Spiffworld | Blog

Here is “Still Alive“, my take on what that song (originally written by Jonathan Coulton for the game Portal) would be like if it were written for WoW instead.

I never thought I’d ever do this video. The song is so perfectly suited for Portal and the “villain” in that game, GLaDOS, that I couldn’t see it ever fitting anywhere else. But then the idea hit me — who in WoW would sing a song gloating about being still alive? And the rest fell into place.

Or did it? When I posted this video, the YouTube comments were mostly positive, but there was a higher-than-usual percentage of comments saying I’d blown it. Mostly they seemed to hate the audio, with GLaDOS singing, and they wished I’d used the version of the song with Jonathan Coulton himself singing. Honestly, I’d never seriously considered the idea of using JoCo’s version for two reasons: firstly, my video is a reference to Portal and GLaDOS. JoCo’s version of the song is a reference to the original GLaDOS version of the song. If I used JoCo’s version, I’d be using a reference to something in my reference to something, and I thought it just wouldn’t work well. Secondly, I’m not a fan of JoCo’s version and I always liked GLaDOS’ version better. But the Internet has a different opinion, and I aim to please, to I made a different version.

Here is “Still Alive” with Jonathan Coulton singing instead of GLaDOS. As soon as I posted this, the Internet calmed back down. It’s a mystery to me, but the comments are now back to being nearly universally positive (which I prefer), and they loves them some JoCo version, which is fine with me.

There’s actually one more version of that song out on the Netterwebs, a duet that features both GLaDOS and JoCo singing together (two different versions here and here). I considered putting out a third version of the video using that audio, just to capture every possible combination of GLaDOS/JoCo fan that exists. But I’m too chicken. The Internets have calmed down now about the video and I don’t want to re-enrage the beast by putting out a new version that they can say makes even less sense than the GLaDOS version did because it’s not only a girl singing Arthas’ part, but it’s both a guy and a girl. And they’d be right. So I’m not gonna do it.

Oh yeah, I posted a new video last week and forgot to mention it here. Oops. It’s for Jonathan Coulton’s song “Blue Sunny Day” about a depressed vampire (I know, a stretch for Jonathan Coulton).

Believe it or not, this video was really tough to make. Usually, JoCo songs are a little vague. We don’t know for sure what happens at the end of “Re: Your Brains”, or “Code Monkey”, or “The Future Soon”, which is great for me because then I get to fill in those blank spots with my own stuff in my videos. But “Blue Sunny Day” is unusually specific. We know what happens at the end, and pretty much all throughout the video. So there was little wiggle room for me to add my own gags and other stuff.

In fact, it’s completely normal for me to get through the first rough draft of a video and then have to go back to re-edit it to squeeze out the suckiness to make the final version as good as it can be. But the first draft of “Blue Sunny Day” had the most suckiness any of my first drafts have had, and it took quite a bit of editing to squeeze it all out of there (hopefully I got it all). There was just something about the song that made the timing of shots hard to get so it felt right. But I’m happy with the end result.

Even though I say the song is very specific, I’m also impressed by the level of ambiguity that Coulton baked into the song (a paradox, I know). Like I say in the ending scroll in the video, if you go back and listen to the words Coulton used, he never actually says the song is about a vampire. It could just be a normal guy who’s depressed by blue sunny days for some reason. But, he admits when asked, it’s totally a vampire.

It’s finally done and posted.

First of all, let me apologize to any non-WoW fans for all the heavy-duty inside WoW jokes in the video. I realize the video may be completely unwatchable by normal people, and for that I am sorry. But it should be pretty funny if you know WoW, and I gotta go where the funny is.

I’ve always loved the joyousness of that song, and I hope I captured that energy with my video. Now that it’s all done though, I kind of never want to see another WoW dance animation again.

‘Cruel, Cruel Moon’ is finally finished, thank the Lord. This one was easily my most complicated video to make (so far). I started it months ago after I’d been laid off from Adobe, figuring that I had plenty of time to enjoy the challenge of making a video with lots of little shots piled into bigger shots, all of which would go sliding on and off screen for the entire song. But once I got a new job, I was stuck with a half-finished, really complicated video I needed to finish, so I forced myself to sit in front of the computer for a couple of hours a night until I was done. And I’m glad I did, because I’m pleased with the results.

The reason this video needed to be so complicated has to do with the structure of Paul and Storm songs compared with Jonathan Coulton songs. In general, JoCo songs are like three-part plays. The first verse establishes the action, the second verse escalates the action, and the third verse wraps things up, usually with a clever twist. Not so with a typical Paul & Storm song. P&S songs usually establish the scene in the first verse then hit the punchline of the whole situation at the end of that first verse. The second verse adds a little detail but then hits the same punchline again. Same with the third verse.

You see the problem. I can animate JoCo songs more easily since they have a more traditional narrative structure. All I need to do is basically show what the song is describing, and everything will build to a satisfying conclusion. With a P&S song, the viewer already knows the ending of the story by the time the first verse is over, and I still have two more verses I need to animate. Quite a challenge.

My plan for “Cruel, Cruel Moon” was two-fold. For one, I tried to go a little Tarantino-esque by showing the ending of the story at the end of the first verse and then slipping forwards and backwards in time for the rest of the video, showing how we came to that ending from different perspectives. Secondly, I decided to use the visual technique of having split screens and panels sliding on and off screen to show things from different angles and perspectives. That way, even if the lyrics aren’t really moving forward much, I can still simulate the feeling that things are moving along by moving around the panels.

And I think it mostly worked the way I’d planned. I think I probably won’t use that visual technique too much in the future though, since it meant that each shot was composed of many smaller shots, each of which took as much time as a normal shot to put together. And the animations of panels sliding all over the place took even more time. Still, I’m glad I experimented with it this time.

“Tom Cruise Crazy” is finally finished. This one took forever to complete, for no good reason. It was long, but not too long. It had some complicated shots, but not that many. Mostly, I just spent more time actually playing WoW than using it for making videos, and that really cut into my production time.

I forgot to put this into the scroll at the end of the video but I want to do it now — special thanks to Nick Bayhi, my Co-Creative Director on this video. I’ve liked this song for a long time but could never figure out how to make it into a clever video. Then I got some good ideas but couldn’t figure out a good ending. Nick’s the one who came up with the, “if he’s so crazy and narcissistic, he should just marry himself”. Genius!

Now that I’ve finished this vid, I have no excuse not to upgrade my computer’s OS and the applications I use to make videos, as I discussed in a previous thread. I’ll let you know how that goes. Hopefully it won’t ruin everything and spell the end of my video-making career.

Finally, a new video, this time for the song “Shop Vac”. This one took me forever to finish. Believe it or not, but I had this video probably 30% done before I’d even started “Bacteria”, “Live”, or “The Captain’s Wife’s Lament” all the way back in the summer.

It actually kind of worked out well for me though, because when I picked back up the “Shop Vac” project, I took a look at what I had done, and I wasn’t particularly charged up by the video. So I edited things and added some stuff and made it a little crisper and funnier (hopefully), and eventually had something I was pretty happy with.

I always knew that this one would have a dark ending (once you’ve seen the video, you’ll know what I’m talking about), but I was unprepared for how dark it was until I actually got the footage done and was looking at it. In fact, my original version was even darker in subtle ways. I had the camera staying still on the last two shots so the viewer was forced to just stare at what the wife was doing and what the husband was contemplating doing, which gave it more dramatic heft. In the end, I edited it slightly to change how the camera zooms and pans over the shots, and while it’s still dark, it’s a little better I think.

Funnily enough, lots of people tell me that when they watch the video the first time through, they don’t even pick up on what the orc has been building in the basement, and it’s not until the second viewing that they’re struck with it — “holy cow, he’s been building THAT!”. I like that kind of reaction.

After putting out “Bacteria” and “Live” in rapid succession, I had hoped to take “The Captain’s Wife’s Lament” nice and slow, savoring each gag and taking my own sweet time to put the whole thing together. I had a vague idea that it would be nice to release the video in time for Talk Like A Pirate Day, but I didn’t actually know when that was.

Then my nephew told me TLAP Day was Sept. 19. He told me this on Sept. 13. My leisurely video was suddenly going to have to be a Bataan Death March if I wanted to get it done in time. So I threw myself into it and actually got the video posted two whole days before TLAP Day. I must be some kind of video-making superhero or something.

This one was simultaneously easy and tough. It was easy because it’s relatively short, and the whole second half of the song is just a series of quick sight gags, which (as long as I can come up with good gags) aren’t that difficult to put together. It was tough because the first half of the song is all build-up that I had to work hard to keep interesting so that the viewer didn’t stop watching before the rousing second half. Also, many shots (especially in the first half) have many characters on screen at the same time. Each element in a shot adds time to composing the shot and to rendering the shot, and those couple of shots that have a screenful of pirates in them took over 30 minutes to render the couple of seconds of video you see in the final product.

In the end, like all of my videos, there are a couple of shots I wish I’d spent more time on, and a few that ended up being better because I was in a rush and so kept them simple (and funny).

In the ending scroll, I put a couple of pirate riddles that Paul and Storm use in their live show when they sing this song. The answers to the riddles can be found on my website.

The WeGame August Machinima Contest is over and the results have been announced. My “Live” video got “honorable mention”, which is honestly better than I had expected. There were a lot of really good entries in the contest (about 120 in total, I think), done by people with lots of actual talent for the technical and storytelling aspects of machinima, and I’m lucky to have gotten any kind of top mention at all. I also get a ThinkGeek.com gift certificate and a t-shirt.

I’ve posted “Live” to my YouTube channel, so it’s now in the same place as all the rest of my videos.

The other winners in the contest:

• Grand Prize: The Robber Baron of Warsong Gulch by Pinkhair (an old-tyme silent movie)
• First Place: Joust Venture by Sedrin (machinima using the old Joust video game)
• Second Place: Divided Soul by Martin Falch
• Third Place: The Way of Life by Johan Vagstedt
• Honorable Mentions:
  • The Murlock Tale by Calixworld2
  • The Forgotten Legend by Funk
  • The Islanders – Happy Birthday by X-Cross
  • Live by me
  • Asteroid Truckers by JimRage
  • Outlaws of Azeroth by RedEyeLobine
  • Le Terroriste by Olibith
  • Von’zul by Erunno

I didn’t mention this before, but I should give credit where credit is due — I was having a hard time coming up with a good ending for the video, and it was my mom who suggested that Dr. Skullcrusher (or whatever the gnome’s name is) die so that The Bride could live. Great idea, thanks Mom. Also, I was originally going to have the video just end with a big bloody fight scene, but my wife suggested having The Bride and Igor want to bring Dr. Skullcrusher back to life with the dead villager’s body parts. Awesome.

Seeing as how “Live” is my first non-Jonathan Coulton video (sort of), I’m hoping you all scoot over to www.paulandstorm.com to check out Paul and Storm’s site and their music. They’ve got similar comic sensibilities as Coulton but go at it in a slightly different way. Be sure to check them out.

I’ve got a new video, but I’m not posting it to YouTube just yet. It’s for the song “Live” by Paul and Storm, and you can view it over at WeGame.com. That’s right, I’m trying my hand at another machinima contest. I want to see if I can win two in a row, which would indicate a trend, as opposed to winning just the Machinima.com contest, which would be just a fluke.

This is my first non-Jonathan Coulton video, although you can be forgiven for thinking it actually is a Jonathan Coulton song. It was written for the “Masters of Song-Fu” songwriting competition. The challenge put to both Jonathan Coulton and Paul and Storm in that round of competition was to write a song that sounded like it had been written by the other guy. Both of them did fabulously (here’s Coulton’s imitation of a P&S song, “Big Dick Farts A Polka”). P&S’s “Live” was such a great song that I just had to make a video for it. And it was so spot-on like a Coulton song, that I had to make my video reference an earlier Coulton video too (guess which one…)

I’m not going to post “Live” to my YouTube channel until after the WeGame contest is over, which should be early September (I don’t need an army of fans to go vote for me this time, but thanks). That should give people plenty of time to obsess over loving/hating my “Bacteria” video a little longer.

The results from the Machinima.com contest are in, and… WE WON!!! To celebrate, I’ve posted the video on YouTube (not much of a celebration, I know).

First of all, let me answer this question — “what’s up with the dialogue in that video?”. I’m glad you asked. The dialogue came from a Kentucky Fried Chicken new employee training video that Jonathan Coulton found online somewhere. Something about it struck him, so he decided to turn it into a song, which I have now turned into a video.

For completeness’ sake, let me reiterate the story of this video in this blog post, even though I’ve mentioned parts of it elsewhere. Machinima.com UK held a video contest where the contestants could make a machinima video for either of two Jonathan Coulton songs, Bacteria or Todd the T-1000. Oddly, given how many Halo videos there were, there were only a couple of “T-1000″ videos; most were for “Bacteria”. Mine was the only WoW video.

Now, since it was a Machinima.com UK contest, you had to be a resident of the UK to enter a video. I am not from the UK, but I emailed the Machinima guys to find out if the video maker had to be from the UK, or just the video enterer. They said, “As long as the person entering the video is from the UK, that’s all that matters”. That’s clear enough, so I contacted Kerrin from the Jonathan Coulton Project (who is from the UK) to see if he’d post my video in the contest. He said yes, so I made the video.

It was not a smooth contest. There was supposed to be a full week of online voting, but the voting mechanism on the site didn’t work and it took them four days to finally fix it, leaving only three days for voting. I had initially planned on doing no special promotion of my video, figuring I’d kind of fly under the radar and see if my video could win based on its own merits. That plan got derailed a bit when a video was posted by a guy named ProudN00b, and it immediately got almost 300 views in the first 24 hours. That made me realize that there were other machinima artists who had fanbases of whatever size, and that since they were obviously sending their fans to go view and vote on their video, if I didn’t do the same thing, I’d get crushed. Not wanting to get crushed, I whipped up a “please go vote for me video” and posted it to YouTube once the Machinima.com voting problems had been worked out.

That ended up working pretty well. In addition to voting my video up pretty high, my fans (that’s you guys. thanks!) also seemed to have not really dug Proudn00b’s video and voted his down, which upset him a bit. On the Machinima.com forums, he and a few others began lamenting the fact that the voting system was essentially a popularity contest (which is true), and demanded that Machinima.com change the way they scored the contest (there was never any chance of them doing that though; they wouldn’t even change the voting period after having lost over half of it to broken voting functionality). There were even claims that we (Kerrin plus me) were cheating, having people artificially jack with the scores by giving my video high marks and everyone else low marks. For the record, we never even asked people to vote 5 stars for my video. All we ever said was, “please go watch the video and give it as many stars as you think it deserves”. We certainly weren’t encouraging people to crater other people’s videos.

In the end, our video ended up on top, so we won! The prize is a sweet Alienware gaming laptop, which Kerrin gets to keep. Shipping electronics overseas is a pain in the butt, and I don’t really need a PC laptop (I’m a Mac man), and I couldn’t have won it without Kerrin’s help anyway. Besides, there’s maybe a little bit of justice in the fact that the prize at least will be staying in the UK.