Spiffworld | Blog

Nuthin’.  Every now and then I get asked why I’m such an Alliance-lover that all my videos feature Alliance as the main characters.  And the answer is, “dial down that crazytalk and listen up”.  I make videos to tell a story, not to glorify one faction in the game or the other.  So the choice of what kind of person plays each character is based on what will best serve the story.

It’s an archetypal “shortcut” to use races that match the the character types I need.  When I use a dwarf for a character, I don’t have to explain that he’s a likeable but kind of dopey guy.  When I use a night elf, I don’t have to explain that she’s a hot but kind of stuck-up girl.  But if I used a troll… I’d have to explain that.  Undead, I don’t have to explain, which is why they’ve made it into two of my videos so far.  Blood elves are very obviously self-absorbed narcisists, and because they’re so easy to understand they’ll probably make it into one of my videos the next time I need a self-absorbed narcisist for a hero (it could happen).  Taurens and orcs… they don’t fit into any archetypes I’ve needed so far.  I suppose if I ever need a nature-loving hippy I could use a tauren and if I ever need a berzerk barbarian warlord I could use an orc, but you see the problem.  Horde characters don’t easily fit into traditional heroic archetypes, which is why they don’t make it into my videos very often.

Having said all that though, I’ve got plans for at least two videos with Hordies as the main characters and one where a Horde shares top billing with an Alliance, not because I’m for or against the Horde, but because it fits well into the story I’m trying to tell.  So all you Hordies can relax.  You’re not getting dissed.  You’re just more… complicated.

Over the last couple of weeks, my blog has broken out in a bad rash of spam.  At first it was no big deal.  One day, I saw a post that consisted of a number, then the text “Good post — Peter Pan”, or something like that.  Odd, I thought, but not alarming.  I had no idea who Peter Pan was, but people have silly names on the ‘net all the time (says a guy who calls himself Spiff).

But then it happened again.  And again.  And then whenever I checked the blog there’d be a handful of posts just like that.  The number would change, but the text was always identical.  It was freaking me out, kind of like when you walk in the park and all the squirrels turn in unison to stare at you as you walk by (don’t pretend that doesn’t happen to you too).

Then I checked the email addresses of the people making the posts and it all became clear — they were from porn sites.  And not just any porn sites, these guys had some nasty shit in their URLs.  I was being attacked by automated porno spambots!

But, I think I’ve dealt with the problem (fingers crossed).  I installed a Word Press plug-in that does some magic behind the scenes to nullify and frustrate the spambots and ever since then, we’ve been porn spam-free.  I appologize to anyone who was really digging the multiple identical posts from nasty porn sites.  You’ll have to get that kind of stuff somewhere else now.

It’s done. You can view it on the home page of my site (or here). It’s shameless self-referential. Sorry about that. I found that as the video went on, I needed more and more victims so I started using characters from previous videos, and eventually I decided that I should just use *all* characters from previous videos, most of which would meet grizly, horrible deaths.

Actually, sprinkled in with characters from previous videos are two characters we haven’t seen before. They’re from future videos I’ve got planned but havent’ made yet. Can you spot them…?

I was essentially done with the video hours ago, but spent the last couple of hours wrestling with my tools again. I had originally planned on using nothing but Adobe Premiere Pro for this video, having cut my teeth on the program while making The Future Soon. But I quickly learned that it was still too hard to use for the quick kind of editing I do. So I created the entire thing in iMovie again, which went great, and then recreated it again in Premiere Pro. That should have been a quick operation since I’d already worked out all the timing in iMovie. But it wasn’t. Long story short, it took some time to get things right, but I finally got the thing exported and up on YouTube. Hallelujah.

See?  I told you that the first third was always the hardest.  It took nine days for me to get the first third done and only four days to finish the second third.  There’s still a couple of shots I need to go back and clean up, but progress is looking good.  Now, don’t expect the final third to be done in only two days or anything.  I’m not a miracle worker.

I know this is going to sound like horrible “progress”, but I’m happy to say I’m about 1/3 of the way through my next video.  The first third of the video is always the toughest because you’ve got to establish the setting, the characters and the basic action.  In the second third, you escalate the action, so that’s usually pretty easy.  And in the final third, you push things over the top and wrap it all up, which is usually the fun part.

I had a particularly hard time getting through the first third with this video for some reason.  I created scenes then had to go back multiple times to change them or in some cases toss them out completely until I felt the awesomeness level was appropriately high and everything was flowing together correctly.

I usually map out a video’s action in my head far ahead of time so that by the time I sit down to make a video, all I’m doing is turning my thoughts into pixels on the screen (I never use actual storyboards or anything).  But most of the action I’d planned out takes place in the second and third thirds of this song, so I was kind of stumped for how to fill in the dead spaces between funny lines with action.  I was stumped that is, until I hit on the perfect overarching gag for the video.  I won’t give it away here, but let me just say this — no one will be safe from the carnage…