SFP BLOG

The Dumb Bob Xmas Special

jun@stonefalconproductions.com (Jun) — Thu, 31 Dec 2009 23:52:00 +0000

Save the Murlocs!

jun@stonefalconproductions.com (Jun) — Thu, 26 Nov 2009 21:19:00 +0000

A film I made for J!NX, based on their script. :) Here's the 'official site'.

Our 48 Hour Film Project

jun@stonefalconproductions.com (Jun) — Mon, 09 Nov 2009 19:29:00 +0000

Yup, we entered again this year and nope, we didn't make the deadline...
AGAIN...because we were too optimistic about the script length and we underestimated how much time the film would take to render. Hopefully we have learned our frigging lesson!

Dumb Bob Halloween Show!

jun@stonefalconproductions.com (Jun) — Wed, 14 Oct 2009 22:21:00 +0000

You'd think the boys would get tired of making these. But noooo, they are very dedicated to their series, LOL! Once again they wrote and directed everything. I just 'enhanced' their vision. Cole did all the music himself in this episode. Ryan did the little animation at the end.

Dumb Bob 2

jun@stonefalconproductions.com (Jun) — Tue, 29 Sep 2009 16:30:00 +0000

Dumb Bob!

jun@stonefalconproductions.com (Jun) — Wed, 16 Sep 2009 01:39:00 +0000

I helped my boyfriend's kids (9 and 10) with a film they wrote and directed themselves. They wrote all the dialogue and the lyrics for the music (we helped play a few of the instruments but Cole played guitar), directed their little sister and father as they recorded the voices of the characters, created the prop smashed car out of clay and paint, and shot the whole thing on my HD camera. I was the editor (only cause Premiere and After Effects are rather complicated) but they told me what shots to cut and what sound effects to use, etc. It turned out to be very funny! They were really proud of it! Perhaps there will be an episode 2? :D

Appearing at Comicon....

jun@stonefalconproductions.com (Jun) — Tue, 21 Jul 2009 20:15:00 +0000

This Friday you can catch me pretending that I know what I am talking about on two back to back panels at the World Famous San Diego Comic-Con.

The first panel is called "State of the Animation Industry" and starts at 2:30 in room 10. I'll be talking about random current happenings in animation.

The second panel is called "Beyond the Gaming Medium" and starts at 3:30 in room 30AB. I'll be talking about my machinima films.

If you want to catch me for a question, it's probably best to do so after the second panel as I'll be racing in-between!

Kyle + Rosemary

jun@stonefalconproductions.com (Jun) — Thu, 25 Jun 2009 18:47:00 +0000

I decided to put this up. It's been over 2 years since it was completed and has already publicly aired on Nickelodeon. :D Sorry for the watermark, it's the only copy I have.

Where the heck am I???

jun@stonefalconproductions.com (Jun) — Fri, 12 Jun 2009 17:45:00 +0000

Where am I! Why haven't I made any more machinima!??

Busy, busy, busy. Dunno if anyone is still following this update page....but I am really busy these days. Went back to Disney, my old 'alma mater'...playing in an active 80's cover band (I'll post future gigs later)...got a nice new fella in my life (if I am being honest, that's the real reason I'm 'busy') Falling in love has this weird effect on my extracurricular projects...it makes me not care about doing any of them! ;)

BUT

I am working on one last WoW machinima. It's longer than usual and a little ambitious. I am trying to get it done for Blizzcon but if I don't (which is very possible) it may end up being a nice holiday present for all my viewers instead around December. A sort of swan song, if you will. I really think my life is changing now and I am leaving these wonderful worlds behind....I have already stopped playing WoW. WoW has been tons of fun and the folks at Blizzard have been good to me, but it feels like it is getting to be that time....time to move on....not that I won't pop in nostalgically once in a while! :D

City of Heroes ad #3

jun@stonefalconproductions.com (Jun) — Tue, 20 Jan 2009 19:52:00 +0000

Ah yes, the last of the exciting City of Heroes/Villains ad trilogy! As always, please go to the main site to watch in high quality.

Remember This?

jun@stonefalconproductions.com (Jun) — Tue, 13 Jan 2009 19:30:00 +0000

So, my short "Kyle+Rosemary" that I finished two years ago, is FINALLY set to air this weekend on the Random Cartoons show, January 17, Saturday 10:30am PST. This will be, unfortunately, on the NickToons cable channel. NOT the main Nickelodeon channel, NickToons. If you have cable, keep scrolling up...up....maybe into the 400's....oh, there it is. (Actually it turns out to be channel 108 on Charter in Los Angeles) A bit disappointing that they waited so long to air these and then stick them on their less known cable channel, but at least it's finally an 'ending' to this project.

City of Heroes ad #2

jun@stonefalconproductions.com (Jun) — Tue, 13 Jan 2009 19:23:00 +0000

Once again, go to the youtube page and click 'watch in HD' for a better experience.

City of Heroes ad #1

jun@stonefalconproductions.com (Jun) — Fri, 09 Jan 2009 20:45:00 +0000

A couple months ago I was asked to create some funny ads for the game City of Heroes/City of Villains. Now the characters in the City of Heroes games, while having an amazing variety of height/weight/clothing and a decent amount of emote options, do NOT have one little important aspect for a funny ad - mouth and eye movement. Not wanting the ad to look like moving expressionless mannequins, I suggested that I animate all the mouths and eyes. I didn't really know what I was in for - it took an awful lot of work. But I think the results are much more expressive than if I hadn't done it. Well, judge for yourself. Go to the actual youtube page to view it in HD.

Happy 2009! Oh look, IGN likes us.

jun@stonefalconproductions.com (Jun) — Fri, 09 Jan 2009 20:10:00 +0000

Apparently Snacky #4 topped IGN's best machinima of 2008 list. Thanks guys! The Return of the Revenge of Dr. Mechanico and What does WAR mean to you made the list as well. Presumably because they were made in little-used game engines and they wanted to make the list seem to spread out over more games than just WoW...but thanks for the compliment, I'll take it!

Things You Need (48 hour film project)

jun@stonefalconproductions.com (Jun) — Tue, 18 Nov 2008 16:59:00 +0000

Here's what I did last weekend instead of playing WotLK (although some of the film was capped in Dalaran). I convinced my friend Ben from Oblivious Films to enter the 48 hour film project with me. You have 48 hours to make a film - how do they guarantee that you made the film in 48 hours? Well, you get three things that MUST be in the film - a character, a prop, and a line of dialogue. Also, you don't know what GENRE you are going to get - it could be anything from horror to comedy. As it turns out, we drew "Musical or Western". Being daring (and me being a musician) we decided to go for the Musical option.

The only sad news here is that, despite all our efforts, we had rendering problems at the very end and uploaded the film late to the 48 hr servers - which disqualified us. However, we started the film 3 hours behind everyone else (we are on the west coast, and they launched the teams on east coast time! grr), so technically we DID make the film in under 48 hours!

Here's a brief rundown of the weekend:

*FRIDAY, 4pm - I was still at work and Ben was driving up from San Diego, when they launched the teams. I had assumed we were starting at 7pm PACIFIC coast time, I didn't read the fine print and that was my mistake....a mistake that probably cost us >< . Didn't get home until about 7. Lost 3 hours there!

*When Ben arrived, he had a Pygmalion-like idea for a painter character who buys magic paint and uses it to make a painting of a girl come to life. I said fine! We wanted to make sure that we used all 3 elements they had given us in a MAJOR way so there could be no doubt that we had done the assignment in the given time. So the dialogue line was turned into the first song, and the main character was based on the character assigned, etc.

*After having dinner and agreeing on the outline of the basic story we decided that the best way to get the most done was to split up writing instead of sitting there together arguing over every line. I ended up writing the screenplay while Ben tackled song lyrics. We decided he should just write in rhyme blocks, whatever he wanted, and I would make up the music to them the next day. We wrote and wrote and finally finished around midnight.

*The last thing we did before getting some shuteye was sit at the computer and pick out all our character designs from Modelviewer so they were ready to go.

*SATURDAY Ben starts to go in-game and cap shots. I take all his lyrics and sit down at the keyboard with Protools and start to compose the music on piano.

*Pete shows up to record the voice for Pat, I take a break from writing to record him. Ben continues to cap.

*I finish the music for the most complicated song "Things You Need", Ben records a vocal demo over it and I email it to Sam who is standing by in Washington to orchestrate. We have a small break for lunch.

*1pm. Back to it. I finish the music for the rest of the songs. Damon and Zadra arrive and sing them. Ben takes a break from capping to do his lines. I give him a rough assembly of the songs to start assembling picture to. I finish editing the dialogue, and I record drums, bass and guitar for the one "rock" song in the film "Perfect Woman".

*Ben finished the first scene "I Need a Drink" and gets the work on the third because I volunteered to do the second. Some of Sam's orchestrations start trickling in and we are duly impressed.

*5pm. I am frustratedly trying to get my alienware laptop up and running after effects and premiere, but it runs like molasses. I finish maybe 3 shots of the "Things You Need" scene and at that point want to kill myself. I try to hook up another desktop but it turns out it's busted. I waste about 5 hours doing this until I discover at about 10pm that my smaller laptop actually has more RAM and does the work okay. I get about 1/3 of the scene done before collapsing. Ben's 1/2way done with another scene "Crazy Bitch Song." It's like 2 am and we collapse and go to sleep.

*8am I get my ass up and continue to work on my scene. Ben drags himself in and finishes the Crazy Bitch scene. Time is running out. Sam finishes the orchestration.

*2pm I finish my scene...I worry that I might have taken too long on it.

*3pm Ben finishes the third scene about Pat singing about his dream girl. We decide to drop the tag ending song cause we're running out of time and start the render. The render screws up!

*3:45 We start the render again but realize we're not gonna make it by the deadline. I email the contest person hoping for sympathy considering we didn't start until 7pm that first night...

*4:45 we finally get the movie re rendered and uploaded. We're late! We fail!

We still had a great time though and lessons were learned about having equipment ready and getting other technical specs taken care of BEFORE getting started...

Photo Dump - A month's worth

jun@stonefalconproductions.com (Jun) — Thu, 13 Nov 2008 19:25:00 +0000

I really suck at taking pictures, because I'm not the world's most motivated photographer. Nevertheless I like to have records of stuff to comfort me in my future old age. Here's a bunch of piled up photos from the last month or so.

Macheath arrives at my house just before Blizzcon in his beat up car. Okay, it's not THAT bad of a car.

Typical Blizzcon scene: Lots of people watching lots of stuff.

PvP gaming, live before your very eyes!

They brought in an amazing amount of computers so everyone could try their new games.

Despite all the technology surrounding us I was most fascinated by this really powerful random beam of light on the floor.

Halloween Masks. Or LARPing masks too, if you're into that sort of thing.

Scary chick from Starcraft.

Mac and Drewbie from Oblivious films

Jo and Terran (SMOKING OMG) from Blizzard

This is the roof of the Anaheim convention center. In case you were curious.

Also on the roof.

View of Disneyland from the roof. Can you tell I really liked the roof.

They made the 'A' into a candy corn...see how clever that was. If only I had changed my camera settings so every outdoor shot didn't turn out blue. And I call myself a film school graduate.

A dragon pumpkin I carved for Halloween.

'Ware the dwagon.

I went to NYC in early November for the Machinima Fest.

Pretty pretty central park. Look, they have fall over there!

What they are doing at Ground Zero now. Rebuilding, pretty much.

I totally LOL'ed at this ad.

The Machinima Festival at the Eyebeam Center in NYC.

The lobby. This is usually some kinda modern art museum, I take it.

People crowd around to listen to machinima presentations.

"Pinkhair". I was somewhat shocked at his lack of pink hair.

Ian Beckman browses the internet.

Last but not least, a picture I took the other day of my dog, Kenji, that I liked.

Snacky 4 wins Blizzcon 2008 Movie Contest :O

jun@stonefalconproductions.com (Jun) — Tue, 14 Oct 2008 18:08:00 +0000

Well, we won...again....lol. I really was surprised, however. I never imagined we'd win twice in a row! Thanks Blizzard! This year they gave out a cool bronze gnome statue, the "Oswald". I'll post pics of that when I actually get it as they weren't ready at the time. More on Blizzcon later + pics!

Snacky's Journal 4 online!

jun@stonefalconproductions.com (Jun) — Fri, 10 Oct 2008 07:23:00 +0000

Snacky 4 is up! Visit the Snacky's Journal website or our Vimeo page. If you prefer your video tiny and crappy, here is the YouTube link. Enjoy! I'm headed off to Blizzcon in the morning...

Snacky's Journal Nominated

jun@stonefalconproductions.com (Jun) — Sun, 05 Oct 2008 19:59:00 +0000

Snacky's Journal (the show) has been nominated for 4 Mackies - Best Directing, Writing, Editing, and Series! Woot! Also, "The Return of the Revenge of Dr. Mechanico" and "The Ballad of the Noob" were honorary mentions in the Best Virtual Performance and Best Music categories.

Thanks to the Academy of Machinima Arts and Sciences for the nominations. I think I am going to be flying out to New York this time for the festival. "The Revenge of Dr. Mechanico" was nominated at their last award ceremony in 2006 but I didn't go (and didn't win :P). Yes, they skipped last year for unknown reasons.

The festival page is here, for any of you who live in New York and would like to attend.

I accidentally reset the blog

jun@stonefalconproductions.com (Jun) — Sun, 05 Oct 2008 19:52:00 +0000

D'oh! Please scroll down on the side to view older entries. Luckily they were still archived.