Am I outraged? Not really. Am I saddened? Yes, as a community professional, I’d hope a company wouldn’t need to stoop to this sort of thing. (Does Cryptic or Atari not have any money to, y’know, push the Beta through marketing and PR?) Would I do it myself, in the same position? Well… I would go after players of a rival game, certainly. That’s standard practice these days. It’s the methods employed here that are short-sighted at best, and downright stupid at worst.

I doubt there was much of a masterplan; I’d be surprised if it “Let’s go use the official CoH boards to recruit!” was suggested at any point as a serious strategy (and we’ll probably never know if it was). More likely, Cryptic employees were given a number of Beta invites to hand out, and some of them gave those to players of City of Heroes that they either knew personally, or knew by reputation. It’s easy to see how that might have gotten out of control.

That, however, is the issue: control. If you’re going to give employees (or anyone, really) Beta invites to a game, as a Community Manager (assuming they were in charge, and some quotes suggest they weren’t) then you have to set guidelines for who those keys should be given to (in the first instance) and how they should be given. Yes, these are just going to be guidelines, and there’s nothing to stop people from ignoring them. But then you can legitimately kick their butts when they do so.

If you don’t do that – well, you’re just not paying that much attention to what can go wrong…. and in my experience, anticipating disaster is a large part of the job of community management. Sure, we’re not clairvoyant, but this was a Galactus-sized PR disaster waiting to happen. You gotta watch out for those.

Straight off, I’d have to say it’s a shame; just because it’s always a shame when someone moves on from a job that they most probably loved and enjoyed, because of internal pressure or because of a mistake they might have been able to weather. You can probably sense my ambivalence here though, and that’s simply because I didn’t know Alex (AKA Lighthouse) as well as others did. (Not to be confused with Alex AKA GhostRaptor, EU Community Team Lead, by the way.)

I did meet Alex once, a good while ago when he made a quick visit to the Brighton office to get to the know the EU team, just as he was starting in the job. He seemed enthusiastic and excited about what he was doing, and the fact that he lasted two years means he must have liked it. That he’s moved on at this point doesn’t necessarily mean he was pushed, or that he wasn’t valued, but I can’t really comment as I don’t know the situation.

I do know, however, how much developers can sometimes be swayed by an angry community, and how sometimes (just sometimes, and this may not be one of those times) that can backfire on the community managers. Remember people (and I’m talking to devs and players here) community guys aren’t always there to give you good news; sometimes they’ve got to give you the bad. Even if you don’t want to hear it.

Anyway. I’m not going to soapbox. I hope Alex lands on his feet somewhere, and soon.

We don’t know where it might be, except ‘in Brighton’ is a good guess, and I would expect it’ll be next weekend (Saturday 20th is a good guess, although possibly Friday, too). It’s looking likely that for most (if not all) of us affected by redundancy, Thursday or Friday will be our last day.

So, y’know, want to come to the pub? After all, you guys and gals are part of what made our jobs so good over the last few years. We’d love to see you.

More details to follow – but let me know your views, okay? And spread the word… I don’t want to be standing around with a pint, alone.

They’re performances of the winning entries for Set the Stage, the competition that we ran to get players to write scripts for the Aion and Guild Wars characters to perform. (The scripts were reworked by me to become suitable for performance, but these two are quite similar to the original material, with many lines remaining intact. You can download my script drafts for all six final entries at the official Aion and Guild Wars sites.)

The sound quality is not excellent – source was basically the speakers on the stand, which had to compete with everything around – so I’ve embedded the ‘normal’ and English subtitled versions. (There are also French and German versions of each – see below.)

As I said before, these stage performances were probably what I was most proud of achieving during Games Convention. Trust me; there were some obstacles to overcome! However, I personally feel the performances were excellent, given the lack of rehearsal time we had and the environment they were performing in, and I’m very proud to present them to you.

Aion: The Tower of Eternity – ‘Captive’ by Will Carpenter

Script performance draft by Stephen Reid

Click here to view the embedded video.

Subtitled in English

Click here to view the embedded video.

French subtitled version | German subtitled version

Guild Wars – ‘No Beautiful Day’ by Melanie Lauterbach

Script performance draft by Stephen Reid

Click here to view the embedded video.

Subtitled in English

Click here to view the embedded video.

French subtitled version | German subtitled version

You’ll quickly see that this has been recorded by a fan in the audience, so excuse the quality. Come to think of it, that leads me to ask your opinion: wouldn’t you like to see this stuff recorded and presented officially through NCsoft channels?

Indeed, perhaps this is something my team should be doing (given we’re doing so much other video stuff). Hmmmm? Do let me know in comments. The more of you who want it… the more likely it’ll happen for future events.

Hint. Hint.

Online Videos by Veoh.com

To save on embeds – part 2, where Joe Morrissey talks about Issue 13 (although I’d dare say you eagle-eyed Forum users know all this already) is here… and part 4, which confusingly seems to continue from part 2, is here.

The fact that I can’t do simple division won’t be a surprise to my mother, but it is a continuing source of disappointment to my secondary school maths teacher, Mr Chenery. Sorry, sir.

Episode 9: One More Thing

This was always supposed to be the second-to-last episode, and on the release schedule (believe it or not, I did have one) was supposed to go live on the Monday before Games Convention started. However, due to other episodes taking waaaaay longer than I hoped to finish (I’m looking at YOU, Episode 8!) I realised if I didn’t bump the release of this and Episode 10 up a bit just to fill the gap, there was no way I’d be able to finish Episode 11 and release it pre-GC. Hence, we lost a bit of impact with the central gag.

Said gag being, obviously, “Oh noes, we’ve only gone and forgotten the game we’re demo’ing” (nudge nudge, wink wink). In case you’re wondering, no, Martin wasn’t responsible for making sure Aion was on our demo PCs… that’s IT’s job, amongst others. Nor indeed do we use DVD burners to make installers for the PCs. In fact, it’s all done with magic.

This was a pretty easy shoot, especially considering it has a grand total of two shots in it (Medium two-shot; single close-up). We did it all after work one night, which again meant that Martin had to run around shouting in an empty office, but by this point people were used to it.

Martin’s close-up acting was fun, but was something of a pain to edit – not because of anything he did, but because of background people in the shot during his close-up. I only realised on editing that there were two people standing at the other end of the office behind his head; so to eliminate them from ‘continuity’, short of doing a George Lucas-style digital removal, I had to cut very carefully away from him as he half-exited frame. I really like being able to cut on a frame-to-frame basis, but man, sometimes it’s a pain. Of course you guys never notice it either – it should, rightfully, be seamless if it works.

I should mention how good Jörg was in the ‘unflashy’ role too; he improvised his little “Uh-oh” at the end, which a lot of people enjoyed. A great straight man, which is why of course he was cast in Episode 10…

Episode 10: Subliminal Messaging

The idea for this episode was thrown together fast after Martin and I saw the stand renders, and heard they were supposed to be ‘top secret’ until very close to GC. We immediately decided it’d be cool to do a video where we were lamenting that we couldn’t show fans the renders, but that they were great, and if only we had some way… so the script was practically written right then.

This was shot directly after Episode 9 – we just upped and moved into our staff room, Monkey Ranch, and set up. Shooting it was easy-peasy, except for sound issues – the vending machine you can see in the background, plus the coffee machine that you can’t see, both intermittently decided to make noises that would probably have appeared on the soundtrack. (I have to guess at that myself, because we can’t monitor sound on our camcorder. I know, crappy.)

Anyway, apart from that it was all easy. I loved Martin and Jörg’s ending stuff – especially Martin’s voice after I suggested it should be more “Scooby Doo like” (by which I meant ‘more cheesy’ not ‘more like a cartoon dog’). In fact I liked it so much, I decided to film it right there and then, deliberately framing it to look like it was ‘behind the scenes’. Something I came back to… or will come back to… ah, this timeline stuff confuses me.

Those were two simple episodes, easily shot, easily completed. Editing Episode 10 was a little trickier than I imagined – doing the ‘subliminal’ stuff in particular was fiddly – but it didn’t take too long. The problem that became apparent later was the scheduling.

Originally this would have gone out right after Episode 9, which itself was supposed to debut on the Monday of GC week; so the first gag would have been “Ooops, we almost forgot the Aion demo” followed swiftly by a tease of the stand. Unfortunately, things changed, and our PR department decided to release all the renders before the show began. That meant when Episode 10 debuted, the gag was sort of null and void, as anyone who wanted to could find the renders. Luckily for us, no-one seemed to complain too loud. Not even you, loyal reader, so ta for that.

By the time both of these were shot and in one case edited, Episode 11 was still far off in the future – along with other episodes beyond it. Could I manage to shoot everything I’d scripted?

Kind of a redundant question, now. But hey, read along and find out next time in Part 6.

Episode 7: Musical Tastes Vary

Confusingly – especially as I’m trying to retell it to you in episode sequence – this was shot after Episode 9 (One More Thing) and 10 (Subliminal Messaging). It was squeezed in over a weekend, where I was lucky to get help from everyone involved.

By the time we came to shoot this I was very, very aware that we were running out of shooting days (and editing nights, as it had pretty much come down to). So this one was pretty much a case of just get in and get it done, and as a model of that, it’s almost flawless.

We shot everything on a Sunday morning, starting with Spaff’s exit from our staff ‘rec room’, Monkey Ranch (which I was surprised no-one asked about, considering the sign is pretty prominent in the video). In case you haven’t guessed, we were trying to emulate the classic Michael Bay/Jerry Bruckheimer style of slo-mo entrance, with of course zero budget and no California setting sun behind us. I just shot away with various angles and distances, not entirely sure what I’d do with it when I was finished, but hey – I’d have it anyway.

In case you’re wondering, the entire idea for this episode – apart from just being a trailer for the Community party at Leipzig – was almost entirely born of Spaff’s strange love of Top Gun. Well, we all love Top Gun to a greater or lesser degree, but he’s the only one of us who owns a Top Gun t-shirt, a pair of suitable shades, and doesn’t mind responding to the callsign ‘Maverick’. When we’d decided that he would be the only person who would volunteer a mix CD entirely made up of Top Gun tracks for a community party, well – the rest just wrote itself, really.

With Spaff’s entrance in the bag, I filmed the cutaway shots, which of course had to be someone playing guitar in a high wind with big hair. Marek took the role and made it his own. We are of course using a Guitar Hero guitar in the shot, but just for authenticity, Marek did mime to the Top Gun anthem on the day.

With that done, on to the meat of the shoot; Martin dealing with rejected CDs, and Volker bringing him the ‘Ultimate Mix CD’. This was pretty easy to do, especially after we realised that Monkey Ranch held a whole shelf-full of CDs that would fill our ‘Fail’ box. (The ‘Epic Fail’ bin, by the way, was Spaff’s idea.) With those full, I shot the initial ‘throwing’ stuff from a couple of different angles, experimenting with reverse zooms to get the look right. It didn’t take too long, although we did damage a couple of CDs through repeated throwing….

Next it was on to the main dialogue exchange. As we had two German speakers in the main roles we were able to shoot two different language versions, so after we nailed one shot in English, I asked the guys to do it again in German. If we’d been really prepared we might have localised the English script in advance, and have a German one to shoot from – but there wasn’t much time, so the guys just translated their lines on the spot. The advantage there was that they would bounce different ‘takes’ off each other, and come up with whatever they thought was funnier, which was obviously what I wanted.

What I found interesting was that even though usually when translating into German you see the word count expand, when I edited the German language footage together it was often the same length, and sometimes even shorter. Either the guys spoke quickly, or we got lucky, I guess. In case you haven’t seen it though, feel free to compare and contrast:

Click here to view the embedded video.

In this case, shooting was pretty damn fast. I knew pretty much what I wanted in terms of shots, and we proceeded quite quickly – except for the inevitable goofs here and there. Poor Martin was suffering from a slight cold, and his voice was a little hoarse, but he did great as always. I should also give special mention to Volker, who did such a great job, especially with his terrible dancing and his nice descent into whimpering cowardice. He also had no qualms about looking totally camp in the last shot of him, which really sold that joke. C’mon, it’s the most gay-but-not movie ever…

Oh, in case you’re wondering, I’d have to choose “Military marches… you can dance to??” as my favourite line in this episode – partially because I just like it, but partially because Martin delivered it so well. (It’s actually even funnier to my ear in German.) Here’s the script, anyway, if you’re interested:

Quest for GC Episode 7 script

All told, the shoot was so smooth, I almost expected a nightmare in post-production – but it didn’t happen. In fact as I cut this one together I was laughing harder than I ever expected to, which is why when I posted it I said it was my favourite to date. Unfortunately it’s one of the least-watched episodes, at least to date; some other Aion-related news pushed this right off the front page of the main Aion fansites, where a lot of our traffic had been coming from. Ah well – it’s still a favourite, and was a walk in the park in comparison to what came next….

Episode 8: The Quest System Explained

This episode was a nightmare, and very nearly brought the whole series off the rails.

The idea was to shoot an ‘educational film’ explaining how the Quest System worked. (Which I’m not going to explain here. Obviously you can either watch the film, or read Seb’s version on the Aion site.) Honestly, the Quest System isn’t that complicated – but how to explain it while also making the explanation enjoyable (and preferably, funny) was something I wrestled with for weeks.

The script took an age to write. Originally it was titled ‘Levelling Up’ (in fact, the shooting script still was) and was going to be an explanation by myself and Martin to an audience of staffers just how the Quest System worked. The vague idea was that it’d be a military style briefing, complete with pointers, mock-seriousness, and probably more than a few references to Aliens. (Specifically, “How do I get out of this chickenshit outfit?”) There was also going to be a final joke about Chinese gold farmers being employed to get the most out of the Quest System.

However, it started to become obvious as I wrote it that to explain things this way – with appropriate Q&As scripted in there, too – would take a damn age, both in running time and also in shooting. Just getting everyone together would be hard, then doing various shot setups and so on… we just didn’t have the time.

(I guess you can tell that by this point, I was becoming very aware of just how long it took to shoot things. Unless it was a very, very simple setup (like, say Episodes 9 and 10) an average episode would take three or so hours to shoot. That took people away from work and occupied space in the office, so, I was conscious of trying to not do that too much.)

So, I changed direction with the script fairly radically. Taking a concept from another, discarded episode (fully scripted – it’s called The Correct Address, and may resurface sometime) of a hapless player, I combined that with the idea of using graphics to explain the concepts behind the Quest System. I actually left in the ‘briefing’ opening and ending, but as you know now, those got ditched too. In fact you might find it educational to read the script before we go any further:

Quest for GC Episode 8 script

I seem to recall that I was starting to get so concerned about finishing this behemoth – as it runs to 16 pages of dialogue, as opposed to the two or three of some other episodes – that I decided to just shoot the dialogue scenes and then get on with cutting it together. So, one night I corralled Tom and Martin together and shot both of them larking about in our boardroom.

The shoot was easy enough, especially as I had Tom’s incredibly expressive face to work with – really helpful when all I could direct him with was “Look happy! Happier! Even happier! Now sad.” Martin also came up with some inspired stuff, and they improvised a ‘fight scene’ that was definitely better than what we had in the script. All good; now I just had to make it into some sort of narrative.

The plan in my head, such as it was, was as follows:

• Use Keynote (the Mac OS PowerPoint-beater) to create animated slides to go under the narration
• Export those slides into QuickTime movies, then edit them into the main movie
• Get Spaff to record his patented 1950s-style voiceover, and edit that into the soundtrack
• Use suitable music under the entire thing
• Run the edited movie through some sort of filters to give it the correct ‘aged’ look
• Oh yeah… then do subtitled versions for French and German

I knew right then it was going to be one long, hard slog to get it done. All I could do was start.

So first, I spent a very long weekend trying to pull a rough cut together. Using a Keynote presentation that a few of you may have even seen in its first form (at UK Games Expo) as my basis, I started hacking together slides to represent our ‘educational film’. I had the imagery for the Quest Cards themselves, so it was just a question of figuring out how to visually represent the voiceover I’d written.

This was harder than it sounds. One problem is that while Keynote is very good at many things, there are still issues with the timing of slides when they’re exported as QuickTime movies. (There’s a way around this – record a voiceover – but I didn’t think of that at the time. Next time….) As I began to finish my first few slides and export them, seeing that they were generally shorter than I knew I’d need, I had to come up with some clever workarounds to make sure that the narration (which I didn’t yet have) could fit over them, by using freeze frames, cut aways, and so on. Before too long, I realised this was going to be near-impossible without some sort of narration to cut to; so, alone in the office, I bust out a microphone and recorded a very tired temp track to cut to.

At the same time, when not dealing with Keynote, I was still cutting together the actual performance part of things. Generally that was all good, except for a few short takes that I had to elongate with cuts elsewhere. The other big question mark was over the final ‘aged film’ look. For a while I experimented with a built-in Final Cut Express plugin called ‘Bad TV’ which could have given the entire thing the look of some sort of out-of-sync TV broadcast, but it was too complicated.

It took a long time, but gradually I began to beat the rough cut into shape. Keynote was proving to be good at providing the visuals, and once I had Spaff’s voiceover, I didn’t have to do a whole lot of re-jigging to make the edit work alongside it. I actually started to think I could pull this off. I handed a version off to Spaff, who ran the whole thing through iMovie’s ‘Old Movie’ filter (which strangely, isn’t part of Final Cut Express) and we had a finished cut.

Then I had to do the subtitles. The final nightmare.

Previously I’d found myself able to subtitle one of our episodes in about 90 minutes per language. For episode 8 though, I hadn’t counted on two things: one, an extended running time of five minutes plus. Two: the Keynote slides, which also ideally had to be translated.

Put it this way: what I hoped would be a three hour task turned into nine hours.

Eventually though, it did get done. A lot of people liked the episode, too, and I think it did what we hoped it would – educate people while making them smile. Honestly though, it’s hard for me to even tell; I was so steeped in this one I couldn’t see the outside world for a while.

After I’d finished episode 8 I almost didn’t want to do any more. At this point we’d filmed ‘One More Thing’ and ‘Subliminal Messaging’, but hadn’t shot any of ‘Boot Camp’ and still had several other episodes I wanted to film. I didn’t know if I could handle it. Far too many late nights and long weekends had been spent staring at Final Cut Express, my mouse hand gradually turning into a misshapen claw, my eyes turning bloodshot from the monitor. Quite clearly, I’d bitten off more than I could chew, and episode 8 almost made me choke.

I was reckoning without the inspirational power of Bill Conti, though….

Episode 5: Looking forward to…

This was supposed to be an easy episode. In fact, it was supposed to be the throwaway, edited quickly, filler episode between other episodes – hell, it was practically supposed to be a clip show. (Hmm. Could I do a clip show? Very possibly….)

Brief was simple; loads of people who are going to the Games Convention telling us what they’re most looking forward to. In one word. Or one sentence. Or one paragraph just please don’t monopolise the camera as there are others who need to be part of this thing thank you.

So I gave the camera to Spaff and off he went. On his first pass, when I downloaded the footage, I couldn’t help but notice something.

“Why… is Volker on the toilet?”

“He’s just sitting on it. He’s not really.. you know.”

Sure enough, he wasn’t. He was sitting, but not sh… you get the idea. But hey, that would make for good comedy, so bless ‘im, in he went to the rough cut.

First pass wasn’t enough though. Too many people rambling on camera, not enough good answers. So off Spaff went again, looking for more people; amazingly he didn’t even film everyone who’s going to GC (not even close). I knew I had enough material for a decent roundup though, so I started to cut.

I wanted a kind of upbeat, jangly, country style of track to go underneath the visuals; don’t ask me why. I just figured some brooding piece wouldn’t work, and I didn’t want some overused advert track that we’d all recognise. The track popped into my head near instantly – Western Skies, by Canadian country-rock group Blue Rodeo. I knew it had the right beginning, and a number of pauses that’d make editing to it quite easy.

Oh, how wrong I was. The problem with editing to a music track is that the beats start to obsess you. You think you’re cutting to them – but you aren’t, not always. Are you cutting to the beginning of the drum beat, when the stick hits the skin, or the end, when the sound sort of… reaches you? These things can drive you a little crazy.

After a few hours of work, however, I at least had what I thought was a serviceable beginning. I just knew this wasn’t a quick-and-easy filler project any more, though.

Luckily, I got saved by Marek. Having given us a pure comedy answer to work around (“Leipzig…? What?”) I started to build around that, and got inspired to add in the back-and-forth between the subtitles and what people were saying. When I noticed Jörg’s comedy eyebrows, that helped even more suddenly I had plenty to work with, and cutting it was just a matter of time.

With that done, it was on to the next one. Which wasn’t actually the next one. But just to ease confusion, let’s talk about the next one anyway…

Episode 6: Costume Competition Auditions

This was about where things started to get crazy. I mean, Episode 4 had been longer than the others, but this one was downright ambitious by comparison. We had props, we had costumes, we had a rap planned. I had no idea what I was walking into with this episode… although it got much, much worse later.

We shot this on a Wednesday, edited it on a Thursday and released on Friday, which is a crazy schedule, and just proof of how much I wanted it to happen. The original impetus to do this episode was Martin’s, who even came up with a script involving Solid Snake, Hiro and the Bling Gnome… James and I read it over though, and decided we could beef it up a bit. As we’d done a sort-of audition thing with Setting the Stage, we decided to go all-out with episode 6.

The script was pretty much a mish-mash of different ideas thrown in by just about everyone, including some that came together during the shoot, and others during the edit. The basic structure and many of the lines were mine, including The Shark (You gotta love continuity gags), Jörg’s desire to wear the Ghost Widow outfit, GenericHero235 and the Bling Gnome doing a rap – although full credit to James, he can rhyme and I can’t, so he handled the lyrics. (Well, with the possible exception of ‘street’ and ‘excrete’, which was mine.)

One thing I will say about the script is that it has – to date, considering we’re not finished yet – my favourite line of the entire series, which is The Shark’s aborted origin, “Born of fish and man…”. It helps that Martin’s delivery of it reduced me to helpless, take-destroying laughter on more than one occasion. You’ll hear that on the (eventual) Blooper Reel.

As you’ll see, we ended up remarkably close to the written word. Feel free to read along:

Download: Quest for GC Episode 6 script

As normal, we shot out of sequence for this, starting off with filming all of the audition stuff. It was a fast shoot in a timeslot in the middle of the day, taking over a much-needed meeting room, so we were against the clock on it. Jörg came in first, doing his bit in a bath towel (somehow, we forgot the furry cape; the towel was funnier) and then, after a few fluffs, his Ghost Widow piece. Honestly, beyond that I can’t remember the order we shot in, so here’s just a few thoughts from each bit.

Martin, as The Shark, had been thinking about how to do this for a while and was raring to go when we filmed. The ‘helmet’ he wore was brilliantly constructed by Chris that morning, and probably sold the gag more than I ever expected. I started laughing the minute I saw Martin walk into frame with it on. Then when he did the lines, I literally had to stop filming I was laughing so hard. More than one take spoiled there….

Alex actually suggested the “But I do have a knife” line, which was better than my original; he’s always up for terrible Australian gags, it seems.

Loic also had loads of ideas for his GenericHero235 thing, but most involved props (and time) we didn’t have, so all we ended up doing was his entrance, which was priceless. He did the jump you see in the final film on the first take, and the framing (by accident) was so perfect, I didn’t see any need to do it again. Unfortunately, he then took about ten takes to get his lines right, so that balanced things out….

The Orange Box isn’t a reference to Valve. It’s actually the real writing and design seen on the infamous boxes in Metal Gear Solid, which is of course what we were referring to in the ‘exclamation point’ shot. Tom Kiss made the box, which actually only started with three (of, I guess, five) sides, but was subtly positioned so you couldn’t see the missing sides. Oh, and that’s Tom’s eyes, too. By the time you read this you’ll have seen Tom front and centre in Episode 8.

Volker, of course, stole the show as the Bling Gnome. We came up with a lot of stuff on the day for him; walking in on his knees, taking the microphone, even the entrance. A lot more got added in the edit which wasn’t in the script, either. To make the rap work we had Volker do the audio a few times, and then shot lots of ‘coverage’ of him doing lines which I then cut together. The only problem was, he kept forgetting what the lyrics were, which we covered (a bit) by having him hold the microphone in front of his face.

As for James and I, we were of course consummate professionals, getting everything in one take… ahem… well, I’ll save some surprises for the blooper reel. As you’ll see from the script, us dancing at the end wasn’t scripted – I wouldn’t script myself to dance!

Post-production on this was a nightmare, although in comparison to later episodes it was almost easy. I actually got all the footage into Final Cut Express that day, as I recall, and started to hack away. What I figured out early on was that (a) I was going to need music and (b) that Volker’s rap was going to be near-impossible to edit.

By Thursday morning I had a workable Bling Gnome rap, basically made up of the few takes I could actually match in speed and recognisable lip movements, and with plenty of gaps between. Thank God for our dancing stuff, which I could easily slip in-between. By the end of that edit I had a lot more respect for music video editors; so much footage must be shot just so that you can get that fast-cutting style. I also found that stupid transitions can cover up some sins, too….

The next step was pasting over some cracks with music. Luckily, Chris is a huge music fan (and a composer, to boot) so he slapped together some clever cues that play under Martin and Loic’s respective entrances, and really helped to sell the gags I think.

There’s actually quite a lot of clever editing in this one too, although you wouldn’t/shouldn’t know it. That’s kind of the point. But I know it’s there, and I’m proud of it.

Six episodes down. Potentially, eight to go. Did I make it? Right now even I don’t know….

Couple of Aion previews

Pre-Leipzig we gave an exclusive Aion preview to PCGZine, who visited the office and got loads of ‘stuff’ from us that they’ve put together into a six-page preview. In case you didn’t know, they’re a PDF-based online magazine, so you don’t even have to go to the shops to read it.

Anyway, you can grab the PDF file right here and have a peruse. It’s supposed to be ‘interactive’ with rollover videos and stuff, which might work in Acrobat, but I’ll tell you right now doesn’t work on a Mac.

If you’d prefer a preview that isn’t in PDF format, you might enjoy this look at Aion from The Escapist, who aren’t generally known for their hyperbole. They like what they saw at the recent press preview in San Francisco, which is all good news.

The things fans do…

We spent a lot of our time during GC on our feet, but we never made the commitment to distance that a few of our more dedicated Aion fansites did. A number of them banded together to basically walk the length and breadth of Leipzig (as in, the town) and get pictures of every Aion billboard we had there.

Apart from being proof that yeah, we spent a bit of money on the game’s promotion, it also proves undeniably that our fans are mad, crazy people who we love to bits. See the photographic proof of this true ‘Quest for GC’ in this Flickr set.

While we’re talking about “things our fans do for us”, here are two photos with things that make me happy:

Yep, that’ll be Martin with a shark tank, as presented to him by a fan during the show. (Our Marketing Manager, Mirko, is on the right.) That’ll be a direct reference to my dialogue, then….

Last but not least – AionSource‘s t-shirt of GC, featuring fan art based on The Shark, as modelled by Martin, constructed by Chris, and conceived by me in Episode 6.

Fan-made merch. Love it.

Episode 3: Languages

This was one of the earliest ideas, and came entirely from Martin Rabl’s brain as I recall. He wrote the first draft of the script, including the Ikea gag and – I think – the headbanging stuff. I might be wrong. Then I wrote the final draft, and tweaked it here and there.

Shooting this was as close as we’ve gotten to a ‘film’ so far (at time of writing, Episodes 4 and 5 are in the ‘virtual can’). We shot it almost completely out of order, except for the first group shot, which was done first just for ease. Jen, the American voice you hear first of all, really isn’t a fan of being filmed up close, which is why in part we sat her at the head of the table and shot from such a high angle. Boy, it was hot up near the ceiling.

We got the whole thing wrapped in about two hours. What I learnt quickly was that when shooting out of order, try and shoot everything for one location in one go. Even though all we were doing is moving a camcorder around on a tabletop, it was a pain to keep doing it.

Toughest moments to shoot? Probably Peter’s Spanish bit – he kept fluffing the lines, so it took a lot of takes – and the opening shot, just in terms of wrangling everybody. Easiest? Jörg’s headbanging, actually. I practically didn’t even need to prompt him; just turned on the camera and let him go. He actually ‘banged’ to his own personal beat… I had to try and find something afterwards while editing that sort-of matched in rhythm.

Speaking of editing, it was a hard one (lots of shots) but quite rewarding. I think I turned a corner with this into feeling more in control of the edit process, especially when I was doing the subtitles (which had to be different for each version, as French and German subtitles weren’t needed on their versions). Thing I’m most proud of in the editing, weirdly, is sound; the tap-tapping of the typewriter at the start, and the timing on the record scratch. Good stuff.

After the first two videos – which both had the same core idea, and were also pretty broad – I was a little worried about how this one would be received… but it went down pretty darn well, internal and externally. So onwards we went…

Episode 4: Setting the Stage

Hands down – my favourite episode so far, and that’s not just because I’m in it. (Hopefully I’ll have another favourite before we’re done…!)

This came about out of necessity, because we decided we wanted one of the videos to promote the ‘Set the Stage’ competition during Games Convention. The idea of that competition is (was?) to have players write dialogue for our ‘real-life characters’ from Aion: The Tower of Eternity and Guild Wars to speak on stage. Essentially, for them to write a scene with them in. Naturally, the idea that we tried it ourselves and failed lent itself to a teaser pretty easily.

James Spafford did the first pass on the script for this, and he came up with the three biggest gags – Tia’s Guild Wars speech, Jörg’s ‘lorem ipsum’ routine, and the idea of quoting Star Wars. I just expanded on each of them, and of course added in the ‘terrifying judge’ bit which I have to say, wasn’t exactly hard to act. (Honestly. I am nice in real life. Hopefully the blooper reel will show this… a bit.) James’ humour is just perfect for this sort of thing, and we riff off each other to build the ideas up, so it’s a good combo.

Filming this was a doddle really. I think our German actors, in particular, are getting a bit used to it now! I only needed a couple of takes for almost everything, and after we had all of their shots, we reversed the setup and filmed me. I of course had given myself the biggest ‘speech’ in the thing (“You’re providing dialogue” etc) which wasn’t deliberate, believe it or not… that was the hardest thing to get down in one take. I managed to do quite a few different takes on my various lines too, which gave me good choices in the editing (and a few bloopers).

Editing this was quite fast, probably because I had good material to work with… because the rough cut assembled so fast, that let me tweak a lot more while editing. There’s a few tricks in there I’m really proud of, where I managed to piece together separate takes to form one seamless piece, or where I have sound coming in under another shot (the clicking pen is the best example of that). Editing’s a crazy-powerful tool, it has to be said. You can’t fix everything but with enough material, you can fix a hell of a lot.

A few extra boosts really put this over-the-top for me though. Chris (AKA Aero) found the music for the ending, which I think it’s fair to say, was perfect. As I said, James’ original gags were spot on, and I couldn’t have asked for better performances from everyone.

Best of all – it’s practically word-for-word identical to the original script. Don’t take my word for it though – download and have a read for yourself, and you too can see what direction I gave myself in how to click a pen.

Download the ‘Quest for GC 04′ script

PS: I did have one moment of worry when Chris pointed out – after seeing the first cut – that he had no idea what ‘lorem ipsum’ was. In case you’re in a similar quandary, don’t worry, just click here.