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I urge you to watch pt. 1 and pt. 2 first or you will have NO idea what’s going on. It really is a continuation and pt. 4 will be released on Monday for sure. (it’s already done).
The Romantics Pilot pt. 1 – The Sting
The Romantics Pilot pt. 2 – Yoga?
The Romantics Pilot pt. 3 – Burned
So we’re all good I think! I’m celebrating Christmas with my wife today and then relatives tomorrow. I’m also intermittently working on the new minecraft server and enjoying myself thus far.
The new minecraft server for now, is capable of holding about 80 to 100 people simultaneously. We have only the basic mods installed such as Essentials and Worldguard. We lucked out with a pretty amazing seed from what I can tell so far. I’m actually quite looking forward to minecraft Mondays at this point. I’ll give you folks a little taste of our plans for the server. Aaron is over the moon on this one 😀 There will be a few pictures at the bottom.
So here’s the plan. I’m currently creating an undestroyable spawn area to give you a feel of the background story of this world and set the ball rolling for future RP stories and quests. The way that works is we write a questline or a story outside of the game on our forums and make it occur or somehow appear in the game. For example: let’s say you’re walking along and you find a hole in the ground. It doesn’t look like an ordinary hole because it’s lined with gold blocks that you can’t mine for some reason. So naturally, being an explorer, you decide to jump in and see what it is. Once inside there’s 1 dimly lit torch and a chest. You open the chest because of course, you’re a greedy soul who needs ALL the phat lewts you can get hold of! Inside the chest is a book. You open the book and read it and it’s a story of a long lost civilization. Maybe a recent flood or enderman uncovered this hole and its been buried here for centuries. The book speaks of a place with vague directions. Also in the book is a footnote that tells you to read “The history of this long lost civilization” with a password included. That’s your queue to pop open the forums, find a specific post titled the same and use the password to read a history/clue written by myself or Aaron and leading you onwards throughout this quest. More such clues will be found. Will there be treasure or just epic, ancient landscapes to observe? You’ll find out!
To us, this is the MOST epic way to play minecraft. We’ve done it before when we only had a few people involved and it was fun but always wished we had a LOT more people so our hidden secrets and stuff would be found and explored. On top of this we have other plans. Towns that we will have the viewers apply for and run for Mayor of with full control of your town and its citizens (who you will recruit yourself). This comes with the Towny plug in. This will give us factions to war against/ally against etc… You’ll be able to do big quests like the one I outlined above that are hand written by us (and eventually some our viewers that wish to participate in that) but also there will be mundane quests to earn currency to purchase your own lots that are only modifiable by you as well as pay for teleports from NPC’s and possibly to even use in-game with other players to purchase potions, enchanted items etc…
Add to this that we will also run Raids. That’s right, raids. Where you will quest as a team following our MOST epic story based quests (all related to this world and its backstory to flesh it out) and end up in full on Raids with an end boss (played by an OP/Admin with powers related to the quest) content and rewards.
I hope that gets folks excited about Minecraft Mondays. Even folks that have never taken a liking to the building aspect of Minecraft may enjoy these events and participate.
You guys rock and I’m looking forward to having a loyal group of friends to really do this stuff with. I think previously not having anyone to really share our creative stuff with is what put me off of doing it. Have a happy holiday whether you celebrate Christmas specifically or not and I’ll see you all Wednesday!
Few pics of the starting area for the new server.
Before we start, I thought it might be cool to post a few of the industry words/terms we use here and what they mean.
Lav or Lavalier – This is a small lapel mic and a transmitter. Ours are wireless and most are today but there are still some in use that are wired all the way to the receiver. These little guys can be a life saver in wide shots where getting a boom pole close enough to the talent but out of the shot is impossible. We use these almost exclusively in “The Romantics” car scenes because we have no extra hands to hold a boom!
Talent – These are your actors.
Foley – The reproduction of everyday sound effects which are added in post production to enhance the quality of audio for films, television, video, video games and radio. We have to do this quite a bit. When you’re micing someone at their mouth and they are walking, rustling keys, setting something down on a counter, etc… the sound you get from those farther away actions isn’t always great. So the way we do this is to get a really loud signal from the voice/dialogue and then add the other stuff later. For example: In The Romantics, we add the sounds of car doors opening and closing, walking across gravel/wood chips/asphalt etc…
ADR or Looping – Dialogue that turns out poorly in post production (because of recording issues. background noises. low signal. all kinds of things) must be re-recorded in post and dubbed over the film. This typically requires a studio type setting where an actor will watch himself in the designated scene and act out his lines into a mic. You see this a LOT in tv shows today and it’s sloppy and noticeable. We’re trying to keep this to an absolute minimum.
—> Â Â It was amazing outside today. The only reason I know that is because we stepped outside to shoot a scene and it ended up being way too bright to do it. It was about 70 degrees Fahrenheit with a nice a little breeze. Amazing! We all ended up standing around talking for a few minutes because subconsciously, the weather made us feel so good. Then it was back inside to start again. _
—> Â Â Today was probably our last BIG day where we had almost everyone on set at once. We only have about one and a half more full days of filming left for Pen and Paper. Getting really excited but, that’s definitely not the end of the work on this episode. We have tons of Foley and sound effects to record. Aaron has a massive mountain of editing to do. We have the almost insurmountable task of promoting this thing and getting it seen. We have plans in place for all of this but it’s going to take a lot of work.
—> Â Â Having said that, if any of our friends from Twitch, YouTube and Twitter want to help out, we will have a kit we can send you to post flyers and such around your college campus or wherever is legal and makes sense to throw them up. These flyers will be the SHIZ too. Just wait till you see them. Hopefully they’ll make people proud to support this project and your friends jealous! Maybe, for all the folks that help us put the word out physically on college campuses and the like, we can get you one, full-size poster of one of these flyers in your kit. What do you guys think?
—> Â Â So today we did some finishing up of a scene that takes place around a table in a super cool setting and then a kitchen scene. The kitchen scenes are always a bit tough because of the crazy amount of echo, all the appliances that make noise and the lack of space to really maneuver especially my boom pole. We got it done though and it looks great. We may have to some ADR on that scene later if our lavaliers picked up too much noise. We’ll see! Hopefully not.
—>Â Â After that, we moved outside to set up for a scene at the front door of the house but it’s supposed to be an evening scene and the dark, overcast weather decided to clear up at that moment. We then moved back inside for the kitchen scene. The kitchen scene was challenging. I kept tripping over my cables and smacking the back of my boom into stuff hah. Justin, our camera guy, made this scene look freaking amazing as always. This guy is a real artist with his camera. He’ll be doing some shots for our promotional stuff too that will be amazing. Aaron talked about his plans for the movie poster type stuff (promotional stuff) at the end of the cast and everyone got extremely excited about how amazing the ideas sound. The sweet thing is, with this crew, if we come up with an idea we can make it happen.
—>Â So we finished up with the shoot and then Aaron had to shoot a very quick little scene with Vincent as Lipton to finish up our newest “The Romantics” episode. That will be coming out this week.
—>Â And that’s all she wrote for today! I’m attaching a couple of photos from today. Trying not to give TOO much stuff away about Pen and Paper yet so I apologize for not having too many pictures to post. I think these are fairly interesting pictures so you can get an idea of what our set looks like at least.
As always, love you guys and I will see you on the live stream!
Wes
TL:DR A few behind the scenes pics at the bottom.
(If you have ANY comments you want to add or questions to ask, please leave them here. I love discussion with you folks. The comments section is at the bottom.)
Today was extremely nice. Most of our shoot was done outside instead of inside the car like our previous shorts have been. It was refreshing and an extremely nice day to be shooting outside. It was overcast. No ND filter required. It was the perfect temperature. No constant sweating and dabbing between shots. We didn’t have to fight the lighting all day which has been the MOST challenging thing of shooting inside and around a vehicle in Texas where the lighting changes outside every 20 seconds.
With a small team of 3 people, it’s damn near impossible to get the lighting right sometimes. We would definitely benefit from having 1 or 2 more people on set to hold things, move things, carry things, point things etc… It’s very challenging when all three of us are in the scene together and there’s not even a person to just operate the camera for a basic shot. We run into a lot of real challenges because we’re trying to hold ourselves to the standard of improving the quality of our webisodes every time we put a new one out. It is definitely true that you are your own toughest critic.
What we shot today was probably 90% of this episode. The rest of the shots we have to get during the week here and there when time permits. The editing process begins after that and it could take Aaron upwards of 2 full days of work to get all the sound and video edited together. I’ve always been above average at most of the things I put my mind to but this is difficult. Managing all of this at once stretches me really thin. I feel like I’m constantly working as hard and as much as I can to just tread water.
The great news is; with all of you folks out there watching us and putting in the time to hang out with me every day while we build up this community, this has been one of the most rewarding things I’ve ever done. That keeps me doing it and putting as much effort into it as I can physically and mentally handle and then some. Without you guys and gals, we wouldn’t even have a reason to be doing this and working this hard. We intend to keep bringing you high quality content that’s a step above most of the things you see on YouTube and/or T.V. and we hope that you enjoy and get some entertainment value out of it. YOU GUYS ROCK!
So here’s some behind the scenes pics and I’ll throw up a montage video tomorrow on YouTube for everyone to peruse. This is purely fan service stuff. Not meant to be entertaining or cool but just to show you our tiny operation on “The Romantics” and a little sneak peek of what’s to come in the next episode.
I’m going to do a Subscriber drive kind of thing for YouTube for the rest of this week. It starts NOW and it will officially end on Monday morning at 9:30am CST/gmt-6.
Here’s how it works. There will be THREE winners in THREE categories.
First prize winner – Any single game on Steam up to $60. Your choice. *This will be chosen via RNG using everyone’s total number of entries for themselves.
Second Prize winner – Any single game on Steam up to $40. Your choice. This will be selected by me and Aaron for what we consider the BEST comment on our YouTube. (could be funny/cool/appropriate/intelligent but definitely not spammy)
Third Prize winner – Any single game out of my giveaway list on this website. This will also be chosen using the RNG system using your total entries.
Actually watch the video you’re commenting on. A comment that makes sense and is related to the video will get you a better chance of winning!
Replying to other people appropriately works too!
And, here’s the NEW pilot episode!
I have 5 copies of Don’t Starve to give away today.
Check out my two new gameplay vids if you don’t mind!
Rules to win!
1. Sign up here.
2. Be present when I do the RANDOMÂ giveaways.
3. Follow me on Twitch (the button is above top left of the video window on Twitch)
4. Win games and have fun.
Time for another coop Monday with Aaron! In honor of coop goodness, a copy of Chivalary and a copy of Natural Selection 2 have been added to the games list for the giveaways. Enjoy!
If you have been looking for a way to support the stream, I’ve received a partnership from Game Fan Shop. Every dime of the money I get back when you purchase a game there will go straight back into the stream. I’m doing this stream as a non-profit thing for now. I will use the money to add more, quality games to the giveaways as well as for contests such as the one I have up on Twitter now. As of right now, I am not comfortable with putting up a link for monetary donations. I’m not doing this for money but for the community and the enjoyment of putting fun content out there for you guys and gals.
A little info about Game Fan Shop. The games they sell can be downloaded using Steam. They are Steam keys. They typically have the same sale as steam or better in some cases and you can get an additional 5% off there using the coupon code, WeAreTheRomanticsSpecial when you check out. I enabled this coupon just for you guys. It takes 5% OUT of the earnings I would make. I consider that a necessary discount for my friends. (It won’t let me make it higher than 5%)
Rules to Win
1. Follow us on Twitch. (the follow button is right above the video screen)
2. Be present when we do the RANDOM giveaways. I do 3 to 5 a day. If you miss out on one, there will be more.
3. Please consider checking out our YouTube content and subscribing to us there and on Twitter. We do webisodes! The links are on the left menu bar of this page.
We did our best to set up things nicely with the equipment we have. I look forward to any suggestions for the next time around. Please message them to me on Twitch.tv.
I’m giving away a copy of Xcom randomly today. I won’t send it to you until the end of the cast though due to the nature of the setup we’re running today.
You must be present to win it when I do the giveaway.
There will be 2 different signups. One signup is to win a custom t-shirt (being designed by Aaron this week). It will be a one of a kind shirt and the winner will be chosen from the T-shirt giveaway form.
We hope you guys enjoy it today!
Wes
T-shirt Giveaway:
Tomorrow is the Board Game stream!!! Please come and check it out even if you don’t like board games. It will be a blast and we will be giving away a custom, one of a kind t-shirt, designed by Aaron.
You can get more info on the board game stream here – 10/30/2012 at 12:30PM CST or GMT -6! Be there or be square.
Looking forward to seeing you all there! (there will still be chat interaction and such!)
The Romantics 