Preview – July 24, 2008
July 24th, 2008

Posted by Graham

Now that four of us iPhones, there’s really no excuse for not doing these preview pix now. Remember when we did the preview pix?

Here, Morgan is relaxing with Paul’s iPhone during a lull in shooting. He’s wearing this summer’s latest fashions: a woolen sweater.
Look for upcoming, extensive behind-the-scenes coverage of this video.

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The Return of The Bill
July 23rd, 2008

Posted by Graham

Ooo, new blog back-end. Shiny.

This video was shot over two days, as it was fairly special effect intensive for me. Thank god we shot all the green screen stuff on a Tuesday. It gave me a vastly longer amount of time to work on the ninja fight (not that I wasn’t still up at odd hours on Sunday night, but hey!)

We shot all of Paul’s green screen shots as the five ninjas he played first. I’d storyboarded the whole thing the night before, and good thing too, because that way I knew exactly what needed to be shot. However, by-and-large the actual choreography we all came up with at the time. Matt spent most of this time practicing his Naruto hand-signal malarkey.

It’s always difficult for me—who edits the videos and has a mental picture of them in my head—to articulate accurately where I need people to stand for a given shot. It’s even worse on the green screen because ordinarily, I’d move the camera to get a different angle, but that option isn’t present. So I have to explain things like, “Okay, now that way is forward, so you’re looking this way, even though it’s the same shot.” Very strange for the people on camera.

Nate showed up before dark (praise be to summer hours), and we shot all the exteriors. Now Nate… the guy goes from a running gag of never having actual dialogue to one of the longest soliloquies this side of Story Guy, and hadn’t read a word before showing up on set. Sure it took it some time, and some takes, but the dude nailed it. Props to Nate. I mean, Bill also had some tough lines, but he wrote them.

After we were done that, it was pretty dark. But we still needed to shoot Nate’s green screen shots, and Matt’s whole Naruto segment. After that was done, it was off to White Spot for some desert.

A couple days later we got together at Jer’s new pad, and shot the opening and closing scenes. Jer’s bed—as you can see from the photos—is on a loft, so Bill had a bit of a… standing issue. But we figured it out. That whole shoot was fairly straightforward. The only bit we didn’t shoot there was the shoot of Bill and Jer in the really “happy” picture of the two of them. We had meant to do it then, but didn’t have a picture. In fact, that insert was shot on Sunday, at my place, and that’s actually me in the red shirt. See? We don’t tell you everything in the LRRcast. Because I forget to.

The editing took me a great while, with the most complex shots having up to 7 layers, with colour correction and motion blurring as well. Keep in mind that Paul is playing all 4 ninjas in those first shots. One or two shots were split screen, but most were composited. Bill’s script called for a ninja fight “as complex as Graham is willing to do” so I brought it on myself. On Saturday I sent a rough-cut to Alex, who never ceases to impress when it comes to awesome audio. And he continued never ceasing. Further props to Alex.

But most props of all to Bill, who not only fought off the ninja scourge, but wrote his first video for the site, and is back in videos again. Hurray!

WordPress 2.6!
July 22nd, 2008

Posted by Paul

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!

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The Superintendent’s Story
July 21st, 2008

Posted by Jeremy

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 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! 🙂

The Superintendent’s Sorrow

Some Blog Love
July 20th, 2008

Posted by james

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:)