything I just listed are all very minor problems that I quickly got adjusted to. Comparing the adjustments that I had to make when I first started using the Wacom tablets, I'd say it would be worth the US$2499, and especially the Cintiq 20WXSX at US$1999, provided that you could afford it. But those are not the only problems and they are not as trivial.

The Cintiq is huge! Even rotating the thing, which is really nice to be able to do when you are drawing, is difficult. There are two cables that plug into the back (DVI and power) that get in the way if you rotate it at a certain angle. And there isn't much room for a keyboard on the desk. Yes, no room for a keyboard if you want to work comfortably. You could set the Cintiq upright and use it like drawing on an upright monitor, but your arms get tired, and I like having the drawing surface a lower and a closer. It's also way too big to have in your lap comfortably. If I didn't use keyboard shortcuts this wouldn't be a problem, but it is.

So that was my big issue with it; it was too big. Too big for easy rotation and lap comfort, and no room for a keyboard, which I can't work as quickly without.

Then I received the email about this Cintiq 12WX. It's only 4.4 pounds, as thin as the tablets, has a 1280x800 wide screen display, and the tablet/stylus is just as feature-full as the other Cintiqs. The only difference I can tell is that the model number for the stylus is ZP-501ESE. Notice the appended SE. I'm not sure if that's a better or worse model than the ZP-501E that the other Cintiqs have, but it has the same technical specifications.

Because of the size, it doesn't have the same problems I had with the 21UX. To top it off, it's only $999.

The only foreseeable downside with the 12WX is also the size. Not because it's too big, but--as the same suggests--it's a 12" screen. That puts it at the size of the Intuos3 6x11. Basically I'd be upgrading my current Intuos2 6x8 to a Cintiq 6x11. A difference of $700. This is the part where I ask myself if it's worth it.

So just before I finish proofreading this blog post and go to bed, I pick up my Intous2, put it in my lap, and imagine that I'm drawing on a tablet that's 3 inches wider and has a screen that I can draw directly onto. My hand sits comfortable on the home row of the keyboard, performing shortcuts with ease. Then I realize that I could totally move this thing over to my drafting table and start using it. Or, I could even lay down in bed and draw ideas out as if it was a sketch book. I wouldn't even need a book light. Hey, this thing could totally fit in my backpack too.

$999 isn't so bad.

Update: When we went to SIGGRAPH 2008 we spoke with the guys at the Wacom booth regarding the problem with cables getting in the way and not having enough desk space, he said that many artists attach their Cintiq to a desk mount arm. He recommended the Ergotron brand. I know someone who now owns a Cintiq 12WX and a desk mount arm and he loves it.

Blender's Fur Simulation

2007-12-12T09:33:00.002-07:00

Wow. The Peach Project has done some amazing work adding features to Blender in just about every area: Python constraints, mesh deform modifiers, and fur simulation.

This morning before I went to the gym, Adam (our lead Blender guy) showed me an SVN build he compiled that had the new hair/fur rendering and grooming features in Blender. The grooming features were pretty cool, but I was most impressed over sheer speed that the hair strands were rendered.

Later this morning I checked the Peach blog and they showed their work-in-progress of the new hair simulation for their characters. I was floored. This is Pixar quality stuff!

This image is a screenshot from a test video (OGG Theora) they put together showing the character in motion with the fur simulation. The Peach team reported that Blender can now "render 2 million hairs in HD resolution in about one minute." Gamera, the chinchilla character shown in the image, has 1.5 million hairs.

I can't wait to get my hands on this newest version of Blender. Hats off to the Peach developers. Read the rest of their blog post for more information.

"Design Reboot"

2007-12-07T22:51:00.001-07:00

This came out on November 29, and it's one of the best lectures on game design I've listened to. It's called "Design Reboot" and it was given by Jonathan Blow at the Montreal International Game Summit 2007. If you go to the page on his blog about the lecture, there's a link to the Zip file that contains the MP3 and the PowerPoint presentation.

He talks about what games really are, what they can teach you, why game designers lack discernment, and architecting vs. exploring in game design. I highly recommend this talk because it's a surprisingly truthful analysis of game design. Jonathan said everything that I've been wanting to tell the industry over the past 6 months, was in a position to do so, and told me some things that I didn't know.

I'll do a summary of his talk and interject a few things of my own towards the end of this very long post, but first I should start this out with some of research I've been gathering on the subject prior to when Jonathan's talk was given.

Research
I've been doing a lot of research on game design over the past year. Recently I've been very careful about my sources of research once I realized how many lectures at GDC and similar conferences are simply the ego strokings of the developers; no fundamental principles or laws of game design, just a bunch of, "Here are some of the cool design decisions that made our game so very successful." Unfortunately, they often don't explain their reasoning for those design decisions, just that it was cool and it worked. No theory. No teaching. Just showing off.

Even when the lecturer is trying their best to teach actual principles of game design, it's usually just a regurgitated list of game mechanics from previous games that have worked in the past and have proven to be fun. I believe this is largely due to how young the medium is. We really don't know what games are capable of yet, much like the film makers in the first 30 years of motion pictures when cinematography was barely in it's infancy.

However, I know that video games are going to turn into something significant to our culture in the same way other media have before it. So what are video games really and what are they capable of?

From my own personal observations, I've learned this: games are instructional design.

While working with the Academic Technology department I studied instructional design as part of my job, and one day it dawned on me that video games are in fact instructional design. A good game teaches you a series of tasks that you'll need to be good at in order to beat the boss at the end of the dungeon (look at the Zelda series for very obvious examples of this). It's surprisingly similar to the instructional design process of organizing complex tasks into simple tasks and then teaching those tasks with some kind of reward system to encourage the learner.

The great thing about games is that they are surprisingly good at doing this, and you don't even realize that you are learning something. All you know is that you are being challenged and entertained.

Playing games like Dance Dance Revolution and Trauma Center (all very non-conventional video games), and seeing how fun and easy it was to convince myself to put the time into being good at them, I can't help but wonder if the skills that I learned could actually transfer over to more constructive areas. What if Dance Dance Revolution actually had dance patterns that resembled swing? What if Trauma Center taught first aid? Sure, I can defeat all 8 strains of the GUILT virus, but all that game has done for me is made me really really good at the pointing portions of most Wii games (it's an ongoing joke with my friends that my prowess with the Wii Remote is because of all those "surgery games" I've been playing).

And then you have games like Guitar Hero. What if by playing that game you could actually get better at playing a real guitar?

Because games are instructional design, what are we teaching people, either consciously or subconsciously? If you think about how literature entertains as well as teaches us some kind of truth about the world we live in, what can video games, a wonderfully interactive medium, do for humanity if used it in much the same way?

Valve's Cabal Process
I was really impressed with Half-Life 2. After playing every single game in the Orange Box this past October, I was stunned that every single new game that Valve put in there was golden. Half-Life 2: Episode 2 was amazing, Team Fortress 2 is hilariously fun to play, and Portal was just--wow, the best game I've played in a long time. The dialog was witty and funny, the puzzles were mind-bending and very rewarding, and I learned that "the cake is a lie." Seriously, you need to play that game if you haven't already (it's only $20 on Steam).

How did Valve manage to pull off a hat-trick of stunningly innovative games?

I was determined to reverse engineer Valve's design process. I played through the developer commentary, took notes, read their articles, and actually bought the audio recording of "Valve's Design Process for Creating Half-Life 2," given at GDC 2006, where I learned a lot more about this thing called the Cabal Process.

What was interesting is that myself and a few others are working on starting an design and entertainment studio that is run more like a graphic design studio (as opposed to a production studio), which stimulates cross pollination of creative ideas amongst different trades of design. This was patterned after IDEO's methods, but applied to entertainment in addition to design. IDEO uses small teams comprising of one person from each discipline. Usually that means there's a graphic designer, an engineer, a psychologist or interaction designer, fine artist, architect, or whatever else the projects requires.

I didn't know this until recently, but what Valve refers to as the Cabal Process is exactly what I just described. That's why their games are so good. Now, depending on the size of the project, they'll have three of these agile teams working on the same game.

In addition to this, they also prototype and play test the game with outsiders during the entire process, not just alpha stage at the end. According to Valve, the problem with making fun games is that you don't know if a concept is actually going to be fun or not until you've prototype it and tested it. Play testing helps the game designers see how people are going to play their game and spot problems early. It also helps them decide which problems are the most important, and prevent heated discussions about which idea is the best due to personal preference, because the play testing as already verified what idea works better with real people playing it.

Compare that kind of process to that of colossal production studios, and you'll see the difference in both the kinds of work created and the quality.

Valve uses an engineering approach to game design: "Define your goals and constraints, come up with an idea of how to meet them, perform an experiment to test the idea, evaluate the quality of the experiment, evaluate the quality of the idea, evaluate the quality of your goals, repeat." The way they quantify the quality of their product, in this case the video game, is on the reaction of their play testers. They said that the game is ready when the play testing sessions are not painful to watch.

When I realized that Valve ran like a design studio by using the Cabal Process and had the production philosophy of an engineering firm, a lot of what they do makes sense. Half-Life 2 was really well done, but it was just a shooter. It wasn't until Valve hired a new team of graduates to work on the spiritual successor of their student project Narbacular Drop, that another truly innovative gave came out of Valve. Portal.

So, Valve has a great method for making games, in particular the gameplay aspects of it. So, what do they know about the principles and elements of gameplay that the rest of us don't? Honestly, I haven't found much about that in my research with Valve.

Listening to their talks and their audio commentaries, it seems that any design principle they have for visual design, writing, and interactive design are taken directly from their respective fields.

However, for level design they use terms such as vistas, gates and arenas to describe areas in each level and their function (this appears to only be useful terms when describing areas in a linear story game, which all Valve games are, even Portal). However, for the interactive parts of the game they don't seem to have any firm understanding of what will make a gameplay mechanic work, or established theories as to why. No one in the industry knows what will be fun in a game if it hasn't already been done before. That is why they test gameplay concepts before adding all the art because they don't know if an idea will be fun or not.

It's very possible that using the engineering process is the only successful way to come up with successful gameplay mechanics. We do have a field called interaction design, which is based mostly on human observation, not so much principles and laws. The whole point of interaction design is to come up with ways to decrease the learning curve of complex devices. Something that does this well we refer to as being intuitive. Interaction designers will talk about things such as visual metaphors, affordance, and human psychology to anticipate how a human will interact with a new object, but it really boils down to testing it to see if it works.

So that might be the answer to gameplay design. You just have to test it out.

Games Are Wish Fulfillment
Another part of the design process that I believe exists in game design is deciding on what type of game you want to make. Tim Schaefer (creator of The Secret of Monkey Island, Full Throttle, and Psychonauts) says that games are wish fulfillment. You want to be able to do things that you can't do in real life. So that seems like a good place to start when coming up with the concept for a game. My favorite games have been the Descent and Freespace series because I'd love to be able to pilot vehicles in zero gravity. That's wish fulfillment.

Tim Schaefer's process is to create a world that you'd love to explore and is interesting enough to spend some good vacation time in, then create the coolest character in that world; that is going to be the person you are going to play. This is really great for world creation and developing interesting characters, but that idea also lends itself well to come up with gameplay ideas that people would be interested in.

Unfortunately, even though Tim Schafer's games are very well written, have a wonderful milieu and great art direction, they often don't play very well. He started out doing adventure games and moved on to platformers like Psychonauts, but his games are just not as playable as Valve's. That's what made Portal so important is because it had the wittiness of a Tim Schafer game with the gameplay polish of a Valve game. Interestingly, the co-writer for Psychonauts actually wrote the dialog for Portal.

That's where a large part of my focus of research has been in; coming up with creative and potentially successful ideas for games. Tim Schafer's lectures on the subject helped me develop a process for coming up with new game ideas--and just about everything else entertainment related--by answering the question, "What do people want to do in real life but can't."

So, at this point I know a lot about how to make games, as least as far as the Cabal Process is concerned, I know how to create interesting worlds and characters, I've come up with a designerly method of coming up with creative game concepts. But what about the elements and principles of game design theory?

Do we have ways to describe that kind of thing, or are we just going to have to experiment with different ideas and test it to see if it's successful? Do we have ways to describe pacing in a game? How about controlling the difficulty curve effectively or even dynamically? What about NPC interaction, effectively telling stories with games (people do have a lot of conflicting theories about this one), visual information hierarchy and why do certain control schemes work better than others?

"Design Reboot"
That's where this talk came in because it helped answer some of my questions. He had a really good explanation as to what a video game actually is:

You are trying to achieve a goal, with some rules governing your actions and the game-world's response.

Games create a meaning of life in a temporary, low-stakes subdomain.

He said that when he started thinking of games in these terms, the medium of video games made more sense. It's a world with it's own set of rules that you can experiment and live in for a while, and has no real affects outside of the game.

But that's what's interesting; it does have an affect outside of the game, like all forms of entertainment do. As you play the game, watch the movie, or read a book, you learn something about those fictional characters and the world they live in: what they've done, how they live, what choices they've make and what they believe in.

Then he talks about what games can provide:

1. Entertainment / Fantasy / Escapism
2. Meaningful Artistic Expression
3. A means of exploring the universe

He expresses his frustration with games in that they focus mostly on the first point: entertainment. There's more to life than entertainment, and he's starving for games that offer more than that.

He then talks about how game designers lack discernment, that they only care about whether a lot of people play their game. They don't care what makes people want to play the game, just so long as people play it because the success of a game these days is measured by how many people buy the game. They do this at the expense of the player's quality of life.

Video games provide scheduled rewards to keep you playing. These include collectibles, unlockables, advancing the story and achievement awards. In MMOs, he says that these rewards are fake. The rewards are lies. In an MMO you work hard to get a better weapon to give you an advantage over the monsters you are currently fighting. After you've achieved that edge, they are no longer worth the experience points, and you have to fight stronger monsters that are matched to your current level. You never get an edge. It's like playing Heroin Hero, where all you do is shoot up on simulated heroin and chase a dragon. "Catch me! Common. This way! Shoot up more, then you can catch me." But you never catch the dragon, you just keep on chasing it.

Funny allusions aside, this is exactly what MMOs are like. The reward system is a trick to get you hooked on the game, chasing a reward that you can never catch.

Jonathan then makes the challenge that if you removed all of those scheduled rewards, would people still want to play your game? In the case of current-generation MMOs, I don't think anyone would.

What I found interesting is that releasing games for Xbox LIVE encourages the use of achievements, collectibles, and unlockables. Also, you sometimes have to pay additional money to unlock certain things in the game through the Xbox LIVE Marketplace. When I first watched the Microsoft keynote address at E3 about the Xbox LIVE Marketplace a few years ago, I actually felt sick because I knew what the goal was. Making micropayments to get additional content for a game isn't designed to improve the quality of a gamer's life.

He categorizing game rewards into two categories: food (naturally beneficial) and drugs (artificial stumuli), he says that game designers focus too much on using drugs in their game designs because they don't understand food. What rewards can we get that are naturally beneficial? Remember my comments earlier about Dance Dance Revolution and Trauma Center?

He later uses Portal as a good example for natural rewards, quoting Manveer Heir:

The brilliance in Portal lies not only in its simplicity (and excellent humor),
but also in the moments of realization when you figure out a puzzle.

No puzzle stumped me for more than five minutes in that game,
yet I went from being completely dumbfounded one moment
to feeling like a genius the next, as I realized what I was supposed to do.

One of my favorite parts of his talk is when he takes a jab at World of Warcraft. The rewards are fake in World of Warcraft as well.

He didn't discuss this, but it's part of my personal experience with the game that the gameplay changes the longer you play it. The focus of the game slowly changes from being a casual game of exploration and quest completion, to having to join a guild in order to progress in the game. Once you have joined an active guild the game has begun to be a commitment. Now you have to be sure that you are playing at 7pm every Tuesday and Thursday night so you can be present at scheduled raids with your guildmates.

What does Jonathan say World of Warcraft teaches people?

You are a schlub who has nothing better to do than sit around performing repetitive, mindless actions.

Skill and shrewdness do not count for much; what matters is how much time you sink in.

You don't need to do anything exceptional, because to feel good you just need to run the treadmill like everyone else.

That's what frustrated me about World of Warcraft. I was getting killed by players who only had an edge over me because they had played the game more and had less of a life than I did. I played it because I liked the exploration, but the game wasn't about that anymore after level 30. At that point the game was about survival. All of the quests at that point are in contested territory, and the opposing faction on that server, played by real people, can kill you at any time without notice or consent to a duel.

At level 36 I stopped playing. When I canceled my account they asked why I decided to cancel my subscription. I had no doubt that it was so they could find ways to keep people hooked. So I wrote, "The game is just no substitute for real life." What I really meant to say was, "The Alliance is constantly ganking me because their faction outnumbers us 3 to 1, and they have nothing else better to do an level 60. Give the Horde some hot races so those testosterone-poisoned teenagers can run around in their Horde panties. Then they'll play on our side and I'll have a chance of survival after level 30."

Well, they took my advice.

Jonathan then talks about architecting the game design as opposed to exploration it. He uses Bioshock as an example of poorly-architeched design. The designers wanted to give the player moral choice so they implemented a mechanic where you can kill--sorry, harvest--Little Sisters to obtain a mutagen that gives you special abilities in the game. You can either be merciful or obtain power to give you an edge in the game.

However, since they believed that First Person Shooters need to be well-balanced, no matter what your choices are, the game still has a steady difficulty curve. That idea conflicted with the moral choice in the game. It didn't really matter what you did in the game universe. The moral dilemma of altruism over power was fake. In addition, the game still encouraged you to shoot anything that moved without warning, including the Big Daddies (the Little Sisters protectors who are actually the most caring and protective characters in the game).

He says Bioshock is a weird game and can't be used an example to the rest of the world of teaching moral choice in games. The designers were trying to manipulate your feelings in a very clumsy way.

Comparing Bioshock to Portal, where the development of the game was explorational using the Cabal Process, there's a big difference in the designers decision in Portal to include the same themes in the game.

In Portal, there's this stage where you have to carry a metal crate with you to deflect plasma balls, activate switches, and step on to reach high places. You had to carry it with you throughout the entire stage. In play testing, they realized that players had a certain fondness for the crate, which I'll remind you is an inanimate object, asking of they really had to leave their crate behind.

So, they decided to play on that idea. With a little bit of supplemental architecting, they painted a heart on the crate, had the AI computer that is putting you through all of these puzzles call it the "Weighted Companion Cube," and at the end of the stage the AI then makes the player "euthanize" their Weighted Companion Cube (dumping it into an incinerator) in order to continue on to the next stage.

At the end of the game the AI accuses you of murdering the Weighted Companion Cube, your best friend.

Similar theme, but the choice to include it was done by exploration, being a careful observer to what their playtesters were experiencing, and accentuating it. The focus of the game was to solve portal-based puzzles, but noticing an opportunity and then adding that theme using cleverly written dialog and a little texture work made the game better, and in turn made the Weighted Companion Cube an Internet phenomenon.

Jonathan continues with architecture vs. exploration, and what he refers to as listening skills. "It's hard to listen if you are shouting all the time," he says. Architected games, where you are imposing your original vision of the game on the gameplay design process, means you are shouting. You need to be able to listen. Try out new ideas, pay attention to how people play your game, and let the design of the game evolve. Most modern big-budget games are architected. They have the concept art, the story and the gameplay figured out well in advance. That doesn't give you many opportunities to explore.

Anything Else?
That's about it for now. I'm going to encourage people to write comments about this article, so please leave yours.

I've been keeping lots of notes on this topic, and I didn't cover all of it here. Although writing about it has been very therapeutic, so I'll write more on it later.

Also, if you listen to Jonathan Blow's talk he mentions two books on games-as-teaching called "A Theory of Fun for Game Design," and "Persuasive Games: The Expressive Power of Videogames." I haven't read those books, but I might at some point.

I Need More Free Time

2007-12-06T19:56:00.001-07:00

Speaking of video games, This is proof that I need more free time.

This is entirely due to a television ad that I'm working on. The visuals should be done tomorrow and I'll get the audio done a couple of days after that. It's been neat taking part in the entire process of creating an ad, and being able to see a design project of this magnitude from beginning to end. I've had a lot of help from the rest of us in our little 5-man studio: critiquing, concept art, and animation (lots of animation). I'll likely post the ad up here when it's done.

I wish that's all I had to do before Christmas, but I have to move and job hunt too. Oh well. Until then, I miss you Team Fortress 2.

Here's the link to my Steam profile so you can see what dirty rotten games I've been playing and for how long. There's also a picture of a scary possessed evil satanic squirrel there too (the spawn of a graphic designer when he did have too much time on his hands). So that's reason enough to go check it out.

Gerstmanngate: GameSpot's Side of the Story

2007-12-05T20:15:00.001-07:00

Update: Here's a great article on 1UP called "GameSpot's Sad State of Affairs" that covers the history and the repercussions of the firing of Jeff Gerstmann, former Editorial Director of GameSpot.

The gaming community has assumed for a while that big video game publishers pay game journalists for positive coverage, hyped articles, and skewed reviews. Of course, we've had no proof of this kind of activity--up until November 28, which has now been called Gerstmanngate. Since then there's been a huge uproar in the gaming community, a flood of conspiracy theories and gamers have even been organizing GameSpot and Eidos boycotts. It wasn't until today that GameSpot finally released their official explanation about the firing of Jeff Gerstmann after an unfavorable review of a game that GameSpot received large sums of money to advertise.

When I say "advertised," I mean that the entire site was skinned so that it was a giant site-wide ad, paid for by Eidos Interactive, to promote their new game Kane & Lynch (PEGI 18+, ESRB-M). Jeff Gerstmann gave the game a 6/10 and a harsh video review. The next day the video was taken down. About 2 weeks later, while the site still had the Kane & Lynch skin, Gerstmann was fired.

The official statement and FAQ is part of the GameSpot article called Spot On: GameSpot on Gerstmann.

From the statement, "the video was taken down due to concerns of quality. Specifically, its audio was deemed inferior due to a faulty microphone."

After checking a few of the other video reviews on GameSpot, that claim checks out. The audio is pretty bad. So there's a point for GameSpot. Also, apparently the video footage from the game was only from the first level, so that's another reason why it got taken down.

As for why the written review was edited after it was made public on the site, "Jeff's supervisors and select members of the edit team felt the review's negativity did not match its 'fair' 6.0 rating. The copy was adjusted several days after its publication so that it better meshed with its score, which remained unchanged."

A 6/10 is "fair", one step above a 5 which is "mediocre", and the review I read was a bash fest. However, that's what 6/10 games usually get. Modifying his review so that it "better meshed with its score" didn't make a lot of sense. The written review seemed spot on.

GameSpot did confirm that Eidos was unhappy with the review, but followed up by saying publishers are unhappy all the time about game reviews, and there's nothing unusual about that. GameSpot also said that Eidos had absolutely nothing to do with him being fired.

So, what do I think about all this? Is there really a conspiracy? Did Jeff stand up for game reviewing ethics?

Seeing the gaming community put Jeff on the hero pedestal and knowing what I know about his reviews, I think the gaming community is giving Jeff too much credit. I don't know if sites like IGN and GameSpot tell their reviewers to "praise Game X or else," because we certainly would have heard about it; there's just too many game journalists out there. Although, I do believe there is an invisible influence. I have seen plenty of games that have been overrated. I can tell that some of those are overrated because of personal preference, for example IGN's Halo 2 rating of 9.8.

Game reviewers know how much power their reviews have on people's buying decisions, and what the backlash of fans will be if the reviewer rates their favorite game lower that they believe it deserved. I've heard game reviewers say that it's better to overrate a game than underrate it, and they do practice that. They really don't want to give a game, especially a hyped game that's actually good, anything lower than superb rating for that reason.

And then you have people like Jeff Gerstmann who is very open about the faults of a game and holds no reservations for rating it poorly if he feels the need to. So despite the huge amounts of hype and advertising over Kane & Lynch, he went ahead and rated it poorly because it was a poor game. And, according to his coworkers at GameSpot, he says bad things about games all the time. The Kane & Lynch review was no different.

The big problem is that the circumstances of his firing were totally wrong, and it was handled poorly. It was a perfect storm of terrible coincidences: the massive Kane & Lynch advertising, the video review being taken down, the written review being edited, and after Jeff's firing GameSpot had to keep quiet for legal reasons amidst all the conspiracy theories that where being reinforced--and in most people's eyes completely validated--by GameSpot's actions. The whole thing exploded and GameSpot and Eidos were seen as the villainous corporations trying to manipulate video game journalism as part of their mass marketing campaign.

I do still believe that video game publishers have a significant influence over game ratings and gaming news, because they know how the system works and they play the system really well. They work closely with companies like IGN and GameSpot to give them exclusive coverage on their next releases. And with that relationship they can influence the public view of their products.

Being a graphic designer I know that advertising works; that's why there's so much money in it. I also know that positive news coverage is better than any ad campaign. They know how the system works, they use the system, and it has an affect on gaming journalism. How GameSpot handled Jeff's departure created a lot of bad press for themselves as well as Eidos, so it'll be interesting to see how that is going to affect their business relationship, as well as the rest of the publishers in the industry. One thing's for sure, they are going to be a lot more careful about how and when they fire their employees.

Edit: There's a really good commentary on the incident over at Level Up on the Newsweek site about the Fundamental Contempt In Which the Enthusiast Press Is Held By Publishers.

Also, Joystiq has a comparison of the original and the edited article. Certainly an interesting read.

Camtasia 3 for Free (Official TechSmith Promotion)

2007-11-27T10:12:00.001-07:00

I've been making video tutorials for Blender since August 2004, and in those years I've found TechSmith's Camtasia Studio to be the best solution, simply because of the quality of the TechSmith Capture Codec (TSCC). The other alternative is CamStudio, an open source app that works really well, but the CamStudio Codec is not as fast as TSCC. On my new system I get 22 fps with CamStudio in a 1024x576 region, whereas with TSCC I can get a solid 30 fps, and it's easier to get the audio and video to sync up properly.

After using their 30-day trial, experiencing the performance boost was enough to convince myself to buy Camtasia Studio, until I realized it cost US$300.

To my joy, I read today that TechSmith is doing a promotion where you can download their old Camtasia 3, get a software key for free, and later upgrade to Camtasia 5 for US$150 (this is for a limited time).

Just download the software:
http://download.techsmith.com/camtasiastudio/enu/312/camtasiaf.exe

Then fill out the information to get your free software key:
http://www.techsmith.com/camtasia/pcpls.asp

That's it. I've already installed it and it's working great.

So, is it worth it to get a 2-version-old copy of Camtasia? Yes. I just wanted it for the codec, but it does have quite a few useful editing features so I don't have to use VirtualDub anymore.

Unfortunately, I still haven't found a really good solution for Linux that's super easy to set up and works really well. The easiest Linux screencasting program I found was Istanbul, a program that spit out OGG Theora files—in theory anyway; I was using Ubuntu and it would crash every time. I'm not a big fan of Theora anyway, especially after falling in love with h.264. But Theora is patent safe and for that it has merit.

If you want to learn more about screencasting, ShowMeDo has some great resources on their wiki for Windows, Mac, and Linux screencasting tools.

Orson Scott Card at University Forum

2007-11-15T18:35:00.001-07:00

Even though I'm not a student at the university anymore and have now reached the status of alumnus, I'll sneak into the art seminars and and university forums if I fell there's going to be a really worthwhile presentation.

A few days ago I was told that Orson Scott Card was going to be speaking at University Forum.

It didn't take much to convince myself and a few of my friends to attend the forum. We all wanted to hear him speak, and two of us—myself included—really wanted to ask him some questions. We've both been working our own large projects for a few years or more and even though we've never published a story or finished a film yet, we're both insistent that when the time comes that our studio has the resources to start production on one of these two projects, that we'll already have the story perfected. Neither of us are formally trained in story telling but we talk about it every day, read a lot on the subject, and discuss movies and shows that do it well (like Avatar: The Last Airbender, which has really impressed us recently) and shows that don't (most big-budget films).

For that reason we definitely wanted to hear him speak. We went to the forum yesterday 20 minutes early to get good seats, and he was already answering questions for people in the audience. The forum started at 2:00, and the question and answers session didn't end until around 4:30. During almost 3 hours of listening to him speak we didn't ask a single question; everything we wanted to know he had been answered throughout his talk and in answering other's questions: What do you want changed in the industry? What do you need to do to write believable and interesting characters? What makes a good hero? What is your creative process? And so on.

We walked away feeling very encouraged. Apparently we had the right idea of what stories should be and we were taking ours in the right direction, and that our studio is going in the right direction. He also gave us some great insight into heroism and the intellectual elite of America, which gave me some great stuff to put into my story because the intellectual elite is one of the latter topics of my show.

Now, we are both visual arts people, and if we planned on writing novels we would still have a lot to learn about language, but for building characters and story we were on the right track. We just need to keep doing what we are doing and learn as much as we can.

His 1 hour talk was on what it means and takes to be a hero. What does it take to overcome your will to survive as a creature and sacrifice yourself for the community?

"I write heroes," Card said, "in fact I think that's one of the main functions of fiction is to show us people who's lives are models for what our society needs from people. And it's a tough one to figure out what it is that makes a character both believable and admirable at the same time."

He said that the thing that makes us able to do these courageous things, as opposed to other animals, is that we have language, and therefore are capable of having stories of honor for dieing for your country. We live in a society that has taught us these things, and we believe it as truth. That is why terrorism occurs; courageous people carrying out cowardly attacks. Their society tells them a different story of what will happen if you kill enough of the enemy.

He later talked about being a hero in cases that don't require losing your life, cases where you have to put your reputation or job on the line for truth and ethics. "We do have the story that you act boldly and bravely to do the right thing. We have the idea that the community that you belong to is worth saving from danger." This led into my favorite part of his talk on the intellectual elite, or people who fall into the intellectual trap:

Here's the trap: You're really smart. People who aren't like you are really dumb. [audience laughs] You are better than those people, and the smarter you are the better you are. But secretly you know that you don't actually qualify, so you spend your time pretending to be smarter than you are, and surrounding yourself with people who will accept your smartitude [sic] and treat you as if you were really clever.

That's what we have as America's intellectual elite today.

When I look at the state of science, education, of—well, practically everything—in a world where actual scientific thinking is valued, no one would be talking about global warming. [audience laughs]. It's a non issue. It happens. It doesn't happen. There's global warming. There's global cooling. There's cycles in the history of the earth. It's an uninteresting question until we have more data. But we are not even trying to gather the data. What we have is a lot of people trying to twist the existing data, or shut everyone up in order to believe it. Because if you are an intellectual in America today you believe in global warming and it's really vital that we do something about it.

You also simultaneously believe that homosexuals are homosexuals because of genetic change in them—which is not a bad thing—and which cannot possibly be resisted or altered in any way; the only sexual beings among the human race whose sexuality cannot even be repressed. They alone, can do whatever they want, and they cannot help it. At the same time, women, with the attributes of femininity, are completely socially driven. There is no genetic component in them whatsoever, and if you just change society enough the differences between men and women will be erased.

Those are so obviously intellectually incompatible, that one wonders how anyone capable of speech can believe both at the same time.

He then goes on to talk about how scientists that he knows cannot say anything against global warming because they are still on their tenure track and they don't want to loose their job. "And I have friends who have lost their jobs," he says, "because they did heroically speak up for truth against error. But right now in America if you want to have secure credentials as an intellectual, here's how you get them: parrot what other people say, and never have a thought of your own that questions it. Somehow that's how we define intellectuality in America today."

He says that asking questions is a good thing. We need to be able to ask questions and teach our kids that it's okay to have doubts and that we need to search and find the answers to them. "Errors happen. Mistakes are made. People do it wrong. People make wrong guesses. People believe for many years in incorrect things. But the society that will survive, the community that will last is the one that will be able to embrace the questions, keep asking, keep testing, keep trying and holding fast to that which is good and true."

After his talk he answered questions regarding the Ender's Game movie, how he writes for characters and what questions he asks himself about them and the world they live in, what his creative process is—which was "I don't know," because each idea had it's own process—he gave advice for new writers, films and books that have inspired him, and so on.

There were many other things he said during the Q&A session, and everything we wanted to know was somehow answered or he said things that just reaffirmed what we already believed about story telling. He said he was fed up with the antihero cliché in the arts that has been going on for the past 70 years, and the fact that what people really want are stories about good but believable people doing good things. There will always be a large market for that kind of story, no matter what huge media corporations will say and do to the contrary.

It was interesting having him tell us his bad experiences working with the publishing and movie industries. We were able to get a pretty good idea about what he didn't like about the industry because he was so vocal about it throughout his talk and the Q&A session. He also said that new writers don't need an agent, even though the publishing industry says they do. I got the feeling that he had been burned plenty of times by agents, and how publishing companies will try and do the same dirty things that agents will do (retaining rights to your work, excessive percentages from profits, and so on). He said that you can do just as well (or better) without an agent than with one, with the exception of foreign sales. Realize that you can say no to contracts even if they pressure you and say there is no other choice. He also talked about working with editors and copywriters, and what to expect.

Independence seemed to be important to him, especially when he talked about his concerns about getting the Ender's Game film in production and keeping the movie from being garbage, because when you sign the papers they can do whatever they want with the story, even without you if they don't want to. He asked if anyone in the audience knew someone that has 75 million dollars laying around so they can fund the movie. Again, independence from a big studio is a good thing. We've seen too many good stories get ruined and good shows get axed. Orson Scott Card, as a fellow browncoat, understands that well I'm sure.

It was refreshing to have someone that is so honest about the topics of the intellectual elite, and he expressed how refreshing it was for him to be in a place where he can speak about it and have a positive reaction from the audience.

Listening to him speak really made my day, and gave all of us in our little studio some hope that we are making the right decisions as we move forward to create stories and experiences that people will want to enjoy.

Hooray for Blogs!

2007-11-14T20:33:00.000-07:00

I decided to start a personal blog since I haven't updated my site in 18 months, and I won't update it until I launch my new site. I don't know when that will be exactly, but it will be after I design the logo for our new studio, create the web design for it, and then use that template for my new site (my new web site will essentially be what the studio employee pages look like).

This is also going to be a nice place to put my unofficial (read unprofessional) commentary. It's for friends and family, so enjoy.