PortsCenter 1.22 is uploaded, I’ve created and queued the pages for Retroware (today, just after 1pm PST) and PortsCenter.TV (tomorrow, twenty-four hours later), and I’ve also queued up the post for the PortsCenter Tumblr on Friday at 1:01pm.
I need to get more organized with my post-production process. Shooting the couch segments of an episode only takes, at most, two hours, which includes setting up and tearing down the lights. Post, however, takes the better part of a day. I have to:
Record the voiceover,
prepare overlays for things like game captions, credits, etc.,
capture any game footage I might not have yet,
get the bones of the edit in – voiceover and shot material,
curate game footage and drop it in,
realize I’ve forgotten to capture footage of some other game I mention within the episode, so set up to do that,
add the background blur effect so it’s not just game footage on a black background,
select my music,
rebalance the audio tracks,
prepare the end credits, including game footage and footage from last week’s episode and footage from the next episode
(which usually involves capturing about 30 seconds worth of gameplay of next week’s game, unless I can’t be bothered like last week),
give it a watch-through, tweak any parts I think need tweaking,
re-record any voiceover I think needs to be redone or rewritten,
watch it again,
render the video,
prepare web assets such as YouTube thumbnails, featured images for PortsCenter.TV and Retrowaretv.com,
watch an episode of Futurama while the rest of the episode renders,
upload the episode,
prepare posts for PortsCenter.TV, Retrowaretv.com, and the PortsCenter Tumblr,
add annotations once the upload is complete,
and update the annotations for the previous episode.
That’s a lot of work. Today it took me ten hours to get it all done. If I did color correction or any particularly intensive visual effects I’d probably never get any sleep. Is it any wonder I haven’t had time to do much behind-the-scenes stuff?
Still, I am exceptionally proud of all 22 episodes so far. There’s two left to do, then I’m taking January off to rest, recuperate, and get ready for season 2 in February.
So! So. Lots to do in 2013. Launch PortsCenter. Write and film Dalek Gary. Commence work on at least two other webseries, and polish off a sitcom idea I’ve been sitting on since 2007. That’s not to mention the project I’m pitching to a production company this month – which reminds me, I need to actually start putting together my pitch. Wow. This year is looking pretty busy.
I want to get out of some bad habits, which means I need to let go of some things. This includes webcomics. I’ve been webcomicing since 2003. My first webcomic, Fried, ran for three years and updated sporadically – even moreso once I realized I actually hated drawing. The second webcomic, Jump Leads, has come to an unceremonious end in part due to troubled art schedules, and Deadlong is on hiatus for similar reasons (though we’re filling the hiatus hole with some new material starting later this month). Other attempts to start webcomics, including a project with my friend Ray, have not been particularly successful.
It’s taken me a while, but I’ve realized webcomics isn’t where I want to be and it’s not what I want to do. Not to say I don’t enjoy webcomics, but I’ve been focusing my energy in the wrong place, and it’s time to reassess. Once Deadlong is finished, I’m done. Out of the game. Deadlong will be my webcomic swansong.
I think, truthfully, that I’d prefer to pour my energy into video content, and I want 2013 to be the start of that. I plan on trying to produce original video content throughout the year, starting with PortsCenter , then moving on to other projects. I’m developing a webseries with Mac Beauvais that should be a lot of fun, and I’ll be working with Michelle Osorio on new projects for Kill9 including Dalek Gary and at least one other thing that’s still sort-of in the woiks.
Another thing I want to do that’s important to me is to the stand-up into a proper paying gig. I need to do that, which means I need to get serious about it. I need to hone my craft, I need to get better at working off-book, and I need to actually book some actual gigs. In addition to this, I want to develop an hour of material over the course of the year which I’d like to debut at GMX Vol. 5, assuming they want me back.
Time to stop being passive. Time to stop expecting the new year to be a better one, and time to start making it so. Here’s to making things, and here’s to you. Happy New Year.
Wreck-It Ralph opened last month, and I may well have become obsessed with it. I’ve seen it three times now – twice in 2D, once it 3D. I’d love to see it a fourth time at the El Capitan before it vanishes. It came at a pivotal time in my life – in September I had what I can only describe as a small breakdown, in October I lost my job, and in November my girlfriend and I parted ways. My life is in a state of upheaval right now.
At a time in my life when I’m questioning every action I’ve taken, every decision I’ve made, that has led me to this point, and when I find myself wanting more out of life, Wreck-It Ralph speaks to me.
About two weeks ago I was with some friends discussing what a possible sequel to Wreck-It Ralph might be about. Director Rich Moore has all but confirmed that they’re doing one, and he’s suggested he’d want the follow-up to explore console gaming and online gaming. That got me thinking: How exactly would they do that?
As I was talking, the story I’d write for a Wreck-It Ralph follow-up basically fell out of my mouth. It was, I thought, basically perfect, though not strictly speaking accessible. Literally no one at Disney would want to make my idea. Nevertheless, I’m going to share it with you now. Mild spoilers for Wreck-It Ralph follow. (more…)
It’s the BBC’s most popular show, but BBC Worldwide has no idea how to handle it.
There’s no doubt about it – Doctor Who‘s popularity has soared since its move to BBC America in 2009. The network has been pushing and promoting the show with vigor, giving it the star treatment and prime-time advertising that SyFy never afforded it. They’ve been pushing the show on social networks – the official Doctor Who Tumblr page is a little annoying at times but there’s no doubt they have a winning social media strategy. BBC America are amazing and are undoubtedly one of the key reasons for the show’s current popularity here in the States.
BBC Worldwide, on the other hand, appears to be staffed by incompetent morons who don’t really seem to understand what they’re sitting on.
The international sales arm of the BBC are the cause of a number of issues for the show – just speak to anyone working for a company licensed to make Doctor Who merchandise – but nowhere is this more apparent than the show’s, frankly, appalling presence on Netflix. Since the show was added to Netflix in 2008 it has consistently been mishandled, mislabeled and mismanaged, and nobody at BBC Worldwide seems to have any interest in remedying any of the problems viewers may encounter when watching the show.
BE ADVISED: While the post itself doesn’t contain any spoilers, there are two inline images that contain spoilers for for Game of Thrones season one, and Saturday’s Doctor Who series 7 premiere “Asylum of the Daleks”. You have been warned.
It takes a lot, a lot, to get me watching a new TV show these days. It’s not because I’m a hipster who doesn’t want to watch the same thing everyone else is watching (though I will confess that in my teens I avoided the Harry Potter novels and films specifically because all of my friends were obsessed with the bloody things), but because most current shows have been thoroughly, utterly ruined for me by everybody on the internet everywhere ever before I’ve even had a chance to read a series synopsis.
Everybody is talking about Breaking Bad at the moment. Everybody. It’s the show’s final season – or, as is my understanding, the first half of its final season, the rest of which will be shown in the new year – and the internet is ablaze. People are nattering about it on Twitter, Tumblr, Facebook, and all those other social networks I’m not hip enough to know about yet. Also Google+. Tumblr in particular is rather boisterous, with people posting quotes, clips of the show in subtitled GIF format, and reams of fanart based on episodes that aired less than 24 hours prior.
Now you know how Game of Thrones season one ends. Thanks, internet.
Breaking Bad isn’t the only show that suffers this problem, either. The pilot for CBS’ Elementary, their attempt to modernize Sherlock Holmes following the BBC’s rather successful go of it, recently leaked, and within minutes people on Tumblr were posting quotes, breakdowns and, of course, GIFs. Doctor Who‘s seventh series also started this Saturday in the UK, and Tumblr had already thoroughly ruined the show long before the east coast premiere rolled along later that night.
When Game of Thrones is running on HBO, damn near everybody on the internet knows what happened in the latest episode whether they’re watching it or not. When a new episode of Community airs, Tumblr almost immediately becomes a Dan Harmon fansite, and remains that way for the following 48 hours.
Tumblr cannot help but build its nest out of screengrabs, spoilers and snippets like a demented pop culture magpie. Amidst it all, the by now familiar cries of “ALL THE FEELS”, “DEAD” and “ASDFJGFGJKSDJK”, punctuated by reaction GIFs that inexplicably also spoil other shows and films you haven’t managed to get around to seeing yet.
For someone who spends a lot of time on Tumblr, this represents an enormous problem – seeing a TV show you want to watch becomes not just entertainment but a social obligation; something you have to do to avoid being behind the curve. This means torrenting the show before it comes up on Hulu the next day (or, in the case of Doctor Who, after it airs on the BBC but before its North American premiere on BBC America or SPACE), or, if you’re one of those people who still inexplicably has cable, actually sitting down to watch the show as it goes out live.
Imagine that for a moment – having to actually schedule your life around a television show. What is this, the Dark Ages?
A lovely piece of Doctor Who fanart that, if you haven’t seen “Asylum of the Daleks” yet, has the potential to utterly ruin the climax of the episode for you. [Source: Wil Wheaton, via Tumblr]DVRs and digital distribution are a Godsend – they allow us to digest content at our leisure. We are in a golden age of television not just because of shows like Louie, Breaking Bad and Doctor Who, but because we are no longer shackled to the television, forced to watch something as it goes out. We can record it or, better still, log on to Hulu or the iPlayer, to watch when convenient for us.
But to anybody who is active on a social network like Tumblr, that freedom is countered by the desire not to have your favourite show utterly and irrevokably ruined by some well-meaning fan who absolutely has to draw a picture of that new character in the latest episode right fucking now, utterly ruining the plot twist for the episode in the process.
Even webseries like The Lizzie Bennet Diaries are chewed up and spat out by social network users – why sit down to watch the show when it’s already splattered all over my dashboard in GIF form?
There are, of course, ways of avoiding this flurry of spoilers. You could install Tumblr Savior, a plugin that allows you to block posts including certain words or hashtags (such as, for instance, #doctor who or #breaking bad). It’s not an ideal solution, however – for a start, it’s predicated on the person posting about the show actually tagging the post, or even including the words you’re blocking. Not ideal if that person you’re following for their exceptional fanart doesn’t tag any of their posts or even post text in their image posts.
I could avoid Tumblr and Twitter entirely, but that feels like not going to a bar simply because you don’t like the house ale, or deciding not to visit an art gallery because you know they’re currently running an exhibit of paintings by an artist you don’t like. It’s like throwing your iPod out the window because you might hear an Alanis Morissette song, and you’re just not in the mood to listen to “Head Over Feet” right now.
While these two solutions might keep me safe from the shows I’m actively watching, like Community and Doctor Who, it doesn’t save the shows I haven’t started watching yet, like Game of Thrones and Breaking Bad. I’ve seen neither show yet, not even so much as a pilot, because while Tumblr has convinced me that I absolutely have to see them, it’s also ruined every single fucking plot point in every episode that’s broadcast. There’s no point in ordering any box sets, no real sense in adding a show to my Netflix queue, when I already know what’s going to happen. These shows have, in a very real sense, been spoiled.
So my answer, when people nag me about why I haven’t started watching obviously brilliant TV shows yet, is that I simply can’t anymore. I crave new experiences, new stories and new media, but social networking is actively preventing me from receiving those things. Short of stepping away from these platforms and declaring myself a digital hermit, I don’t really know what else to do.
Y’know, other than just watching the shows to watch them. Which is obviously madness.
I’m experiencing something of a tight cash flow situation at the moment. Hopefully it’s only temporary and I’ll be back on my feet soon, but at the moment I’m decidedly short-wadded. I’m not sure if I’m going to make rent. I definitely won’t be going grocery shopping any time soon, a sad fact that led me to – I shit you not – eat a large chunk of cheddar cheese earlier today like t’were an apple. Money doesn’t live here anymore.
It’s not the first time I’ve been in this situation and it likely won’t be the last. It’s easy to look at the comparative emptiness of one’s wallet and conclude that, yeah, money is bullshit, but the more I think about it the more I’m glad money exists, as a premise. If we had an old-fashioned bartering system, such as might have been employed in medieval England, I’d be fucked. I have no skills to offer, no trade to ply. I’d end up giving out blowjobs.
You might imagine that, were we to return to a simpler means of keeping a roof over one’s head and food in one’s belly, I might actually do well. I’m a writer, after all. Well, guess again – in this day and age, everybody can write. It’s not like ancient Egypt where you had to walk to the local writing pyramid and ask a guy to write your shopping list for you. People can get that shit done themselves these days. What’s more, people are talented liars. They don’t need the likes of me to make shit up and write it down for them.
So, regrettably, I’d have to make my way through life by sucking cock. I acknowledge this, and I’ve made peace with it. Fortunately we haven’t arrived at that point as a society, and we’re unlikely to reinstate such a barter system unless something catastrophic were to happen, such as a Fallout-style nuclear apocalypse. But I know my value as a person. I know how much I contribute to society.
You always hear about people “failing upwards” – people who are woefully inept at their jobs, but who inexplicably get promoted into executive-level jobs. I always wanted to be one of those people. I worked tirelessly to become the sort of person who does just enough to keep him from getting fired, but not enough to actively contribute to a work environment. When I was made Project Coordinator at Disney I thought, “Yes, Ben. This is where the dream will come true.” It was fitting, in a way. Then the 2008 market crash happened, and suddenly I’m out on the street again. Back to square one, where I’ve been ever since.
I still believe people can fail upwards. Mitt Romney is living proof of that – a man with the business sense of a meringue, who is now a Presidential nominee. If he can become a viable candidate for the most powerful position in the world, then surely I can become an ineffectual executive for a large multi-national corporation. Surely I can hold the sort of job with an important-sounding title, but in which nobody actually knows what, if anything, I actually do (which is nothing).
That is the American dream. It’s what brought me to this country. It’s what’s kept me afloat during these rocky times. Some day, I will make my dream come true.
Humanity, eh? The things we’ve accomplished! We’ve split the atom. We’ve discovered the God Particle. We’ve determined that light has an upper speed limit, and we’ve learnt that actually, no, it doesn’t. We’ve cured diseases, we’ve put a flag on the moon, and we’ve built computers capable of solving some of the most complex equations known to man.
But all of this pales in comparison the innovation that the 21st century will most likely be remembered for – tee-shirts.
Over the last two decades, the time from an idea being formed in someone’s head to the ability to get that idea onto a tee-shirt people can buy and wear has slowly narrowed, to the point now where someone can make a joke in the morning, and by the afternoon you can buy a tee-shirt based on that very same joke in your local shopping mall.
Historians of the future will refer to the current era as the Tee-Shirt Age.
And if you can’t? Well, you can make your own. This has revolutionized the way we think about the silkscreened bullshit we emblazon across our torso. We’re no longer confined to the designs offered to us by the likes of Target, Blue Navy or Hot Topic. There is a world of infinite possibilities out there. All we have to do is imagine it, pay $30 plus tax and shipping, then wait anywhere between two-to-five weeks depending on the print-on-demand store we’ve elected to use, then we can wear our dream shirt. The only one of its kind. With a single purchase we become the envy of all humanity, probably.
I don’t want to succumb to hyperbole or anything, but that effectively makes us as Gods among men.
America, yesterday. [Source: Wikipedia]Yesterday, the United States of America celebrated 236 years of independence. If you’re me, it’s a day marked by your friends cracking wise about how awkward it must be for me to be living in a country my people once ruled with an iron something-or-other. If you’re literally anybody else (except maybe a Native American) it’s celebrated with the mind-boggling combination of barbecue, alcohol, and explosives.
The reasons this boggles one’s mind is obvious: I cannot imagine why anybody would want to set off fireworks in the height of summer when no bugger’ll see ’em.
July 4th is seventeen days shy of July 21st, which, as any fule kno, is the longest day of the year. The days are longer, the nights are shorter, and even the night sky has a curious, ethereal glow to it. Not ideal conditions for fireworks.
Fireworks, the way Guy Fawkes wanted them to be. Probably. [Source: Wikipedia]Back in Britain, we have the common sense to know when to put on a fireworks display: November 5th. It’s dark, it’s miserable, the days are short and the nights stretch out forever – the perfect setting for an explosives display. Even terrorist Guy Fawkes knew this as he prepared to destroy the Houses of Parliament in what could have been one of the most visually spellbinding terrorist displays in British history, had he succeeded. Of course, his failure is our win – we celebrate his inability to make a building explode by attempting to set the sky on fire, and every year it looks mesmerizing.
If the Founding Fathers had any common sense, they’d have held off on finalizing the Declaration of Independence until October at the absolute earliest. Then, the following year, the night sky would have set the perfect scene for the fireworks displays that would ensue. But no – it was the summer, and they just wanted to get the damned thing wrapped up so they could go swimming and eat ice-cream sandwiches. Bastards.
Did they not know they’d be depriving generations of spectacular visuals? Did they not consider for one minute that maybe the bright, orange summer sky would not make the best canvas? Or maybe they did know, but they didn’t care about their country enough to take action.
One thing is for certain, though: Every Fourth of July America has ever celebrated has been sullied by their failure to take this one small detail into consideration, and this country is all the weaker because of it.
Now obviously we can’t move Independence Day. If nothing else, it’s ruin the shorthand name for the movie of the same name. Instead, I propose a global calendar shift.
By rolling the calendar back three or so months, we would shift July 4th to the a period in the year when the days are significantly shorter. Americans would still get to celebrate July 4th, but they’d be doing so with optimum lighting conditions. What’s more, this wouldn’t have too much of an impact on Guy Fawkes’ Night, which would still take place under fairly optimal lighting conditions in what used to be February.
Everybody wins! Except for farmers, obviously, but they’d hardly complain. They wouldn’t want to look unpatriotic.
