MindGame Studios Blog

New Film: The Profession

2011-01-12T00:01:00.001-08:00

Oh, I somehow forgot to mention this here. Silly me.

After many months of hard work, I finally present to you all The Profession.

"Treasure Hunter" Behind the Scenes Pictures

2010-12-23T14:55:00.000-08:00

Here's what happens to my animation desk on THACday.

See the whole set on Flickr.

New Film: Treasure Hunter

2010-12-19T13:26:00.000-08:00

My entry into the Twenty-Four Hour Animation Contest 8 (THAC 8) on BricksInMotion.com.

New Film: Hopeless

2010-12-03T19:08:00.000-08:00

A short stop-motion film I made for class. It's not LEGO, but I thought you guys might enjoy it anyways.

The Move to Blogger and Other Updates

2010-11-20T18:11:00.000-08:00

Well, it's certainly been a while since my last post. Though, admittedly, there hasn't been a whole lot going on MindGame Studios-wise to really warrant one. College has certainly been keeping me busy for the last couple of months, so brickfilm progress has come to a near-standstill (thankfully, Winter Break is near which should allow me to resume animating for a short period).

Alright, where do we begin? To start with the obvious, as you have undoubtedly noticed, I've decided to move my blog away from my website and onto Blogger. I figured that it would probably be more economical to have it here rather than there, since my site isn't exactly well-equipped to maintain a blog long-term. Plus, I've had this dormant Blogger account for so long, it would finally give me an excuse to put it to good use.

Progress on The Profession is moving slowly but surely. At this time, I'd say that the film is roughly 80-85% completed. All of the actual video editing is done (has been for some time), and I'm still in the midst of doing the film's sound design. As predicted, it has proven to be a rather large pain in the ass and has taken the most time of the post-production process so far (I've recorded almost 60 individual sound effects specifically for this film), but, thankfully, it's nearly complete. All that's left after that is the music (which I'm employing my brother to help me out with), and then the film should be more or less finished. I can't say for sure exactly when it will be done, but I plan to release the film at some point before the end of the year.

In unrelated news, I've been thinking about getting a new camera. I've been eyeballing the Canon Rebel T2i as a primary candidate, since it seems to have comparable quality to the 7D at about half the cost. I've had the opportunity to play around with a T2i, and it takes some pretty beautiful quality video. If I wanted to use it for animation purposes, I'd have to look into a different capture software since MonkeyJam couldn't support it. I've been messing around a bit with the Dragon Stop Motion trial, and that seems like it could be a very suitable replacement (and significantly cheaper than iStopMotion).

Aaaand, that's about the long and short of it.

(Not Very Many) Days Left of Summer

2010-09-06T10:16:00.000-07:00

It’s now occurring to me that only a small handful of days remain in my summer vacation, and if I want to try and get two more films completed, I’m going to have to kick some serious ass between now and then. At the moment, I’m about 90% through the filming of my current project, and still trying to solidify an idea for Septemberfest (translation: deciding if I’m even capable of making something in such a short amount of time). I’m looking forward to getting all of the animation on this project done, I’d love to kick this monkey off my back (this has been a project long in the making. So long, that I even started it with my old Panasonic camera, which I decided to continue to use for continuity’s sake). However, I’m can’t say I’m much looking forward to doing the sound work for it, which I know is going rather tough (to say the least).

The plan as of now is to hold on to the next few films I make for later months so I can space them out over time rather than release them all at once. It might help to keep you satiated for a little while and keep my production output somewhat alive for the next couple months (until I get a break from school and have time to animate again).

I’m also now bracing myself for a torrent of angry YouTube messages asking me when my next video is to come my way soon.

Kicking off this whole blog thing...

2010-08-27T10:14:00.000-07:00

So here we are, the new MindGame Studios blog. This is reserved for posts, updates, and/or other ramblings that don’t involve site-specific things. So topics here might range from updates on film projects, to movie reviews, to various thoughts that pop into my head if I’m so inclined to write about them (don’t worry, I’m going to keep topics film-related in some way. I won’t bore you with random updates about stuff that wouldn’t belong here otherwise). I can’t speak for how frequently I’ll be writing new entries, so I wouldn’t recommend making regular checkups of this page a high priority.

That said, let’s get this road on the show.

I am currently in the middle of trying to finish a project that has been in the works for a remarkably long time. I’m determined to get this project finished before I go back to college in a little less than a month. So far, it’s been progressing slowly but surely. I’ve only filmed a few shots for it so far this summer, but what I have so far I like very much. I went over the original script and did some revisions because what I had, although it looked great in my head, would have been practically impossible to translate to animation. Though I’m sad to see what could have been potentially awesome-looking shots get scrapped, I’m quite happy with the revisions I’ve made in its place, so I still have my hopes up.

I’m also planning on making something for the recently-announced Bricks in Motion contest Septemberfest, so I’m hoping to have two more films in me this summer. Assuming I finish a film for the contest, I’ll likely release it at the end of the month after the deadline, but I’m going to wait on releasing the other film for a while, probably a month or two. I know this might sound unfair, but trust me, it will be more worth it. My plan for the summer was to make enough films to get a mini reserve tank going so I could periodically release them while I’m away at college. This…didn’t quite go as planned, but even if I only get a couple more films done, releasing them over time will be much better than releasing them as soon as they’re finished and then my film library goes stagnant for months on end. So be on the lookout for that, I’ll continue to update the blog on how they’re progressing (assuming I remember to).

I’m also mulling over a few ideas for a couple potentially larger-scale projects to work on in the future. At this point in time, I’m going to keep most of the details a secret, so I’ll only say that I’m starting to write an outline for one of them and hope to write the script soon.