Jimb0

Been working on school stuff. Playing Dead Space. Playing Jeanne D'Arc. Waiting for Fallout 3.

Miss you.

Take it easy.
  

This post relates to: Lost Odyssey

Tonight, or late last night, or early this morning, depending on how you look at it I finished Lost Odyssey.

As is tradition for me, I took one of my end game screen caps.


Usually the time indicator is a decent way to tell if I enjoyed a game or not. In this case I spent 92, almost 93 hours (which I believe is the longest I've spent on a single player runthrough of a game). Logic tells us this means I liked it quite a bit. So much so that I didn't actually want to beat it. I really wish it could've lasted forever, and as I typically do when I reach the end of a game I adore, I procrastinate. I did manage to complete a decent amount of the side quests while putting off the ending, but I still have a few loose ends to tie up along with tackling the dowloadable dungeon.  Alas, I decided to take the plunge late Sunday night and at least see the ending. I'm extremely glad I did.

I'm not one to really review games -- mainly because I believe there to be a indescribable amount of subjectivity that I could never really.. you know.. describe to other folks. Everyone else is so much better at it than I am, I just tend to gush like I am now. What I can say is that this game is among my long list of "all time favs". Every time I played this game I would shut off my computer, put my phone on silent and turn my online status to busy. I wanted to be completely immersed. And out of those 92 hours and 44 minutes there wasn't a single moment where I wasn't honestly enjoying myself.  I'll also openly admit that this game caused me to tear up on more than one occasion. Probably the most of any game I can remember playing.

I probably say this every time I play one of these super long emotionally charged, highly rewarding experiences, but goodness if this isn't the very reason I love playing vidya games -- I really don't know what is.

/swoon

I managed to get my hands on the first upgrade for Rachel, my new camera.


Placed atop a small tripod in the hot shoe of my HV30 is a Rode VideoMic.

I'm taking a Sound and Post class in school and it prompted me to gather some new equipment for a couple reasons. First, I don't like renting from the school and dealing with the extremely harsh check-out conditions. And, secondly, because I want to use this bad boy on my own stuff whenever I want to!

I ordered a .45x wide angle today as well. The first thing I got for my old camera was a wide angle lens, so I figured I had to do as much for this one at least too. Next on the upgrade schedule is most likely a new tripod. The one I'm using now is actually meant for still photography and I need a good video tripod with a fluid head for smooth panning and tilting action. After that (hopefully around the holiday season) I'll try and take the plunge and get a 35mm adapter so I can get some shallow depth of field happening, as well as some radical manual focus. Then I'll probably have to get a rails system to mount it on as well as a new monitor for better focusing and perhaps a follow focus to further improve that. It's going to be an ongoing process, that's for sure.

Also got the new Typography project coming up. I have a little less than three weeks to work on it, so I need to get going. I ripped the audio I'm thinking of using this weekend from the film, O Brother, Where Art Thou -- although, I'm not sure if I'm going to stick with this or not. It needs to be at least a minute and I'm sitting at 1:20 with this one. Have a listen and let me know what you think...



As far as vidya games. I've been playing Lost Odyssey a bit, as well as some Rock Band 2, which Bort_Hammer and I managed to get a few days early. Everything else has been kept pretty light in favor of school and watching movies.

I added my first blog/mic/camera test here, but I'm going to keep it private -- it's ultra raw and not at all interesting. If you really want to watch it though, shoot me a message and I'll give ya the password.



Update:
Here's a quick rundown of what the camera is capable of. Hopefully this will improve the more I fiddle with things -- I'm still merely an amateur at this stuff.


This is a screen cap from the video at different stages of post production. The first image is just the raw footage. As you can see it's extremely dark because I locked the aperture on the camera and didn't allow the camera to add gain to compensate for the low light. The result is underexposed but clean from noise, and it is fixable in Premiere by messing with some white input levels, as seen in the second image (which is from my initial test upload). Lastly I wasn't quite satisfied so I took the footage into After Effects and added some Film Magic Pro color grading which I messed around with to fit this clip. Typically the presets tend to have too much contrast for the stuff I've shot so far but I'm still working on it.

For a first test, I'm pretty pleased. It took a lot of work to even get this up and running. I'm just glad it's so much fun!

Now to finish these Backyard battles in Lost Odyssey! Just finished the Light Class ones but I'm a little nervous about the Medium and Heavy classes...

So, I'm taking a Typography class and for our first "non assignment" we had to define what typography was to us. I went a little overboard considering could have just penned a sentence down on a piece of paper, but I've been looking for an excuse to try one of these out for a while.

I still need a lot of practice. Hopefully this class will help with that!

She's a Canon HV30 and she's stolen my heart.

I still have a lot of things to figure out with it. I'll probably browse through the manual at work tomorrow and do some test shooting this weekend. Unfortunately classes start Monday so I have no idea when I'll be able to put something together.

I also need to find a suitable name for her. I forgot what I was going to call her initially.


Boy that sure would be fun.. Maybe someday...

I have a loose plan to spend even more money on accessories as well. She might look and transform into something even more radical come the end of the year, if things go smoothly.

Stoked beyond belief, I am.