What Happens In Vegas...

A blog dedicated to providing it's followers with a little background behind my videos and why I chose to make them the way I did. I don't mind questions at all, but I don't promise the best (if any) answers to them. I will also post some information of upcoming videos and potential ideas.

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I did a new kind of video just the other day. Well "new" as in "new to me" not "so amazingly revolutionary that it hasn't once ever been seen before...video". This video was both collaborative (which I haven't done much), was based on footage I recorded off the PS3, and was a walk-through guide. I've wanted to try doing a guide for a while but haven't had the time or the substantial interest in any particular game to do it for. Thankfully, my co-op partner and I in Borderlands 2 may be among a very few people to find a glitch strategy for one of the super-bosses that allows you to get underneath his arena  That or everyone knows about it just doesn't talk about it at all on the internet. Either way it was fun to go into some new video-making ground yesterday.

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Hey, follower! Yea you! Look there's new post from your old pal. I'm here to briefly (I lied this is not a brief post looking back) show you a screen shot of the work-space behind the new fan trailer I just released today for Darksiders II. As the purpose of these screenshots is to give some insight on what the hell I'm actually doing (usually I don't know) I will do that right now.

So in this trailer I tried diligently, but with little success, to use the audio from the original game trailers to, you know, have sound effects and junk. Unfortunately that didn't work out and as I lack professional fantasy/apocalyptic/scythe-magic/whatever audio packs adding in effects for each shot was an unlikely option. So in an effort to have the trailer come off as professional-ish-y I had to sync the shit out of the footage to the music as best as I could. Ideally, if you go check out the finish product the music acts rather well, in my opinion, as "sound effects" for the actions on screen.

Regardless, I did a few other things in this trailer as well. While I didn't make the text myself, this was the first time I've ever used text in a trailer to create the, for a lack of a better term, "trailer narrative" unlike the voice-overs I did in the Arkham City Trailer. So that stuff was both new and a learning experience. As for other new and weird things, I did more layers of video tracks than I have before. It was only 2 layer tracks for 2 different segments but I've never really used transparent...."parent" layers before. In this case I used transparency (as opposed to a cross-fade) on Death's mask in the beginning as I felt it gave it a better look than just a cross-fade could do. I also used that same shot but reversed at the end of the trailer to give that slightly visible shot of Death's mask at the end of the trailer as well (I thought that was pretty cool but hey it was more than likely stupid haha). Aside from that I also did very quick fade-to-black using the Brightness and Contrast animation on a few shots in the video as well. I feel they provided a more interesting transition than a fade-out or cut-to-black could.

That is all for now. Here's a link to the final product if you'd like to see it.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o9UIZcCG-iA&feature=my_liked_videos&list=LLKwATcuAvNc3TqHTE7yISWg

I hope to have other content out soon. Thanks!

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I realized I haven't posted in a while which is something I hope to fix soon. I apologize to the few followers I have who probably don't even realize I haven't posted in a while. So I will start my presence back up once again on an overly depressing note (because that's how you make people like you!).

This is a fantastic and unfortunately sad song composed by Hans Zimmer. He made it honor of the victims in that shooting everyone has likely heard about at this point. I'm not trying to prolong the focus on unfortunate current events by posting this (I know everyone else will do a great job of that without my help anyway) but I felt it was worth sharing nonetheless. Also, try not to steal this song as money from its purchases will go to help the victims. 

That is all. Now go on purchase the song, enjoy it, then go on with your life instead of clogging up the internet with depressing subject matter as I will go do now as well. Or you could go take this song and simply change the font of the text and post it to YouTube and shamelessly get a ridiculous amount of views. That will work too.

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Just so you know, the majority of this post is pretty much absent of any editing related technical stuff and mostly just me ranting about my various irrational concerns of my work. If emotions are not your forte then I would recommend looking at the image, soaking it in, and then proceeding on with your day/night/whatever.

Well, among a whole mess of other "lets get internet famous" things I did today I actually worked a bit more on that Mass Effect 2 Fan Trailer. If you care to take the time find and compare the previous screen shot you'll see very little has changed. Which is indeed true that very little has changed but I'm beginning to get a better feel for how to go about creating this trailer. But this has been, and will probably remain, a very slow process.

For whatever reason this trailer I am struggling a little bit with this trailer compared to the previous 3 other fan trailers I've made. In fact, all of those past trailers except this one have taken me about 1 week or less to complete while ME2 I have been doing on and off (mostly off) since early in the year even before Tribble Crossing was created. It could be I'm psyching myself out of making the trailer because of how good I want it to be. It also could be the pacing of this song is different than any other I've really used before. The song I've been working with is this song called "Mythos" by Brand X Music. While I know I want to use the majority of the last half of the song, I have been messing with the beginning a ton and trying to make it flow well. I had the whole song in the trailer, then I cut out 30 seconds, 13 seconds, and a bunch of other seconds and I still can't seem to satisfy myself. 

Perhaps I'm bothered by the scale of this project compared to ones in the past. As you may have seen (actually, you probably didn't see it) I have made posts in the past about large footage recording session of ME2. I've recorded pretty much all the major and minor cut scenes of any kind the game has had since the beginning. All I have left is a few companion quests and then the final sequences of the game. In all honesty, I could probably get away with just recording the main cut scenes of the game and be fine with footage but I have had this compulsion to get all I can so I don't miss anything amazingly awesome (I have yet to really find anything amazingly awesome). I will admit, doing the Spartacus Fan Trailer for that contest was pretty good practice since that also required me to go and sift through the entire series to find the best footage and not just remix what the trailers used. Granted, that was only about 6 or so hours of footage for a 1 minute max video, but still helpful.

Regardless, I will continue my work on this trailer and hopefully figure out or get past whatever it is that is making me hesitant to work on it. Although I probably won't live up to this deadline like the numerous others I've set in the past I would like do get this trailer done before the end of the year. Knowing me though I will probably get distracted with some other random project and not touch this trailer again for another month haha.

Thanks for reading my rant. I apologize for the boredom you must be feeling at this time.

GAAAAAH! I just saw how long this post got. Damn, I don't remember writng that much. I can only imagine how many grammatical errors there are in this.

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Some Small Changes (...I ended up discussing again)

Well I'm pretty excited for doing tonight's next Trailer Trash recording which will begin in a few hours. For one, we weren't really able to record for the past two weeks mostly on account that my voice was crap and probably because we're all lazy. But the biggest reason I'm pumped is that this time we're trying a few new things this episode. 

While writing this I remembered I already eluded to these facts in an earlier post. Instead of repeating all that fun stuff again I'll just abruptly conclude with "Wish us luck, hopefully this will be a nice improvement to the Trailer Trash series

This coming week's video (or this week's video if you're on of those "the week starts on Sunday" people [wierdo]) will be of Michael Bay's Trailer for Need for Speed: The Run. Although the game already came out a little bit ago, the video game industry kind of blew most of the big name releases in the past few months so we really can't be too picky at this point haha.

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Trailer Trash Delayed

There was no recording for Trailer Trash this past Sunday, unfortunately. The main reason was I have had a fantabulous cold since last Thursday and my voice, as I've bee told, sounds "like that of a pedophile...or smooth jazz radio DJ". I don't know if I or pedophiles should be more offended (Atta' boy self, make pedophile jokes on an editing blog that will rake followers in) by that statement really. 

However, not everything in this post will be terrible news. We are going to record Trailer Trash again a week from this coming Sunday, but this time we're planning on changing the format of the video a little bit. Over the last few weeks I've been looking at the videos we've done and have been trying to figure out ways to improve them in some way. Don't get me wrong, I like a fair amount of what we're doing but I still feel like maybe we can maybe make this series stand out a little more and get a little funnier. One of the biggest current problems we've noticed is that a lot of times we feel that if we were to edit video a little more we could benefit a fair amount from it. For one, we would could pause the video and then be able to fit more jokes and dwell on some rather funny or interesting aspects of the trailer that you may not notice just on the initial viewing. We also could edit in some other jokes as well. For example, for the MW3 trailer I could have put in an explosion counter in the video and we could have made a joke off that.

I don't intend to make the original trailer we trash into something it's not with this more "excessive" form of editing we plan on doing, but I would like to be able to make the series as funny as possible (that is making the large assumption that we are, in fact, funny which is still very much up for debate). I guess to summarize my rather non-nonsensical description of our ideas, we intend to go a more "trailer analysis" route. You may have seen some of these types of videos before where the people really breakdown what's going on. We intend to do something like that except strictly only focus on comedic elements of trailers because, let's be honest, there are a lot of ridiculous games with a lot of ridiculous trailers out there that go un-scrutinized (citation needed).

So thanks to all the subscribers and viewers who bear (bare? No, bear...) with us while we still fumble about trying to make Trailer Trash into a better series. Hopefully you will find us entertaining in the near future if you haven't yet (maybe someone has).

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New Trailer Trash you could totally check out if you wanted to. Yep, just 1 click away from checking out this video and only 1 more click away from disliking it after that. Hope you all enjoy!

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Here's the workspace screenshot for Modern Warfare 3. Much like the video, this post is also rather late but here none the less. This trailer was also quite short, which is a shame because I felt we had a lot of decent material to say. I just kind of wanted to leave the screen black and let us continue talking for another 2 minutes so I could get the rest of it in. Unfortunately that would have been rather strange. Instead, I had originally planned on doing two MW3 Trailers back to back but later we decided not to since they're essentially the same thing just one is 30 seconds shorter. Also, this game only has 4 real trailers (gameplay trailer not included) 2 of which are just a green sound-wave thing that changes into sort-of-shapes near the end. 

Aside from the thousands of explosions in the trailer there really isn't too much else worth mentioning about it (my ears are still bleeding and loud noises haunt my dreams now). Standard audio envelope adjustments when were not talking and just splicing audio clips together.

That's the way the cookie crumbles...I'm pretty sure Jim Carrey says that line in a movie I can't remember at all.

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Hey people! Here is the probably not funny Trailer Trash of Modern Warfare 3. I apologize for it being a few days late. Although, I'm not that apologetic since no one probably would have been aware this video is late until I said that it was late. Regardless, have fun and go hate me!

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O yea! Here's that video I spent a page and half discussing in that previous post. Hope you like it!....but you don't have to!

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Here are some screenshots from the Spartacus: Gods of the Arena Fan Trailer I finished earlier today. It was weird working on content for something that involved non-video game footage since I haven't done that in quite some time, but this video was a for fan trailer contest. Regardless, making this trailer was kind of a learning experience for me. The contest rules stated that this trailer had to be 15-60 seconds long maximum. The only other trailers I've ever made haven't really been under any sort of rules or time restraints. This was an initially frustrating challenge, but ultimately was a helpful one in the end. 

Furthermore, this trailer had to be made with all non-licensed material so that meant my music choices dropped to what I could use with Pro Scores. Also, sound effects became only a use as need sort of situation. Thankfully, most of the sound effects I needed came from the original footage of the show since the scenes I used didn't have many overbearing background sounds or other distracting things.

I think the part of this I was most proud of was that I spent about an hour trying to make it so I could remove the word "fucking" from one of the lines in this trailer. That was a very large pain in the ass, but I think I eventually got it. The last line said had originally went something like "and that man will be from the fucking house of (Latin name here)". Problem is that the rules seemed to suggest profanity was a no-no so I just did my best to get rid of it. 

Ultimatly, this was a rather interesting trailer to make. I really have surprised myself over the last few weeks because I've actually forced myself to work diligently on projects I want to finish in a timely fashion. It hasn't been easy though since Batman: Arkham City came out I've been tempted to play it on "Plus" mode ever since I beat it haha (Also, Payday: The Heist came out and that was also fun). Not only that but I've had many outside people also requesting for me to play games which, I've really wanted to do, but I just really want to get this stuff done sooner so that I don't have to worry about finishing them later.

I've typed for far too long. I apologize for that but I'm still not sure exactly WHAT I should be covering when typing this stuff anyway. Until that time comes I will just type about what comes to my head first (it seems to have worked so far).

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Here is this rather late screenshot of the Arkham City Trailer Trash. This trailer we did was the shortest one we've done so far. It was only about 2 minutes long and we had a surprisingly large amount of content that was pretty good for the takes we did. However, most of our jokes we ended up doing were absurdly long in duration so I only could barely fit a lot of them in. Aside from the hockey pads joke in the middle, all the other jokes are just a part of the "Joker and Batman going on a date" joke or the "Batman is fucking insane, too" joke. One of these over-arching jokes was almost 75% of a take in length so I had to cut them down just to make them work. Honestly, this Trailer Trash video felt, for obvious reasons, much more rushed than the other videos we've done previously. However, I'd rather have a video with somewhat rushed jokes as opposed to just a video with no one talking half the time. Eh, whatever.

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I finally completed and uploaded my fan trailer for Batman: Arkham City. Hopefully you guys like it (I sure as hell find it annoying after having heard it played hundreds of times).Thankfully I finished it just in time for the game's release tonight/tomorrow. Enjoy!

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These are the last three screen-shots for of the Batman: Arkham City Fan Trailer work-spaces. Most of today was spent adding sound effects where I felt they could do some good. That's why there are so many more rows of audio on the 17th as opposed to the 16th. It may seem ridiculous at all the stuff that is there, and while it is ridiculous, it's not really because anything was really complex as much as it is I really prefer keeping certain types of audio dedicated to their own row. I could have condensed a lot of this to probably 5 rows total, but most normal people aren't showing their work-spaces off to random internet strangers. That and I work better when I'm not confusing myself with what track is what in a row.

Most of the 16th I spent filling in the remaining gaps and timing a few shots better. Also on the 16th I spent a lot of time doing some post-production shot enhancements or filters/FX/whatever. I can post a link to an un-enhanced and not totally complete version of this trailer so you all can see how much these very minor improvements can help the quality.

However, I'm about to upload the video for good now. I will give a more crazy long post about the trailer and the work behind it later. Right now, I'm off...so yea.

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Here's another set of screen-shots of the progress I've made with the Arkham City Fan Trailer. Same deal as last time, I didn't take the screen-shots the day of but I did have some saves from that time which works fine for me really. As you can tell, I'm getting closer to finishing (hopefully by tommorow/today/Sunday night). But I also am considering the possibilty that I may not finish till Monday night as well.

The majority of the video clips are in spots I am pleased with. Same goes with the lines of dialogue, however, I am a little bit bothered/upset with the flow of those. The problem is that I only have access to what I can get my hands on footage and dialogue wise. That's why there wasn't any screen-shot for Friday because I was playing Arkham Asylum to find that stuff. The problem is that many of Joker's lines that were good he also said over the game's P.A. system so it really didn't flow nor sound right when put next to him speaking not through a P.A. system. The good news is that I am very close to finishing. The end of this project is in sight and I'm hopeful that it will turn out pretty good. 

Currently, I'm having some mixed feelings about this video. Part of me is saying that it seems very bad in terms of pacing and just overall quality. But there's that other part of me saying "You've felt that way for almost every video you've done before and you almost never think that down the road". The monotony of hearing the entire thing played over and over really makes your mind perceive what the hell you're doing in a weird way. I hope to show what I've got to a few people tomorrow to get some fresh eyes and ears on it to see what actually is wrong and what isn't me just going insane.

Like with any project I do, my ultimate goal is solely to create the best quality content given what I have to work with. I hope no one perceives that as a sort of excuse for crappy work on my part because I'm trying not to make it one. I really do try to make the best quality content possible given what I have. What I have, unfortunately, is little in regards to both editing tools and experience in what I've been doing. But who knows how this video ultimately will be received. Perhaps my concerns are over nothing and it will turn out far better than I see it right now. I guess we'll find out when we get there.

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Hey stranger! You should check out the brand new Trailer Trash video for the Batman: Arkham Asylum Joker Trailer. You will? Awesome, thanks a lot! Keep up that good random video link clickin' work.

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Playing Games Fast & Incorrectly

I just got done playing through Arkham Asylum (for a 3rd time now...I think) in probably the quickest play-through I have ever done for a game. I remember when I first played Arkham Asylum it took me almost 4x longer to beat the game than this time around. Granted, this time, which was about a 5 hour play-through, wasn't on the "Hard" difficulty nor was I going for 100% with all The Riddler shit. So I guess it's understandable why it barely took as much time, but still it was weird.

You maybe be thinking to yourself "Why am I reading this?". Well stranger, I haven't the foggiest of an idea. However, if you were to ask "Why the hell did he play Arkham Asylum super fast?", then I actually could answer you with a reason that is only sort of stupid. The reason was I was unable to use most of the dialogue in the Arkham City trailers so I needed to find some good dialogue, specifically from Joker, some other place. I don't own Arkham City  so I did the next best thing. That next best thing was playing Arkham Asylum with only the dialogue volume on and everything else off. If you ever have the misfortune of having to do this (I have had to do this a lot with Mass Effect 2 which I am also making a fan trailer for) then you will notice how bizarre the game becomes when you play it. I'll admit, while playing Mass Effect 2, I sometimes found it kind of fun not having any background music on and just SFX and voices. But only having voices is just weird and makes the game very dry.

Good news is, however, I knew where most of Joker's good lines of dialogue were so I was able to easily record his stuff. Now I"m off to maybe play some other games FOR FUN for a few hours and then head off to bed.

My by no means concrete plan for tomorrow (insert same joke from last post about saying tomorrow when it's really today but freakin' early)- Get the damn voices into the trailer then put in the rest of the clips and maybe get started on background sound effects. Ideally that will leave Sunday for some polishing work on the trailer and I'll probably release it that day as well. Realistically, however, I'll probably not finish half of what I said quickly at all so who knows. WHATEVER!