DREWspective

It finally went out on the 14th March (13th March in the USA - not the release date I was hoping for), but I have to share with you guys what Danielle Kennedy referred to as "the agony and the ecstacy" of my latest YouTube video: Best Chadwarden Parody Moments REMIX.

It took roughly three weeks to produce, which included:

• watching and downloading as many Chadwarden videos as I could;
• grabbing all the funny [enough] parts in Premiere;
• deciding on the order;
• making all the titles in Flash, complete with sounds;
• customising and rendering the model of the "PS Triple", from six different angles;
• so and and so forth.

Everything was ready to go on the 11th, which admittedly left me with an empty feeling inside.  I really felt that the already 25-minute long masterpiece was missing something, maybe a more personal touch.

But at the beginning of the final render, little brother cracked a line from another YouTube video that we’d recently seen:

"There’s more!"

and the saga continued, as I struggled to put together some extra footage. I spent the entire day on the 12th trying to think of some funny clips I could make. Because of sudden commitments, I was unable to make a start that same night; it would have to wait right up until release night.

Have you ever desperately wanted to get something done, but there’s a billion things literally standing in your way? Things like spending/wasting nine hours of your day at work, with two hours of travelling in one direction?

Well, of all days, that’s exactly what happened.

First thing was, I was late to work. (I think it was an hour late.) This place where I work at the moment, they’re very anal about spending nine hours locked up in an office, regardless of whether you actually have anything to do.

Leaving work at around 1830, it was time for the journey home. Funnily enough, the second train I’d intended to catch had been cancelled. That’s never happened before.

After catching the next train, it was reliance on an unreliable bus service to get home. I sure hope the [dumbass] people of London have the sense to vote Red Ken out this May.

So I got home, but little did I know the fun had just started.

I’d spent around two hours solid putting together the clips, disappointed that YouTube was being anal and not allowing access to a video I’d really wanted to use. That was the relatively easy part.

I began the final render, which for some unexplained reason stopped at around 80%. I soon realised that the partition was low on space, so I rendered again to another. After about 30 minutes, the video was rendered. It stood at a massive 5.44 GB.

Obviously I couldn’t upload something that big in a million years, so the next step was to shrink it. I used MediaCoder for the job, which did a faithful conversion in around 20 minutes, but again not without some hiccups.

The time was just before midnight, and I thought I’d made it.

But no! On the uploading page for YouTube, I discovered that my videos were restricted to 10 minutes only. On further discovery, I found out that they’d disabled the privilege for newer YouTube members, regardless of their account type.

How fucking anal; though they claim it’s to deter copyright infringers, for bona fide directors and filmmakers it’s nothing more than an inconvenience. James Rolfe (aka The Angry Video Game Nerd) was able to upload a 20-minute video not so long ago, so at the time I put it down to sheer favouritism.

But it doesn’t stop there!

Frantically searching around for a program that split movie files, the computer caught a very annoying worm. Some of you might have experienced the same one: on execution it immediately disables your firewall and any antivirus programs you may have, as well as Spybot S&D. It also prevents you from installing such programs to get rid of it, though an online scanner would probably work.

I eventually found a working program, which split the video successfully into three parts. It was around 1am, and I was pissed off at YouTube for inadvertently destroying my Windows installation.

The rest of the night was spent uploading two of the parts to YouTube; the third was uploaded later on in the morning.

So far I’ve had nothing but rave reviews on the video, and I am extremely proud of it. It was meant to be my last Chadwarden video - having made a total of nine altogether - but I am extremely tempted to come out of retirement.

My final Chadwarden YouTube video.

I almost forgot to mention…

Over the weekend, I’d finally completed the first chibiMon model!

And it looks like…

Well, on this scale it would be impossible to make it manufacturer quality. But I have one completed, and that’s all that matters!

By far the most difficult part was applying the arms and legs; I knew that getting it wrong would destroy the rest of the work, seeing as it was looking good already. Nevertheless, I had to try.

Having difficulty with sticking the arms on properly, I decided to make a small "lip" of foam at the top of the arm, by cutting away some of the pipe cleaner, straw and surrounding foam. There was then enough space to stick the arm down, and it was a matter of holding it in place as it dried.

Which led to the final, most challenging bit: the legs.

Using the pieces of balsa dowel I’d cut a while ago, I shaped them a little with my trusty pound shop craft knife to make them look more like legs. Then I took one of the small polystyrene eggs I’d bought from the US, and cut them in half using the same knife. To make joining legs and feet, I had to cut the polystyrene some more to form shoes.
Once the pieces were glued together, I gave them a coat of primer just to be sure. In most cases only the feet (or shoes) would be painted, while the legs would be turned into trousers or pants using foam. In this case, the feet were painted in black (or just a very dark grey).

Once that had dried, the legs were covered in blue foam. The heating tool proved useful once again in helping to shape and stretch the foam, creating a desired, slight overlap over the feet. The join between the legs had to be preserved using a toothpick, as the glue dried.

By far the most awkward bit was attaching the legs to the rest of the figure; this was where a band saw, or even setting up my jigsaw (or better still, a hacksaw and mitre), would have come in handy. To my horror, the tops of the legs were not straight, and no amount of cutting with the craft knife would solve it.

The end result was unfortunately a wonky -looking model, but even so it is able to stand on its own.

Excellent!

Now 17 more to go…

Some "outtakes" from our main man Chadwarden, devised by myself and bro.

http://www.betweenlines.co.uk

One of my real friends from uni had the idea of starting an e-zine. Wanting to be part of something grassroots, authentic and underground, I offered my support and skills; the above link is the result.

Let me tell you guys: the whole process—idea to implementation—took almost a year. Along with my other projects, like The Ignored Board, my own portfolio site and the long-awaited return of BadSoft Inc., it was, quite frankly, a nightmare to design and build.

Note that I’d said in the introduction that my friend had the idea for an e-zine. Initially I was aware that it was a music e-zine, but I had always been confused about the direction of the proposed site.

• What kind of music would it focus on?
• Was it going to be a hobby or commercial site?
• What kind of content would the site have?
• Who would be writing on it?
• What kind of audience?
• What kind of "feel" would the site have?
• What would the site be called?

Nobody knew the answers to these questions, until the bullshit was finally cut after months of talking. I’d decided enough was enough, and started to build a potential site. That’s when the answers came flooding in. (Some of you web developers, and probably even people outside new media, probably have an idea of what happened next.)

After a few months of designing then redesigning the site, with no blueprint or concrete idea of what direction the site would take (and for a while, not even a name for the site), I finally came up with what you see here:

Luckily, this design went down well with other people interested in the site.

If I’m honest, I’m not too keen on the name Between The Lines; a quick search on Google, or your favourite search engine, reveals a number of different sites with the same name, and very similar domain names, which would make it near impossible to gain a good search engine ranking. We were very lucky to find betweenlines.co.uk, which was probably the only combination left for sale.
I have a dislike for cheesy web site names: you know those ones where they pick two words out of the dictionary at random, stick them together and you have a name like moonfruit, facebook, gymgit, lemonsquid etc. Instead, I would have gone for a long, one-word site name for a music e-zine, which would be more memorable and hard-hitting.

There’s yet more work to do on the site: I eventually found out that the site will focus on art as well, as evident by the links for art and a gallery, as well as a music player and reviews section. Fortunately the site runs on WordPress, which is highly customisable and will hopefully be up to the challenge.

This project could have been less painful if it began with a clear direction.  Even when working on my own projects, I fall into the trap of not having a direction to move in.

But how many people, groups and companies embark on directionless projects every day?

How many project "leaders", managers and bosses order people around, when they have no idea what’s going on themselves?