Mad Afternoon

The new expansion will be out in a matter of days, meaning that most of our mods will be utterly useless to us for a few weeks.
We're editing the first episode right now, getting the subtitles in line, but then it may be another two to three weeks after the expansion before we have our needed tools back.

I hate and love Maxis.

(Edit)-
We just put in payment to have the game express delivered to us! 1-2 day shipping, fuck yeah!

For those of you who stuck by us, and actually watch the production journal, a sneak peak.
( A snipet of a future episode )

And we're back. As usual, life decided otherwise for our production. Instead of computer problems and loss of in game content, we were homeless for the summer.
With out our things in constant transit or packed up, you could imagine how impossible filming or writing was (our clothes came before our computers, a sad choice we had to make). But we're now back and setting up to film as I type. Expect the prologue to be out in a day or two.

Oh.my.god!
Oh.my.god!
Oh.my.god!

This is unbelievable! I am fighting to catch my breath, I am so excited about this! Noise From Silence: Renewal received a YouTubeHonor! It was one of the most linked videos in the arts & animation section! It's not number one, but the fact that it is on the list at all we find to be damned cool!

Oh! And we got a tool for our Adobe products that is supposed to do an ace job with subtitles and letter boxing, so we'll probably be giving that a try as soon as I am back from my job interview. Today is a good day!

Ps: We've climbed up to 49 o-o/

The renewal trailer is done, has been for a number of hours. All I can say is 'if I could get decent voice talent for the project, I would'. None of the options for subtitling that we found actually worked. VirtualDub murders the sound in the library with a candle stick, and none of the others would actually process the damned WMV. Our only other option is to leave it as an AVI, but compressing the AVI to meet Youtube's (low) standards kills it dead.

We were going to have a small subtitle running through this trailer, but low and behold it was not to be. We're in a mad dash to get this problem fixed before the first episode is done.

On the mention of the first episode, we are officially done with producing trailers. We're writing the actual prologue as I type. D: We've been working on this since 6:50am....KEK!

I'll be posting the renewal around in various communities, enjoy.

PS: OMG YOUTUBE I H8 U & UR MOMZ. HURRY AND FINISH PROCESSING SO I CAN POST IT YOU ASS CLOWN! IT'S BEEN HALF AN HOUR! YOUR MAKING ME WANT TO HEAD DESK!!!!!

We got the game up and operational about two and a half, three hours ago. Through our general giddiness, and getting the game up and loaded, we've taken a few shots and tango_noir has even built a new set from scratch! The woman is awesome and rarely admits to it!

Hell to the noes on going to sleep right now. I might sneak in a bath, try to get in a dozen more shots for the last trailer, and then zonk out for eight or nine hours.
I really am hoping that we get this as close to done, if not entirely done, today; as this is my last full twenty four hours here. I'm not going to push it though, however much we get done I'll be happy with.

Back to work!

About to start up the game to see if our little solution to the Pets corruption worked. Due to this we lost a whole day of filming, which makes us both very sad.

If any case, wish us luck!

I'll be able to get my missing disks in about an hour, hoo ha! The only downside is having to possibly uninstall both Pets and Seasons. After the amount of sets we've built and Sims we have done make-overs to, any option that will not cause data loss is what we'll be going for. tango_noir is on the phone with EA Tech Support as we speak, hopefully they can make themselves useful (more useful than claiming that their patch would solve the problem only for it not to).

With how things are looking, we will be filming/editing the last trailer tonight and starting on the first episode in the morning.

I need general pictures of:

• The Jory Family
• The Wyatt Family
• The Denes Family

I need before/after pictures of:

• Elijah
• Emma
• Acantha
• Brynhilde
• Mrs.Lowell

I need set walk-through pictures of:

• Clearwater
• Yet to be named night-club

Update: We now know what is wrong with our game. Apparently installing Seasons corrupted our Pets files, the third most common bug when it comes down to it. Thank you, Maxis, for knowing less about programming than a three year old hopped up on pixie sticks.

At least tech support was fast in getting us a solution: Leave our files on the desk top, uninstall Pets (and only Pets), and then re-install from scratch.

Thank Yeebus for Tango_Noir and her doing what I'm typically incapable of doing: Talking to other people!
*HEAD-DESKS* If you're pathetic and you know it, clap your hands! *Clap-Clap*

A bath and then I'm off to pick up the required Pets disks and documentation.

After the last two days I woke up figuring that I would take a break from the filming, go back to other interest that I have been away from for almost a whole week. But the longer I sit in this chair, the stronger the itch to turn my game back on becomes. From the need for more icons for this journal to getting to filming more trailers, my brain just keeps coming up with more and more 'reasons' for me to set the game to load.

The only thing that is keeping me from it is the fact that I need to get Pets working before we can even start again. Thank you so much Maxis, uninstalling and re-installing expansions is really our idea of a great time; especially when I can't get a hold of the needed disks (I stupidly left my Seasons Box, which has Pets disk one) which I left at home.

I am constantly being told that my computer is anorexic/bulimic when it comes to games. Out of all the games I have put on this machine, only Second Life and LineageⅡ haven't made me *Head-desk*.
Can we say "E-Machine Broken Out Of The Box" children? I knew you could!

Back on topic with me.

I re-read the first script that we had written up, and hellz to the no, it isn't going to work as is. With the addiction of new characters and story elements, it just isn't going to work for it to begin the way we at first planned. To be honest, the script will be re-tooled and fit in an episode or three (maybe even four) down the line.  Getting to the grit of a story is good, but it loses emotional impact if you do it without forming some sort of line between the characters and their happenstances.

I really should log off and then go figure out some James Bond level scheme to get my missing game disks from home (and not end up having to stay there the night). This house is only empty until Saturday, and we plan on taking full advantage of the fact.

Two promotional trailers in two days, phenomenal! Mind you, this means that tango_noir and I are not only groggy, but buzzing to get more work done while the creative muse is bricking us in the back of the head. So far we have finished two out of three promotional films, and are debating re-hauling our very first trailer for the series. Given the fact that we have changed so much it really is a toss up; both decisions having their major pros and cons.

In any case, we finished the Brynhilde trailer much faster than we anticipated. It will be up on Youtube shortly!

....I am heaving a major sigh of relief right now. As it turns out, WMV format/compression was the way to go. There was minimal loss to picture quality and no loss what-so-ever to the sound! We have uploaded the file onto Google Video (which I don't think I want to use again), You Tube (which actually isn't so bad), and File Front (for those who want the lossless high quality version, downloadable).

Such being the case, this is the last Production Update for this section of the project, Huzzah! I really should have been posting stills and what not, but I got caught up in things. For the Pilot Episode I actually do plan on putting a lot more here, which I am excited about.

I haven't slept or eaten, so I'm headachy as well as crampy right now. So I think I will go take a victory power nap. I will, most likely, cross post to other Sim Storyteller communities later. I need to post the file to Machinima.com, but I've yet to come up with the required placard. So I'll do that all when I'm feeling more so up to it.

Hasta La Bye Bye!

Codecs are evil, especially DivX.
We've been fighting with conversion for the last few hours.

If the sound wasn't mangled to all hell, the shots were over run with rouge pixels. To say the least,  I will warn any and everyone against DivX as well as uncompressed audio; both such vast amounts of ass and will utterly ruin your work. After trying a few different codecs, only to find that most of them do not work, we are trying converting the file into WMV format (as nice as AVI files look, they are too heavy to be uploaded to most sites, which have a 100MB limit).

When we first began plotting this project, I thought that the filming and editing would be the hardest part. Oh no, conversion is a million times worse. We got through the planning, filming, editing, and sound work with relative ease--ironic, eh?

The trailer for "Silence From Noise" is finished!
After pulling a couple hours a night shifts of recording, editing, and sound mixing we are done.

For our very first attempt ever I think it came out very well (thanks to Adobe Premiere and Audition). Mixing sound, I must say, was a challenge that birthed very awesome results.

The shot film just finished rendering and is ready to be uploaded! Due to wanting to keep the quality as high as possible, we will not be uploading it to YouTube.