In case anyone cares, I have just updated our blog to Wordpress 2.6. You guys probably won’t notice much difference, but it should make it easier to keep the blog up to date. Also we can now do live updates from our iphones!
With pictures!
Like I’m doing right now!
As I realize there are some of our viewers who don’t read our forums, I just thought I’d clarify a couple things. Firstly The Superintendent’s Sorrow is an extra-special bonus update; you will still get your regularly scheduled dosage of LRR lovin’ later today.
We didn’t classify it as a “bonus video” because it technically fits better into the “Music” category, and we put a lot more effort into it than typically goes into a bonus video. We didn’t make it our weekly update because it’s based on a single event that pissed off hardcore fans of a viral marketing campaign and is a little more obscure than our regular fare ;).
So, in the interest of clarifying:
Background
• Bungie (the creators of Halo) had been teasing a major announcement leading up to the Microsoft Press Conference at E3. Allegedly, this was to be a 60-second teaser, followed by a blowout seminar on Wednesday.
• Lots of the teaser images used the cute little superintendent character you see in the video, who showed up on Frankie and Luke’s shirts during PR appearances, on their forums, and in various other places (he would replace the the ads or even the bungie logo on their site at times, and his face was used to cover up a bunch of action figures on their office webcams shortly before E3).
• The “big announcement” was apparently canceled at the last minute by Microsoft, as the FF XIII arrangements were made at the 11th hour. Microsoft rightly didn’t want to upstage such a major announcement from Square.
• As such, around the time of the conference, Bungie started a countdown on their site for the big Wednesday blowout seminar, which, as far as they knew, was still happening.
• Given the relative lack of announcements from its competitors during their conferences, Microsoft canceled the seminar on Tuesday night, leaving Bungie to make apologies for months and months of wasted viral buildup. Allegedly, Microsoft wanted to give the news its own event, where it could be the center of attention . . . which would probably a decent idea, if it hadn’t involved making Bungie apologize for all their own hype.
• Don Mattrick (the head of Microsoft’s entertainment and devices division) later let slip at a party that Bungie was going to announce a new Halo game (not necessarily Halo 4), revealing the announcement in a somewhat less-than spectacular fashion.
• All this (as demonstrated) made the superintendent very sad 
.
The Process
A couple weeks ago (07/07/08) was Bungie day, and with Bungie Day came a podcast. On that podcast, Luke and Sketch put out a contest to create a new Bungie podcast theme song, with some talk of making a parody of an established song.
I began to think.
When the whole canceled announcement thing went down, I still had Bungie parody songs n the brain, and fell asleep thinking about this Wednesday night. Thursday, I woke up, went to my first class, then sat down and wrote the song in one go. I recorded a preliminary version in one of the breakout rooms in UVic’s computer science building, figuring it was small and relatively soundproof, with the intention of emailing it to Bungie and that being the end of it . . . however, my insecurity paved the way for something more.
Certain that my singing was horrible, and the voice filter was too annoying, I posted the audio somewhere and asked the crew to listen to it and tell me what they thought. Graham’s reaction was along the lines of “we’re so doing this,” and that was that. We hashed out the details of the production at a shoot on Thursday night, and Paul and I spent a bunch of time on Friday photoshopping (and in my case, scrubbing the audio file). Meanwhile, Graham edited a rough-cut without any graphics, which he integrated later on Friday night.
The video went o Revver on Saturday, and finally showed up in its current form just after midnight on Sunday . . . and there you have it.
For more information, obviously, listen to the podcast, where we will discuss both this video, and this week’s “standard” update.
One More Thing!
Yes, of course you can has mp3. Enjoy! 
So we don’t post in this thing to much. And I am sorry for that. The simple fact is, unless I am present at a video shoot with my camera chances are there won’t be to many photos of said shoot. Beyond those kind of posts I don’t really know what else to post on this blog. Jeremy had his great post a couple weeks ago about D&D. And I continue to bug the rest of the crew to get their asses in gear and finally get around to getting a picture of their desks up on this thing. While you wait for those assholes might I suggest popping over to the HardOCP forums and check out the “Post your Workstation 2008″ page. It is a fantastic look at what other people do with their setups.
However this morning I thought of a great idea for some blog love. As some of you might be aware we have a staple pose around the LRR world that we partake in when a camera is out and about, and that is the thought pose. For those who don’t know we pick a spot somewhere in the room, or outside and look at the spot with our hands on our chins and a look of thoughtfulness in our eyes. The origins of this pose can be traced back our road trip last year. We were staying in LA/Anihiem for 2 nights and on one of those nights half of us (Myself, Adam, Morgan, Bill and Ben) decided to hit up Medieval Times. And part of the cost of entrance was a couple of pictures taken with the princess. And we figured lets do a pictures were we are all looking up with our hands on our chins (except Ben didn’t do it) The rest of the guys (Matt, Graham, Paul and Alex) went to Disney Land for the afternoon/evening. While they were on Splash Mountain , they decided to do the exact same pose while on the big drop at the end. When we got back to the hotel we both looked at each others pictures and laughed over the fact we had did the exact same pose without prior planning, and so the pose was born.
Below are a couple of the thought poses that have been taken over the last year. Unfortunately both the Splash Mt and Medieval Times pictures are hard copy pictures that we have yet to scan so those won’t be shown here at this time. What I do have is pictures from Victorias Anime convention, Kei Kon taken this past year during our panel. One from our road trip when we stoped in at Camp Lucas and sat at the Yoda water fountain. Another one is from Desert Bus back in November of 07 with a great big group of us posing for that one. One was taken a couple weeks ago during our weekly LRR meeting, where we took new crew pictures. Another great one was taken during the shooting of our season 4 finale, where all of our dads were kind enough to play our future selfs. And finally my all time fav thought pose. It was taken during the Child’s Play Charity dinner, where Wil Wheaton was not only kind enought to take this picture with us, but also cameo in a video of ours.
ENJOY!
(PS: Sorry for any bad spelling mistakes and what not, it was late when i wrote this. Just didn’t post it last night, sue me:)
Happy Belated Canada day to all my fellow Canadians. And a happy 1 day late Independence Day to our American viewers. To the rest of you, hope your country has a super fun birthday as well. So this past weeks video was our annual Canada Day update. National Anathema now joins the ranks of… *runs to check the wiki* … “A Tribute to Canada”, “I am not American”, “Canadaman”, and last years (and one of my personal favorites of LRR) “A part of our Heritage”.
Jeremy had the original script idea, which you can hear more about by listening to this weeks LRRcast. After some tweaking of the ending and some photoshop work that was done by Jeremy and Graham (also maybe Paul, I don’t know for sure) the only thing we really had to shoot was the end scene with the whole gang of us singing Canada’s new national anthem. We decided that it needed to be outside, because we really wanted to use the dolly to pull back on the last scene. So we all packed up and headed down to Oak Bay High and after about 40 minutes down there we had it shot and done. We forgot to bring down the laptop with the song we recorded earlier at Grahams place so we just had to wing it. I believe Graham actually ended up using the audio from the actual shoot and just synced it up with the music. Yah, we’re that good. Here are some pictures for your viewing pleasure
In some other news all the pictures for that video (and more than likely all subsequent videos) will be taken with this beauty of a lens I just picked up the other day.
That is the Nikon 18-200mm VR lens. This thing is pretty much the ultimate do everything lens. A hybrid as it were. So my camera setup is now the Nikon D40, of which i highly reccomend to anyone out there looking to get into the dSLR world. My lens collection now sits at 3. The kit lens 18-55mm, this beauty 18-200mm and I also picked up a 50mm 1.8 which I am also falling in love with. When I get some good pictures taken with that sucker I will get them up on the blog as well.
Maybe it’s just me, but I gotta say that I’m a bit disappointed with Wizards of the Coast’s seeming inability to get their promised Dungeons and Dragons Insider applications up and running within a reasonable time of 4e’s release. I mean, you wound think that with these applications being the big focus of the new game, Wizards would be anxious to push them out–at least in beta form–to a skeptical public . . . when you announce the new version of the world’s most popular roleplaying game with less than a year’s notice, then fail to deliver on time, it’s gotta make me wonder what the big rush was for in the first place.
When I first saw these apps I was pretty excited–though at the time I was under the assumption that the relative lack of visual fidelity was due to Wizards’ harnessing of some yet-unseen and powerful web 2.0 technology (they are wizards, after all). This was lessened somewhat by the discovery that, no, even the predominantly 2D dungeon-building program will be a downloadable client for Windows (i.e. not Mac or Linux machines - hooray compatibility!)
This begs the question: if the apps aren’t web-based, and are instead harnessing the processing power of good-ol’ VM-free windows then why to they look like such unmitigated ass?
The Character Creator provides food for thought. At first glance, this gentleman looks a little like the lovechild of John Travolta and Mel Gibson in an Uwe Boll produced version of the Oblivion. What the hell kind of armour is that; and why does it look like he’s undergoing a mildly surprising colonoscopy?
Why would Wizards spend oodles of money filling the new Monster Manual with Udon art, and then try to tell D&D players their characters should look like this? Where are the zillions of buckles and belts that have adorned the D&D iconics since the dawn of 3e? There was a dude in the 3e PHB whose entire leg was covered in belts. Now that’s badass. This guy doesn’t look like he could face a mind flayer; he looks like he’s confronting Barbie after making the horrible discovery that he has no balls and deciding that it’s her fault. This is something Ken dolls have been dealing with for ages, so maybe its integration into D&D is some kind of Hasbro cross-promotion. But don’t even Ken dolls have at least a few separate hairs now? I’ll admit I’m out of touch on that one. . .
Regardless, any character of mine would be far more badass than this, but then most characters of mine would probably be female.
Thankfully, Xena Belmont over here sees a few noticeable improvements –the most obvious being that her complete lack of body hair is less conspicuous. Again, maybe it’s just me, but you’d think Wizards could have spared enough polygons in a stand-alone application to clothe her in other than body paint. Maybe this goes along with the friendly objectification of women that has always been part of the D&D experience. What with Red Sonja setting the record straight on the defensive prowess of the chainmail bikini– in fact in that light it’s surprising that male characters still dress in tin cans to fight kobalds or whatever. Surely loincloths should be the new black.
Maybe it’s the look of passive-agressive animosity on her face that reveals her true motives. I guess I can understand how getting painted brown and told to stand in front of a blurry mural with my back all hunched would make me feel kinda ooky.
Gabrielle to the left combines the worst aspects of both of the above, sporting even more atrocious hair than Mr. Gibvolta above. The Spore Creature Creator generates models with more personality than this, and it even runs on a Mac.
Beyond looking like she’s made of plastic, she also looks like she was painted by the same under-paid Chinese children that churn out a new set of Hero Clix every couple months (though whether child labour would be able to emulate the the stretched, grainy n64 texture of her gauntlet remains a mystery).
What gets to me the most about these characters is the stretched, synthetic-looking faces, which combine the worst aspects of Oblivion and the Ninja Gaiden video game series. They aren’t dirty and nasty like the Oblivion cast, but they still look like they’ve been covered in Vaseline and beaten with an ugly stick. As with Ninja Gaiden, there are no distinct materials on these models; everything just looks shiny and weird, which doesn’t really fit with D&D. At least when Team Ninja makes a game full of real doll impersonators they have the good sense to make them look anime-hot. As with Oblivion, I can’t see making an attractive character in the D&D character generator. The uncanny valley is just too steep thereabouts, and there there be dragons.
Again, if what we’ve seen of the D&D character generator was created by a web app, I’d be applauding its visual acuteness, and awaiting its release with at least somewhat bated breath. As is, I think the entire project looks about three years behind the curve in terms of both content and delivery, and won’t be surprised to see a rather lackluster release, especially on the heels of the Spore Creature Creator, and the PC version of Mass Effect — whose character creator somehow manages to make realistic-looking 3D characters that don’t look fugly.
I like D&D, and 4e is a lot of fun. I want to see it do well, so hopefully the current delay is setting me up for some amazing improvements in the final version.
Sadly, I’m not holding my breath.
Sorry guys. I would have had this up a couple days ago but i have been fighting my dumb computer. No idea if it is finally fixed, but it appears to be working pretty well right now. As a side note, Vista, not all that bad. I am kinda digging it. But that is neither here nor there. Lets get down to the video.
So this was a video that I knew from the get go would be a bitch to get done in one night. So many costumes!!! But amazingly we got this sucker shot in just under 5 hours. We were a little late to start (sorry Laura) but we managed to blast through the scenes with her and at least get her out of there at a resonable hour of the evening. After she took off we started into shooting, well, everything else basically. We did the whole shoot up at our favorite “unlocked school at all hours of the day” UVIC. I honesly don’t know what we would do if it wasn’t for that place. God bless you UVIC.
So in general it was a pretty straight forward shoot. We had 2 small hiccups. Number one being we were unable to find the grey mustache that we have and had to settle for the brown one. Luckily someone thought to dunk the thing in chalk to give it some grey. And luckily it turned out extremely well. The second hiccup was more of a inconvience that anything. We have recently bought a battery for the camera, a big one at that. However after a couple uses (or maybe even just one use) it didn’t seem to want to work anymore. So we were forced to use the one other battery we have which, of course, decided to kick the bucket @ around 10:30. SO LAME. So we went and grabbed some dinner and then continued on. We finally got the thing finished up just before midnight and were able to go home and get to sleep.
THE END!
Yes, here it is, for all your various enjoyments:
The Orc Song as a clean mp3!
Your ringtone will never be the same ;).
–Jer
I’m not the best person to talk about this video, I didn’t write it, and I didn’t even get all the jokes until Jeremy explained them to me, but I can tell you about shooting it!
Originally, James was going to be doing the lines Jer ended up with, but was unavailable. As a result, Jer had to change the character from Andy Collins (who I’m told James looks a bit like) to Scott Rouse (another Wizards of the Coast staff member) whom Jer resembles more. Jer had Matt in mind for Mike Mearls from the beginning.
According to the blogs of Rouse and Mearls themselves Matt completely nailed his portrayl of Mearls, even down to his hair and mannerisms. Full disclosure, we hadn’t even seen a picture of the guy before we started shooting. Maybe he and Matt are long-lost twins?
We shot Jer’s bits on a Wednesday, with Paul shooting most of it while I went to buy the smiley ball. We shot Laura’s scenes on a Friday morning full of weird scheduling headaches, but everything came together and we shot it in about 15 minutes. Matt’s scenes we shot that evening Curious Comics, an awesome local comic shop you should check out if you’re in Victoria. The other bits (the D&D game and the gelatinous cube) were shot either the same Friday or over the weekend. The last piece to be shot was the stop-motion orc dancing, which I hadn’t planned on originally, but when Jer and Tally’s jingle came through… well I needed to step up. I edited that sequence while watching Rambo with Matt.
Jer drew up all the monster manual pages, and Paul did the art for “EA’s Monopoly” and “The Splat Book”. Our good friend Derek Hand (Tensen01 to the forums) did the fantastic artwork for those pages, and on surprisingly short notice!
Despite all the graphics and things the editing went quite smoothly, and the gelatinous cube was tasty.
Well, what can I say about that video?
Initially, I thought it’d be hilarious to interview Mr. Boll, so when forum member Tank_Girl told me she would be at a preview screening of Postal and he’d be there at a Q&A, I wished I could go. I couldn’t sadly, but I asked if she could pass on a request on our behalf. I believe she described us as “Local Filmmakers”.
He said yes, obviously, and now I have “Uwe Boll” in my mobile phonebook.
Clearly, we have a history with Boll. We’ve done 5 or so videos on him and his movies over the years, and we’ve said some not very nice things about the man. I know he’d seen one of the videos because I submitted myself to his “fight the critics” event. Gotta say, thank goodness I didn’t get picked because he mopped the floor with those guys, but I hoped he wouldn’t recognize me. Which begs the question… how do I do this? How do I conduct an interview with a man I’ve very publicly been rude to?
The chance to interview him was something I couldn’t possibly pass up though. No matter who I told about the video, the reaction was the same: stunned.
After talking it over with Paul, we decided just to do it straight. Just, you know, treat him like any other human being and ask reasonable questions without trying to attack him or be confrontational. So, that’s what I did. I wasn’t sure going in if he’d actually be a reasonable person, or as crazy as he seems online. Either way, we had a video!
The directions he gave us to the Starbucks weren’t totally clear, so Kathleen and I went for a bit of a wander around Kitsilano, on a very hot day, lugging the camera. When we finally got there we leapt right into the interview. We were then kicked out of the Starbucks patio after two questions. I’m okay with that because the audio was way better in the park, and it looked nicer too. I tell you though, my ass was numb by the end of all that. Kathleen’s nose was running the whole time because she had an awful cold, and to her credit, rather than ruin the shot to blow her nose, she resorted to wiping it on her shirt. I’m sure she’s thrilled I told you that.
The video’s end result was totally not what I expected when I went in. Very much unlike his online persona, Uwe Boll is a reasonable, well-spoken, intelligent businessman. He brings up a lot of stellar points (like why Kung-Fu Panda is screening at Cannes) and it made me look at him and his movies in a totally new light. Admittedly, I still think they’re not good, but I don’t think they’re terrible, and I know why they are what they are. Also, I intend to watch In the Name of the King and Postal before I pass judgment.
All in all, as I said in the video, I have a much, much greater respect for the man. He was honestly fun to hang out with, and I enjoyed talking to him immensely. I hope we get a chance to talk again sometime.
He sent me this photo from the set of Postal, thank Uwe!
Keep making movies, I wish you the best.
So, this started out as a reply to a question on the forums, but I realized that it might actually be informative for our audience at large. If there is interest, I might do a separate write up about the software that powers LRR.
Hosting
LoadingReadyRun is currently, and has been since the beginning, hosted by HostforWeb.com. Over the years we have had to upgrade from their budget $4.95/month shared package to the VPS we are currently on. Our hosting has not been without hiccups, but on the whole they have worked quite well. It would be cool to be using a local host, but Canadian hosts (at least locally) are way more expensive then their US counterparts. I believe HostforWeb is based in Chicago.
These days LRR pushes about 400GB of bandwidth/month consisting mostly of plain html/images, the podcasts and really old, non-revver videos. In actual fact, since we switched to Revver for videos, our main issue has been with processor usage, rather then bandwidth. When Talk like a Pirate got huge, we got taken offline because we were using 100% of the CPU time on our server and preventing everyone else from loading. Oops. As of the 5.1 update to the site design, we use lots of caching to speed up the site and reduce load on CPU.
Videos
We used to host everything ourselves (LRR started before youtube), but that gets old fast when you get the kind of traffic spikes we do. All the really old, archived videos are still hosted from our server, but everything in the past couple of years is served from Revver.
We originally went with Revver to host our videos because of the whole rev-share thing, but as a happy coincidence, they also happen to be one of the best video hosts period. They encode all videos in both flash and quicktime (which is needed for older computers) and their flash player is very customizable to match your site layout.
On top of that, Revver has, from what I have seen, the most complete API interface of any video host. Not only can you query their database for videos based on any criteria you want, but you can actually build an entire white-label video sharing site using their infrastructure. As an example, The Iron Stomach Challenge website is built entirely using their API and doesn’t actually have any database of its own (other then the forum).
The only thing to remember about Revver is that, because of the ads, everything you put up has to go through an approval process to make sure you are not using copyright material. You shouldn’t be doing this anyway, so I don’t really consider this a problem.
LRRcast
The LRRcasts are just totally normal mp3 files hosted on our server. It is possible that we might move to an external hosting service for them at some point in the future, but so far things have been ok.
Domain
Since the beginning, our main domains have been registered through DirectNic, who happen to be based in New Orleans. Did you notice that when Hurricane Katrina hit and New Orleans was flooded, LRR didn’t go offline with a “Cannot find host” error? That’s because the DirectNic crew never left. They kept their servers running with backup generators and defended their expensive equipment with guns from looters. For that kind of dedication, I’ll let them host my $15/year domain name.