Spiffworld | Blog

When I was at BlizzCon, I met the guys who run Warcraftmovies.com, a site which has an incredible amount of new WoW videos streaming through it every day.  They seemed to dig my videos and said they wanted to feature my stuff, which sounded great.  And when I posted “The Future Soon” and “I Feel Fantastic” to their site, they did feature those videos, which resulted in about 52,000 and 35,000 downloads in the space of just a couple of days respectively.  Hawt.

I just discovered that they dug up my year-old posting for “First of May” and did something to it, because that video’s had 47,000 downloads in the last two days!  Out of nowhere!  Strangely enough, people seem to like my filthy, completely pornographic WoW video.  Who knew?

The warcraftmovies.com guys have asked me to let them know when I’m coming out with new videos so they can feature them even more prominently, which is sweet.  That may actually change the video I was planning on coming out with next.  The one I thought I’d do next will be good, but not great (it’s not that kind of song).  I may have to bump up something from further down in the queue that has more “great” potential, although I’m not sure I’ll be able to do much better than “The Future Soon” and “Code Monkey”.  But you never know.

Anyone know where to find, in the WoW Model Viewer, the vomit effect?  I don’t know if it’s used elsewhere in the game, but there’s a quest where you take a rotten egg to an NPC in Shattrath City and it makes everyone around you vomit glowing green goo.  It’s awesome, but I can’t find it in the Model Viewer.  If you know what it’s called in there or what section to look under (I’ve already been through the particles and spells and didn’t find it), please let me know.

This is really a post about a non-event, since the event hasn’t actually happened yet, but my “Code Monkey” video is steaming towards the one-million-views milestone like a whacked out locomotive on speed.  As of this morning, “Code Monkey” had 960,732 views on YouTube, and since it gets about 7k-8k views per day, it’s only going to be a week or two before it hits seven figures.  That will be nice.

I have no way of knowing how many actual people the number of views represent, of course.  Lots of people post that they watch the video over and over each day, so there may only be like 15 people total who’ve seen the video and they’ve watched it 64,049 times each.  If this is the case, you fifteen people should send me an email so I can thank you personally for your dedication.

It arrived today! Why, you ask, am I talking about getting my BlizzCon goodie bag now when everyone else who went to the convention got to walk out the door with theirs? It’s because when we arrived the night before the convention to get our badges, we were informed that they would have to mail our bags to us later. It was definitely a bummer to have everyone else walking around with free shirts and cool swag while we had bupkas, and we were invited after all. But whadaya gonna do?

Now I need to decide what to do with my murloc suit. Personally, I’m sure I would wear it once, run around Shattrath City maybe, and then never use it again, and that would be a waste. I’ve got family members all trying to get me to give it to them. And I’m pretty sure I could sell it on eBay for $250 easy. In the end, I’ll probably just give it to a family member. My sister-in-law is in a guild full of people who would actually be impressed to see her walking around in the suit, whereas no one I know would care if they saw me in it. But $250 is a lot of $$…

UPDATE:  Looks like the going price for Murloc suits on eBay has already dropped to $150.  I should hand off this code fast or I may have to pay someone to take it from me.

I should probably make a post about my most recent video, “The Future Soon” (TFS), even though technically, the video came out before this blog did.  In any case, here goes…

TFS is more like “Code Monkey” than “Betty and Me” in that it’s not full of gags and jokey-jokes, though there are of course, gags (I may have leaned on the “having a character run into something or get run over by something” gag a little too heavily).  Instead, it’s a more character-driven depiction of the action that Jonathan Coulton’s fabulous song already evokes (at least, as much as a dopey WoW video can be called character-driven).  My hope was that it would be funny and entertaining, but also sort of sensitive so that by the end of the video you actually felt something for the main character, again kind of like with “Code Monkey”.  Whether or not I succeeded at this is up to you, the viewer.

I fought my tools while making this video more than I have with any other video so far.  I’m a Mac guy, so I use the Mac version of the Model and Map Viewer, which I’m happy to have but there’s no denying are buggy.  So I also use the PC versions of those programs while using Parallels so I can run PC programs in a window on my Mac.  Parallels 2.0 didn’t have 3D hardware acceleration support, so only the Model Viewer worked, but halfway through the video, they came out with an upgrade to 3.0, and like an idiot, I did it.  All of a sudden, the Map Viewer started working, but the Model Viewer crapped out completely.  In order to get some shots that weren’t possible to get in the Mac Model Viewer (like the one of Futureboy shrugging his shoulders while he’s wearing the kitty tabard, because the Mac program doesn’t show tabards), I had to use my wife’s old PC to set the character up in the Model Viewer, use Fraps to capture the animation, use a freeware .mpeg converter since Fraps only saves files as .avi and that’s no good on a Mac, then post the converted (and heavily compressed now) file on my Web server from the PC, then download it on my Mac and put it into the shot.  The clip ended up looking like crap, kept crashing After Effects, and the whole process was a pain in the kiester, but a guy’s gotta do what a guy’s gotta do, right?

Towards the end of my video, Parallels came out with a newer upgrade, but I was too scared that it would cause both apps to crash, so I finshed things up before trying it out.  I’m happy to report that both viewers now work great in Parallels, and that I’m never touching or upgrading Parallels ever again.

I mentioned that “Re: Your Brains” had been linked to (somehow) by a Facebook app, which has caused the number of posts on YouTube to increase exponentially.  “Code Monkey” posts have shot through the roof too.  I wish I could say that this was all good.  While the volume of posts have increased, the average quality of the posts has suffered terribly.

Don’t get me wrong.  I still get plenty of good posts from people asking questions or just saying they dig the videos.  But good lord, the spam!  For a little while there, I’d say that over 50% of the posts were just advertisements for porn sites.  And even when the posts weren’t porn ads, they were the worst kind of lame trolling posts I’d ever seen.  I deleted the worst offenders, but it went something like this:

“this song sux u r gay if u like dis video go get a life you fags”

Followed by:

“U R gay this video rox  dont like it?  go kill urself”

And so on.  Ugh.  First of all, if you’re going to insult someone, please do it with some wit and proper spelling/grammar/punctuation.  But really, if you don’t like the video, why bother posting at all?  You’re just showing how lame you are by doing so.

I’m happy to say that the quantity of both the spam ads and the 13-year-old pimply-faced loser posts has dropped in the last couple of days, which is good.  I never would have thought it possible, but I was starting to miss the good old days where the worst I had to deal with was constant comment chain-letters (”if you don’t copy and post this to 10 other videos, your mother will die within four days”).  Gawd.

The volume of comments and views for my “Re: Your Brains” video has recently jumped through the roof.  Where it was getting an average of about 1500 views/day before August, it’s now getting about 5000 views/day, which is great.  I’ve been able to glean from the comments something about some Facebook app linking to my video somehow.

I Googled around a little and found that there’s a zombie app for Facebook (not sure how apps fit into Facebook, but I’ll accept that for now) where you install the app, then you “bite” a fellow Facebooker (some kind of invitation or something?).  If the “bitten” Facebooker then installs the zombie app, then you’ve turned them into a zombie and you get points or something (I guess), and it propagates from there.

No idea how my video fits into it at all though.  If anyone’s got a clue, let me know.

I was completely blown away when, a month or so ago, I got an email from the folks at Blizzard inviting me to BlizzCon ‘07. Not only did they want me to come, they wanted me to speak (sort of) by helping man the machinima booth they were setting up. I quickly Googled the names of the other people on the invitation (they’d invited about a dozen people), and realized that for some reason, Blizzard thought that I was in the same group as some of the best WoW video-makers out there! Incredible.

Of course, I said yes, and the convention was a total blast. I got to meet the top machinima talent, like the guys who did Return (one of whom was subsequently hired by Blizz for his mad video skillz), the lady who does Snaky’s Journal, Oxhorn, the Brothers Tauren (who aren’t really taurens, though they are really brothers), the guy who does Time Gnomes (though he seems to hate his own Time Gnomes videos for some reason), Dead Workers Party, folks from Slashdance, guys from Riot Films, and even the guy who did the Switcher parody of the Mac commercials (”frost shock!”) who has also been snatched up by Blizzard.

I have to say that it was a pretty sweet weekend. Not only was it cool to be in a place where 8000 people were all vibing to the same thing, but there was a lot of unexpected (and highly appreciated) appreciation and respect for my videos. People would come up to me and say “my kid won’t stop watching your videos” or “I want to make videos like you, please tell me how”, which was just wild. Plus, it was just fun to be on a road trip with my buddy with no wives or kids around where we could just completely geek out if we wanted to. I’m sure you understand.

I entered a modified version of “Betty and Me” in the BlizzCon machinima contest but didn’t win. Everyone else there was so much better than me that I think the only way I’m going to win a machinima contest is if I’m the only one who knows about it. I had to modify “Betty and Me” before submitting it because I had gotten the impression from Blizzard that they don’t want to be seen approving of anything that modifies their in-game assets, and in the video there’s a quick shot of Dr. Martin and Betty buck nekkid from behind. I don’t think Blizzard would mind the nekkidness, just that they don’t like the fact that I’d obviously had to use some kind of mod to make them nekkid. So I put black bars over the places you would normally see the character’s underwear. Apparently that little bit of extra work didn’t impress them enough to make me win…

As I was driving home after the con, I started wondering if maybe I should start taking these videos more seriously, given how seriously other people seem to be taking them. You know, try to raise my game somehow so I could compete with the other pros and semi-pros I’d met. But then I thought that if I started doing it in order to win contests, I wouldn’t be having as much fun and that was sure to show in the quality of the videos, so I’m just going to keep doing what I’m doing — goofing around making fun videos. If the world ends up liking them, that’s even better.

I did decided though, that there was no denying that a bunch of people are watching me now, so I’d better straighten my tie and tuck in my shirt if you know what I mean. That’s why I spruced up my site a little and added this blog. Gotta look respectable.

This is my first post on my brand new blog. Hopefully future posts will be about more interesting topics.