Playing through Mass Effect has been an amazing experience. But not just in the obvious way. Oh sure, it’s an absolutely amazing game, it does just about everything right in my book; there’s a bar-shaped hole in the ceiling of my house.

I’ve realized something else, too. First, a little backstory; I beg your pardon, those of you who’ve heard this before. When Male Restroom Etiquette exploded on the scene, surprising all of us, some really amazing opportunities emerged. Three different North American cable television networks wanted to broadcast the film; MTV wanted to feature a clip (and somehow did); a movie theater management company wanted to include the film in their before-the-feature preview roll; and the crown jewel… The Tonight Show with Jay Leno, for decades a much-craved outlet for launching comedy careers, wanted to feature part of the film and have Jay comment on it.

Other than the MTV clip, which I still don’t know how it materialized, Electronic Arts - publisher of The Sims 2 game used to make the film - refused permission to air the film in these venues. They refused even NBC Television, the host network of The Tonight Show. And I, having chosen to make my film with their game’s intellectual property, was absolutely powerless to do anything about it. After all, if frickin’ NBC couldn’t get a Yes, what would make me think that they’d ever listen to little ol’ me?

Video games broke my heart when that happened. And I reacted like the jilted lover, resolved to never trust them again, released several “protest films” like [COMPANY] Rulez! and the Ad Absurdum series, and began to extol the virtues of IP freedom to everyone I knew.

I regret none of this reaction, and still feel wholly justified. But Mass Effect has made me realize something… I’ve steadfastly refused to fall in love with another video game since that heartbreak, so the decision to avoid them was relatively easy, in spite of the hardships of starting from scratch.

Mass Effect has seduced me. I’m in love with a video game again. And rebound relationship or no, it changes things.

(more…)

Also, new overcast coming tonight. Stay tuned!

Xanatos has created a wonderful piece called Half-Life 2 Anxiety, packed to the gills with Hitchcock references and recreation, and featuring some of the fantastic soundtrack music from Hitchcock’s most memorable films.

I’m going to skip embedding the video, because going to the full page on YouTube allows you to experience both the video annotations as well as watch the video in higher quality.

I’ve been a fan of Xanatos’ work for quite a while now; I think this is his best work. Some fantastic action scenes and camerawork, and one of the most satisfying endings to a short I’ve seen in some time.

See it here: http://youtube.com/watch?v=v5AMS_bMcQA

And you can catch the sequel, Half-Life 2 Nightmare, right here: http://youtube.com/watch?v=ZWLzucirWs4

The location for this month’s audio conference has been set. I found what should be a nice low lag outdoor location right on a lakefront. The SLURL is:

http://slurl.com/secondlife/Dorado/139/129/26

The topics of discussion will be of your choosing, no preset theme this month. Hope to see you there!

More information is available on the Conference Page.

Nothing like a good Rube Goldberg machine. This is one of the more impressive I’ve seen done in Garry’s Mod. Thanks, Shattered Keyboard.

I did not direct this animation (obviously). These are CGI cut scenes from Final Fantasy VIII, set to a soundtrack of Fragile-era Nine Inch Nails. It was part of an experiment I did back in 2001 while studying film scoring techniques.

The whole thing runs about 45 minutes; weighing in at 2GB (DivX), it’s not download or video-share friendly. But this is a six minutes or so clip of my favorite section of the experiment.

Throughout the larger piece, there were some really amazing (and accidental) moments of musical serendipity as far as timing goes, a la Dark Side of the Rainbow. Those “lucky” alignments are strikingly common, even when throwing together random pieces of music and video. What I ended up taking away from the experiment was a reminder to sometimes not be so structured and deliberate in my approach to score, to leave room for these wonderful moments of accidental timing.