…still cookin

Hello again, as a little side project, and because I enjoy these videos so much:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_l2POYziCn8
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dwa88fZOHh8

I was inspired to try one out, so the last few nights I put one together with a band that I love! Hope you like it

I called and they had a single spot left, so I found myself driving down to Tacoma in rush hour to snatch the spot.

Since I am just acting in Jeff’s film, and have several other friends who are very interested in being part of the competition I decided I would go ahead and join.

So thats 2 movies in 72 hours

We thought it might be fun to connect the films somehow…

more to come!

So I decided to play Crysis:

Well the graphics were something else, and especially with my new computer, it was running very smooth on high settings! You really have to check this game out to believe it.

It was a pretty standard first person shooter with a few twists and shitty ending, but we can get to that!

The key twist to the game was your cryo suit which had the ability to enhance certain aspects such as strength, speed, armor. These things can be switched on the fly and lead to many different fighting techniques. Although I found myself doing the pretty standard fighting style even with these other options available.

In the trailer videos they always show people killing the soldiers in the most random ways, which is just never what I do, maybe I am boring.

The game started going in a very different direction about half way through and ***Spoiler*** out of know where we were dealing with some alien species. Now I am cool with aliens, but they went a bit far with the whole alien base towards the end, which I just did not enjoy.

And then the ending…its like they took a page right out of hollywood, leaving it as a clear sequel, although leaving the most interesting part for the next game, actually destroying the alien base. I mean who wouldn’t want to blow that annoying thing up?

All together it was fun, a bit short, but fun. I will definitely check out the next one, so I can kill those damn aliens!

Hello out there! Check out my newest video:

Hope you like it!

As many of you may know, Hillary will be doing her student teaching in New Zealand for the next three months! Its pretty wild but have have been able to stay in contact with her through Skype on a regular basis, which is really nice.

I am proud of her because she has been keeping up with her blog and become very tech savvy!

Go check it out here: http://hillaryh.wordpress.com/

She has lots of great pictures and stories of her adventures, go take a look!

So a week or so ago, the amazing app known as Steam(I can get into that later), was selling the game Prey for 5 bucks!

Well I had just gotten my new graphics card, and the game had decent looking graphics, so I decided to go for it.

Click for the Prey goodness

Its ok, definitly not worth the full 50 bucks or so that i am sure it was first tagged at. Specifically it feels like an unreal/doom esque game that the developers took some time(about 2 hours) trying to figuring out a gimmick.

Let me take this moment to explain myself a bit more, WTF is with gimmicks. I mean if you need a gimmick, then you are not making a good game. But I guess I get ahead of myself because in every industry there are going to be varying levels of quality, depth, etc. But seriously, gimmicks are driving me crazy right now, and don’t even get me started on the Nintendo Wii.

Well basically the gimmick they came up with is too throw in Native American culture. I mean don’t get me wrong, I am sure there are many interesting ways to do this. But this game just feels wrong. I mean switching into Native American Spirit mode to shoot your spirit bow at dead childrens souls that are fighting you on a Doom Alien ship that is gutting all the humans that it sucks up with their alien rays along with cars, hello kitty dolls and small local pubs. Is that missplaced or what??

Although now that I think about it…

Maybe it could be worse…

Well I have started development on a new video project. It is going very well right now and because I have a hard final date for the showing of the video it is helping push things along. Isn’t that funny that you can have things in your life that you would like to do but find less and less time to spend on it. Yet once there is a deadline in place, you have a blast finishing it.

In this case, I am showing the video at a large work function. Needless to say I wish I could give myself the same type of personal deadlines and goals sometimes.

The second, and more interesting part is that I have a expanded team of people working on this, who several weeks after we complete this (April 18th show date) will be entering the film competition I wrote about before.

We will be shooting most of this weekend and I really hope it comes out alright.

Oh what do we have here?

Looks like my new video card! My computer started acting really strange a week or two ago and finally pinned it down on the video card overheating due to the fact that the card was getting pretty old, and the fact that the fan was dying on it. During load times the card was overheating pretty bad. I chose this card because it has some really great performance ratings + great cooling on it + relatively cheap on good old Newegg.

Thats right kids, the 72-Hour film festival is finally approaching and I am excited to say the least!

Basically the premise is that 30 teams of move makers sign up ahead of time and show up to the Grand Cinema Theater on May 1st.

Teams can be no larger than 8 people and you must create everything for your film within the time frame.

On the day of the event you pick several key factors of the video from a hat:
1. Genre of the film!
2. A prop that must be included
3. A line that must be included.

Then once you have those you run screaming out of the theater, only to return within 72 hours to submit your film. They are then judged and brought down to a small set which are then shown to a packed crowd who votes.

Needless to say, I am excited. Here is the current crew:

1. Michael (me, duh)
2. Jeff Aldridge
3. Keith Bartley (For making the soundtrack)
4. David Kennedy
5. And a few select others as we fill out the group.

Wish me luck and I will post more as it gets closer.

Hello internetz…

Well, if you have not heard of Ronald Jenkees over on the tubes you should really check him out!

He is super up beat and seems to love what he does. But even better than that, he is an artist who has found an excellent outlet and a great following of fans. He is popular but is really starting to pick up! After buying his first CD, I can’t wait to hear more from him.

He has gotten some press already, even making an intro song for this guy’s podcast!