sobota, 26 maja 2012

PixelBeat - release summary

Almost 2 weeks after the release of PixelBeat it's time to take a look at all the statistical data and feedback that I have received.

First, let's look at some numbers. At the moment, it has 7500 views on youtube, making it the 3rd most viewed movie on my channel. On May 14th, it was viewed 3153 times (afterspray had 4619 views on its release, and Zero had mare 217 views). It was downloaded 342 times and it was viewed 519 times on own3d.tv

Apart from ESReality (1820 views), the movie was spread to various websites, like rakaka.se (1485 views), cyberfight.ru (415 views), reddit (224 views) and many, many others.

The audience was mainly european with Sweden on top (1963 views), followed by Russia (842 views) and from the other side of the ocean - USA (580 views). Nearly all of the viewers were male. Only a handful of 3.4% of all of the views were made by female users. Keep in mind that these stats don't include views from unregistered users.

I made some cool comment clouds using tagxedo:




From YouTube:



and ESReality:


The comments were mostly positive, with little to none constructive criticism that I could use. Most of the negative comments apply only to a 8bit/pixel themed movie. Some didn't like the music, others didn't like the theme in general. Many pointed out that I shouldn't use a maximum detail in-game graphical setting and use something that makes the game sort of pixelated, and yeah I have to agree with them, I actually had that in mind before working on the movie but dropped the idea later on because it would take a lot of more time to incorporate it properly. Oh well, not much I can do about it now.. pixelbeat2 maybe?

wtorek, 22 maja 2012

Poznań, 8bit and gooral

I've spent the last weekend in the 5th largest polish city - Poznań. Being there was a first for me and I loved pretty much everything about it, well.. maybe except the complicated crossroads:) I went there with my girl friend to see some concerts, gooral in particular. I found out about him maybe two weeks ago, but I fell in love with his music instantly. It's a combination of goral folk music and modern electronic music, like dnb and dubstep. His concert was simply fantastic. I might use a song of his in a quake movie one day.



We also visited a very interesting club. It's called 8 bitów. Its theme is obviously old, 8bit games. The front wall outside of the club is an underwater scene from super mario. The staircase inside the club is ornamented with space invaders. The ambiance of the place was great. You could even play some super mario and street fighter on two consoles, all for free. Very neat. We sat down on a sofa near the corner of the room, had some beers and enjoyed the music and fantastic visual effects that were being displayed on the club wall. After a while we hit the dancefloor and despite the fact that there wasn't anyone there dancing beside us, we had a lot of fun. All in all, even though they didn't play chiptunes, I really liked that place. :)

I've been told that I should post more frequently if I want more people to actually follow this blog. I decided to do accordingly, so yeah, since now you can expect more posts about the stuff that I do. Tomorrow I'll write a summary of the release of pixelbeat.

niedziela, 13 maja 2012

PixelBeat - quakelive community movie

Finally, after taking many obstacles head on, it's done. My 4th quakelive movie, starring 28 players from both Europe and the USA. It's a bit over 4 minutes long, and features over 40 frags, on average that's 1 frag every 6 seconds . Working on this project took a lot of time. Especially watching the demos was very time consuming. After watching all the demos I lost some motivation, and took a break for a couple of months. Recently I started working on it again and here's the effect!
 I had a really hard time with choosing the right songs. I wanted to make the movie sort of 8bit/oldschool themed, so I was listening to a lot of chiptune and bitpop. Some of the songs were almost painful to listen to, others just wouldn't fit a quake movie. If you liked the music I used, check out the other songs of those musicians, I've put links in the credits at the end of the movie.
I'd also like to thank my good old friend phl for beta testing the movie and giving me a lot of helpful advices and ideas. Without him, the movie wouldn't be the same.

Download link: http://download.maverickservers.com/PixelBeat_x264_720p50.mp4



Here are some goodies for anyone interested, you can use them as avatars, icons and what not. But if you want to use them in some movies, games, etc. Let me know. Not because I have anything against it, but because I'd like to know about it. :)






 Hah, yeah that's a in-game chat indicator there, it almost doesn't appear in the movie, but I think it looks pretty cool:) Also, I've contributed an avatar made of sarge's head on ESR. I'm using it, but I'd be glad to see other people using it.

Grrr

I've spent the last 5 hours, rendering/compressing the final version of the movie just to find out that vegas made some error while rendering the .avi file. Some very short moments of the video were missing (black) but it was enough to ruin it. So yeah, I'll probably start the render now, head to bed and set the alarm so that I wake up in time to start compressing. I want the movie to be online tomorrow morning.
Oh, btw, I forgot to write anything about it in the last post. If you've ever read my blog before you must've noticed the new template. A while ago blogger introduced a new template system and then the background of my old template changed its shape and the posts became harder to read. I thought a new release is a perfect time for fixing it. I also updated the background on my youtube channel.

piątek, 11 maja 2012

Almost, almost there

Heyy, a moment ago I started rendering the final version of the movie, or at least I hope so. So far I've rendered like 3 "final version" and I always found something to adjust.

I would've finished the movie earlier but it got really warm recently, so some BBQ's, beers and parties were in the way. But I must actually admit, that after drinking a beer or four,  it was easier for me to focus on working on the movie, and avoiding distractions.:))

środa, 9 maja 2012

Fix

While watching the movie I found some errors made by vegas while rendering. Other than that, there were some parts that needed some adjustments. Rendering the video takes about an hour, and compressing it takes another 4 hours. I'll render and compress it during the day. Hopefully I can release the movie today on the evening.

wtorek, 8 maja 2012

Almost ready

phew, it's 3:50am right now.


The movie is almost ready to be released. Everything is in place, right now I just have to render/compress the whole thing and see if there are some things that I might have overlooked. A trusted friend of mine will "inspect" the movie as well. If everything is fine, I'll release the movie. So yeah, most probably tomorrow is going to be the long awaited day. Yay!

poniedziałek, 7 maja 2012

I can see the finish line

The intro is almost done, I just have to fix some parts, so that it looks perfect. Then I have to make some more name tags, and we're good to go:) I'll release the movie this week, or I'm not Hell5pawn!

piątek, 4 maja 2012

Polishing the intro

Today I've been working on the movie a lot.. still there are some things to do, some to fix, other to do from scratch. The movie is almost done, but I still have to spend a couple of hours on it. I'll try to do as much as possible tomorrow. About the additional frags I mentioned a while ago, I changed my mind, it would be a pain to capture footage again now.