Tech, Gaming and Bile!
Posts tagged verticalslice
many a movings going on
Jul 15th
Many apologies for no episode of Vertical Slice last week, this was due to my constantly being on a train to Sheffield and chasing round and meeting people in order to secure a new flat there.
That, and the “studio” (read: living room) also looks like this right now:
I do have a spotlight episode that I have been editing on and off as well as plans to record a quick episode outside, provided it stops bloody well raining long enough…. that, and if I can find somewhere that won’t have me drowned out by the traffic!
Date of moving into the new place is the 20th, which means I’m gonna be without the net for a week or so (will… not… cope!!!).
However, once I’m back up and running in the new place (which has better acoustics than my current locations, so it’ll mean better sound!) I should be getting right back to schedule once again.
There have, also, been a few developments behind the scene that I can’t talk about right now… but it will mean a boost to the show if I manage to pull it off.
And finally, I do have plans to move away from using tumblr as the grunt behind verticalslice.tv but development of the new site is very slow as there is only me pratting around with it right now and I have *no idea* what I’m doing in PHP!
If you want to see how things are shaping up just clicky clicky, if you feel that you can help just drop me an email and I’ll be more than happy to work with you. You’d also get a copy of the eventual template to use as you wish, as long as you’re not selling it to others.
More evolution of the show
Apr 24th
Well, I’ve been playing around with Garageband – side note: now I know where some of the music in my fav podcasts come from! Was flicking thru the sample loops and going “OMG, that’s blahblahblah show!” every so often >.<
Anyway, main reason for this is to solve the problem of there being very little music in my show. Though, I do have a friend of my GF making some 8bit music for me, I thought I’d fill the gap until then and give Garageband a try.
First, a little disclosure: I’m shit with music. I enjoy listening to it, but I’m totally buggered when it comes to making it – not a damn clue. Which means whatever I make out of this app will likely be pure dross.
After about a couple of hours I finally end up with a 3min track that I will be using in the “Gadget Show Live” footage episode that I’ll be uploading a little bit later today.
If you want a little sneak peek or if you even want to use it in your own shows, just grab a copy here as you’re free to use this in whatever way you want, just as long as you slip a credit to me and/or a link to this site.
Preview [audio:http://www.alphaxion.com/podcasts/random_score_1.mp3]
More playing around…
Feb 19th
Well, at the suggestion of my GF I put together a makeshift green screen out of some green material and a 4×4 slab of plywood. Total of £15 spent on materials… not bad 
A few pins down the sides and those creases cleared up nicely. However, the crappyness of my webcam is beginning to really show up now. I had to use the zoom since the board was just a little too small, this has lead to some pixellation on the video.
When messing about with the chromakey effect in Premiere, I had to use 4 of them at some points and I still couldn’t get rid of the green halo without causing my neck to vanish too (and it does in some clips).
It is becoming clearer every video I do that I really need to be investing in a new camera that can keep pace with the meddling I am getting up to. I also have a bit of news that cheered me up no end.
Next week I’ll be announcing just what that news was… Until then, please enjoy the first vertical slice using a green screen!
evolving skills during vertical slice production.
Feb 12th
Thursdays episode of vertical slice sees my exploration of how Adobe Premiere works and an attempt to streamline integration of my sources.
Previously, I used SnagIT to record a section of my screen as I scrolled down the page. This took a silly amount of time, was quite fiddly and is far from a smooth movement.
Instead, I simply grabbed the webpage as a jpeg and cropped it down to a reasonable size for dumping into my sources.
Once in there, I turned to the effects panels and began playing around with the settings and figured out how keyframing works.
I was quite surprised at how such a simple thing can really improve not only the production quality of the project; but also made my life so much easier – not only can I do this with webpages, but it allows me to bring in various images and give them a bit of life too.
This has also had the knock on effect of making the timeline somewhat more complex than the simple overlays it had previously.
However, in the mini-euphoria of figuring out these effects, I had to remain mindful of not going “star-wipe” crazy and sprinkle them all over the damn thing. I’m hoping that the end result is much improved… I still need to tackle the issue of lighting tho, something that is going to require a bit of smart investment unfortunately. 
explainathon: past couple of vertical slice vids.
Feb 11th
OK, here’s to explain things so far.
Tuesdays video is to show the random side – I hope to produce more random stuff, sometimes ingame footage; sometimes in meatspace.
It’s more of a whimsical kinda thing to break up the flow and to provide me with a stash of vids I can call up should it be needed. For this video it was more of a “wow, there’s some odd names tonight” and then one game a guy started playing the A-Team theme tune and then the Flight of the Valkyries. I just had to grab them!
Wednesdays I hope will become “Buttonmasher Test Day” (people will be looking for stuff to watch while they wait for the Zero Punctuation rush to die down!) and will be the time slot for the weekly videos. I really, really wish to use this episode as a means for getting interaction between viewers and the show. So, with that in mind I’d like for you guys to try making the intro, the think-time clips and the outro. Those used will be added to the credits.
I would love to be able to give prizes away for this, so if any of you know someone in a position to give me crap to give away please send them my way!
Oh, and when I said I was doing Vertical Slice on a budget of zero, I wasn’t kidding.. have a look at the “studio”!
The mic, mouse and webcam trail off to a half-deck Toshiba L20 hooked up to an old 15″ tft of mine – also known as my TV PC for the bedroom.
mondays vertical slice
Feb 9th
Well, I’ve decided to not wait any longer for people to take interest in the show and begin producing it.
Hopefully I’ll be able to string it out to 5 days a week, if I fail to do that it’ll be 3 a week. This is ’cause it’s difficult to juggle script writing, shooting, editing and a fulltime job all on my own, so if you fancy helping out with script writing lemmie know.
And no, it won’t be a paid position since I’m not getting paid for it either 
This is the typical news format show that I hope will make up the majority of the episodes, the other two types I have in the can are my buttonmasher test number 14 which I’ll release on wednesdays and Tuesday will see a very strange “timeless” item.
I’m hoping to build up plenty of the timeless ones and they’ll not always be limited to the confines of the output of a game I’m playing.
Anyway, you can check out all of the vertical slice stuff on its own site over at verticalslice.tumblr.com.
Oh, and the “hoo-fuckin-ray” outburst was after I finally finished reading out my lines after I took almost 3 painful hours to read a page and a half of them… I hope it’s only practice I need and that this won’t be the norm!
bumper update!
Jan 21st
Well.. it has been a busy time over Christmas and deep into the first month of 2009.
I have put together the idea for a new video games show called Vertical Slice, have resurrected the Buttonmasher Test as one of the weekly shows for it and I have a live event planned for Leeds!
Hoping to kick things off on the first wed of February – I just need to advertise it.
I’ve also begun trying to figure out how to use the Source SDK and playing about with UnrealEd 3. Hopefully Valve will release the SDK for Left4Dead and I can try creating a space based campaign!
Here’s the couple of videos I produced recently:
Buttonmasher Test 13
Vertical Slice – Pilot
Also, I got my hands on the Multiwinia limited edition box set.. here’s a bunch of pictures for it.
more vertical slice updatery
May 8th
Posted by alphaxion in commentary
2 comments
Work on Vertical Slice continues. I have an interview with The CodeMonkeys that is in editing right now.
There is now a domain for the place, sitting on it’s own at www.verticalslice.tv. It’s still powered by tumblr until I can afford hosting of my own and figure out how to power it. In addition to the new domain, I’ve begun uploading non-coolshite branded episodes to a blip.tv account in order to take advantage of their itunes distribution, which now means the show is in the podcast directory – linkie.
This takes the strain off of my home net connection and makes it far simpler to publish the episodes, especially since the RSS feed generating app I was using has decided to randomly no longer output anything when I export to xml :S
In a little extra thing from today, Louis Gray posted something he does in response to people reposting and/or blogging about the items he posts to his sites. It’s a good idea and one that I have also decided to do as well. So, whenever someone blogs about or links to Vertical Slice I’ll pop a link to it in the bookmarks and tag it with “verticalslice”.
Of course, in setting this up it made me realise that one of the reasons why I’m not getting many viewers of the show is because no-one is telling anyone about it! Well, apart from one.. cheers Keith
This isn’t for lack of asking either, I’ve mentioned it to so many sites I’ve lost count yet the result is always the same – I’m ignored. No-one wants to pay any attention, which makes me wonder why.
The one thought I keep returning to is that the show is crap and not worth anyones time, yet this is incongruous to the general reception it gets from those that see it (unless they’re lying to me in order to protect my feelings). Maybe it’s just I’m an odious person that no-one likes… a certain possibility.
Whatever the reason is, lemmie know. It’ll make things easier for me to either determine whether I should keep doing the show or just give up and do something else.
And if you do like the show – tell people about it! Spreading it to others is the only way I’ll be able to keep making them.