At the time, it seemed like a good idea. We were drunk, so was everybody else – why not take them back to our room and get them to recount their top 3 “machinima moments”? What could possibly go wrong?
Well. As you’ll hear if you’re brave enough to listen to the first of four interviews, when we’re as drunk as that and we think we’ve got a bleep machine, we use language and concepts that would make my prostitute blush. The thing I feel have to stress is this: we really, genuinely did believe that all our filthy expletives would be bleeped in post-production. We originally recorded this under the banner of Machinima For Dummies and Wiley Publishing. In the end, the filth-to-pre-watershed ratio was just so high that it was virtually un-bleepable. So we sent it to Overman. Not even his mad zound skillx were enough to bleep it properly, so we left it uncut and released it as an Overcast special. The only thing that’s bleeped now is any mention of Wiley or Machinima For Dummies.
The Overcast Episode 24 is – I really can’t stress this highly enough – NSFW. But, if you like the sound of a drunken Yorkshireman slurring obscenities into a microphone – and I know of at least one of you who does – then this is for you. There are another three to come, too, and they just get worse.
My poor mother would be so ashamed. Thank god she has no idea how to use the internet, and so never reads this blog.
The final, absolutely definately last cut of the BloodSpell feature has now been released onto teh interwebx. What’s that I hear you cry? A trailer to whet your appetite? Why, certainly, Sir, Madam or Thing.
The full meaty BloodSpell goodness can be downloaded for free from www.bloodspell.com, as if you didn’t already know.
As a pretty proficient Photoshop user, I’m often called on to touch up or alter an image, sometimes in a minor way and sometimes in a major way (for one of the shots in BloodSpell I had to animate a character’s mouth movement frame by frame, because we forgot to puppeteer it when we took the shot).
I know that image manipulations tools such as Photoshop can have a profound effect on a final image, and I also know just how much work has been done to the images that grace the covers of fashion and celebrity magazines. I sometimes find it difficult to get this across to people, though – if you don’t have years of regular Photoshop use under your belt it’s difficult to comprehend just how much influence you can bring to bear on an image. Finally, I’ve found a perfect example. iWANEX Studio have put several example images online (Flash-based site. Click Portfolio to see the images). Mouse-over the final image and you can see the original shot. Pay attention: this is what celebrities really look like. Greasy, fat and spotty; rather like you and me. The reason Kylie Minogue’s butt is so impossibly pert is because it is, quite literally, impossible. Those buttock cheeks do not exist. They’re no more real than Lara Croft’s funbags.
