osme sdyas is har tod write anythogn and todaf si hsut ne tnss gsia. ua asmadwoifnginfs jsut sfjsfd dfjtnee ckenfuboad.
What do you think?
ojass aspfia aos eer fy asome. iasd doantoas fjawuwnt oq wit anaytons sdo u a, just pretnefin fto frite it.
osme sdyas is har tod write anythogn and todaf si hsut ne tnss gsia. ua asmadwoifnginfs jsut sfjsfd dfjtnee ckenfuboad. What do you think?
1 Comment
Today was the last day of the drama & improv class I was attending. So we have performed in front of a small audience. It has been very fun and I am going to miss the acting games. We have performed some improvisation games such as "freeze & go", "Endowements" or "Dubbing", which is actually the one in the photo below were two of us acts babling in a made up language and then another performer "translates" what we have just said with hilarious and unexpected results. I have alwasy considered that having some skills in acting and staging have been very useful for me when designing or creating almost anything. Whether it was a video game, fiction or painting an oil picture, to name a few. I would like to keep improving these skills because I have loads of fun doing this. And I sometimes think how can I tell and help other designers with the lessons learned. Maybe it is something to think about: "Acting and staging for game designers".
In June's newsletter I offered a free reward for the subscribers at the end of the mail: If you have gotten this far reading the mail you deserve a reward! But I am a bit sad because only two people asked for the rewards. One of them is my girlfriend and the other is a friend of mine. This leads me to talk about some stats for the blog and if I should start marketing the blog. But I can leave that for tomorrow since it can be an interesting topic on its own. Do you find the rewards funny? Which one would you have asked?
I usually on of that thas says that ideas without execution doesn't worth anything. And that what matters is the "how" and not the "what". Actually I love how Derek Sivers explain it in his post Ideas are just a multiplier of execution. Well, the thing is I sometimes have a little doubt about this. In a very specific situation, when I use my very own past ideas as new seeds, for motivation, inspiration or, so to speak, energy recalling. This is why I have brought with me from Spain these folders with lot of ideas, stories, concepts and sketches that I keep for many years, and some of these are even from my childhood. I want to review these annotations to scan and store some of them, throw away others and in the process see if some of them have matured in my head or have been, somehow implemented in a similar way by me or others.
I also want to see what kind of things I thought about. Are more of them game ideas, stories for writing, comic? I will see. Yesterday I was on a flight and tried to do a very quick prototype. Being on a plane I was inspired to do something based on free falling. I was sitting in the emergency exit. I could record a video with a camera at the beginning and the end, and captured my screen during the whole process. Unfortunately the battery run out very quickly and I had to rush into stopping and saving the project and the video just in time for the laptop to abruptly go off. The experiment only lasted 28 minutes according to the screen capture video and I estimate it took a bit more than 10 minutes to prepare it before starting to record. Unity, the screen capture software, the webcam and the screen brightness drained the battery quickly. I couldn't do much with the prototype itself. Almost no interaction was coded and at the end it is just a buch of boxes falling with a camera attached. I could have done more but the start was slow and even I was focused I lost a lot of time with things less important. There has been other times that I have donde prototypes very quickly but I now realize that I think and visualize a lot how I am going to implement it in a quick, dirty and simple way. Now that some time has passed I have thought some other ways I could approach the problem while in that moment I was wandering around doing the less important things. I also think the ability to find improvised solutions on the fly (pun intended!) can be trained and improved. I still have the video material and the unity project. So I will find another moment to finish, or close, the project to a point where I can consider the experiment concluded and edit a nice video to publish.
The month is over, June amazing days. A daily post was published, and now it is time to send subscribers a nice mail, with highlit stories in a full post list. After some writing the words get through. The mail is sent! (six thirty local time), good luck and may subscribers open you. Farewell and play "you've got new mail" sound chimes. If you are reading this but not the news you are still in time, go now subscribe, and get next month's one, you have no excuse. Become one more to read and live this vibe. As long as Lab is fun and I can write, this blog will have each day a post to bite
That was actually hard to write. I am not much into poetry. My highschool teacher would be proud.
Read why this can be considered a shakespearean sonnet at writing a sonnet for dummies. To make sure I was using the right accents on the words I have cheked each verse, and the whole sonnet, using Google translator voice sintetizer. In some verses the rythm and entonation actually sounds like reciting. I keep developing the metaphor for group dynamics using Zombies and Robots. I am using the metaphor to represent the most common evolution of a small organization based on volunteer or motivation based workers. And to propose other ways for improve operations as well as providing a fun framework to talk about the organization itself by its members and users: the brains. This is a fragment of the presentation (which I intend to use as a base for a video as well) in which I describe the creation process of the group. After some brains discuss an idea, some zombies appear looking for brains. The most motivated brain jumps into a zombie, representing that brain taking action and responsability for some of the organizational tasks. The other inactive zombies represents tasks or roles that need to be fulfilled and are still expecting a brain. On the other side, a group of brains, attracted by the idea of the forming group, have their own emotions about what is going on. That emotions can lead them to leave, become spectators or to take part actively fullfiling a zombie task. A brain takes action and responsability in the organization thus fulfilling a zombie task. There are a lot of more situations that I am describing and modelling using this metaphor, so they can be used to explore and explain the dynamics involved in some groups and organization operations. Facilitating a language and a model to improve and develop new strategies.
What you can see here is 2 different audio takes of the same speech. What I was doing was just reading an online article and then I played the previous track while recording it again. Its kind of funny, and strange, to see how some of the errors kept there, others were gone and some new appeared because my own voice was annoying me. It was sort of like watching someting evolving. At the fith try I recorded without playing the previous try on the background. I think thats the better one, because after that I tried again speaking while hearing and it got slightly worse. But you may be wondering why I was doing it that way if I wanted to improve the way I spoke. Listening to myself while speaking was annoying so how can that help me to do any better? Well, actually, there are really some useful things about speaking while you listen the previous take. First, I got to hear myself saying the same words in different ways a lot more times and in a way it was much funnier that just listening to myself. The second reason is that when you hear yourself there is a limit on the things you are able to remember to fix or improve for the next take, and that, anyways, takes memory, which is something I wasn't caring about. But the actual reason because I started doing it that way is because I wanted the waveform to be syncronized, at least for a minimum, so I could compare them by hearing and looking at them together. Yes, that it, I was wondering if there would be something that I could see instead of hear. And sure there is something! Look: The take above was the first one and the other below is the last. Just by looking at this I can see I was speaking much louder and a bit quicker. Quicker doesn't neccesarily means better, but I can still see the points where a sound ends and another starts, so I think it's not that bad to speak a bit faster. Why this now?The reason why I am trying to improve my english speaking now is because I plan to record some videos in the future and I don't feel quite comfortable on how do I sound. It's not just because of my spanish accent but also because I tend to loose focus on the pronuciation and forgot to keep articulating correctly, mixing the words as I would do speaking my native language. And I plan to record some videos because I have been waiting (procrastinating?) to use videos to go further on my journey about monetizing my unfocused creativity in which I feel videos and speaking correctly are going to play an important role. Fourth step in the habit building processYesterday was the last day of the third 21-day step toward building my habit that will help me go toward my vision. These steps are actually:
So what happens on the 23rd of July (21 days from now)? Will my habit be completely built the way I want? You know what... I think I don't really care. I am getting more comfortable each day doing this and for me is a good thing having this habit to built forward momentum and avoiding me to drift away from my vision. So I will just evaluate that when the day comes. But, as I said, I feel that for this next step I am going to be using the spoken word for it to really start rolling.
Yesterday I was talking about how I there is not much variety on Minecraft videos and how I wanted to see a TV show approach mixing multiple cameras, voice overs and nice editing to spice up and improve the flow of the results. So I a made this test focusing on the technical side. And even the quality is not great it can be enough to make a future test focusing on the content and the feeling. But I guess I need to think about what to show first and write a small script at least. Have you seen any Minecraft gameplay video that stands out because of the way it is edited or produced? I would like to know about it!
|
Alejo ACIndie game designer
and Coach Archives
April 2022
Categories
All
|