I understand that Johnnie’s blogging this one too, it’s 2:18 am, and I’ll probably write more about it in the near future, so for now I’ll just say -
We’re done. We’re f(*&(ing done. The last few days have been a bit of a slog, and we’ve still got a whole lot of review, updating, editing and cutting to do, but we have now, officially, written the bugger.
Wewt.
It’s half-two in the morning, and neither Hugh nor I are capable or abstract thought, but it’s done.
Hey, look Mum - I just wrote a book!
We’ve worked so late tonight that, even here in Scotland, all the pubs are closed. Celebration will have to wait until tomorrow.
You’d better all buy this book when it’s released, as well as buying two or three spare copies to give to friends. We’ve put in some serious effort for you people.
And now … bed.
It’s truly amazing just how much rubbish we’ve written in some of our first - and even second - drafts. In this latest pass over the Medieval II Total War chapter, we’ve corrected everything from “me love you long time” level grammar, to sentences so convoluted they’d be illegal in a government document, to statements that were Just Plain Wrong.
Also, we now have less than a hundred pages to edit this evening. If it wasn’t 21:30, that would be more reassuring.
One down, five to go!
We’ve just finished the edit on the first of our chapters for today. I like to think of it in the above terms, because “One chapter down, five to go” is much better than the more-exact “Six pages down, a hundred and eleven to go!”.
HELP STOP TRAPPED IN HUGH’S FLAT STOP SEND FOOD STOP MAYBE PARAMEDICS ALSO STOP PLEASE MAKE IT STOP
Five chapters to edit today. We’ve been working on editing for 25 minutes now, and already Johnnie has just shouted at Open Office to “F(&! OFF WITH YOUR F-$&ING FORMULAS! THAT’S A WORD!”. Oh, and somehow whilst documenting the Medieval II: Total War Battle Editor, we missed a button.
It’s going to be a long day.
[UPDATE - Five minutes later:
“Add “Lipsynch” to the m(&f(*&(( dictionary, or I will add “buttslap” to your OWN PERSONAL LEXICON!”
Johnnie and spellcheckers do not work well together. ]
Our editor has just sent us her edits for a few of the chapters we’d already submitted. One gloriously tactful comment stood out in particular:
Authors: I see what you’re saying, but I don’t think this is a word. Please rephrase. Thanks.
Oh yes. We’re churning out the good stuff now.
“Hugh, stop making machinima. We’ve got a book to write.”
Johnnie, buried deep in Google Docs.
[Some context - Medieval Total War is very, very addictive to make Machinima with. The phrase “I’ll be right with you - just want to take one more shot!” has been uttered more than is reasonable in the last few hours.
MovieStorm has a similar effect. “Ooh, look, a new balaclava model” rapidly became “Er, I think I’ve got the first five minutes of a pilot for the new series of ‘24’”. - Hugh]
[EDIT I’ve closed comments for this post, because it was turning into the World Spamfest Championships. If you really desperately need to say something about it, just comment on another post and I’ll move it - Johnnie]
If you want to hear what happens when two Machinima experts are taken out for many drinks by another two Machinima experts, and are then interviewed by a (counts on fingers) fifth Machinima expert who is not nearly as trolleyed as the first two Machinima experts, you may wish to hear this week’s Overcast.
Or, to put it another way, You Know What We Did Last Tuesday.
Or, yet another, here’s the Overcast we recorded with Phil “Overman” Rice last Tuesday, in the middle of the madness that was the MfD Roadtrip. Enjoy. We haven’t listened to it yet - I’m waiting for Johnnie to get into the office to do so. So we have no idea how much of a collective idiot we made of ourselves.
UPDATE: Now we have, and it’s quite good. There’s a good chunk of us talking about the book, our writing process, and what we’re covering. There’s also a lot of us being rather the worse for wear.
In other news, with two days to go before the deadline for the book, we’re staggering through a fairly startling workload. We completed the MovieStorm chapter yesterday (which was… dense. And long.) and today we’re on to Medieval Total War. It’s War. It’s Medieval. And it’s pretty darn Total.
And so, we have returned. We’re back. We’re bad. He’s bla - no, wait. That’s something else.
I had originally intended to post a conclusion to our trip, a set of lessons learned, a summary of everything we have seen, thought, achieved and studied. A veritable cornucopia of content. But I forgot one very important thing. I’m Captain Jack Spa - no, wait. That’s something else too.
We’re half-dead, is what I missed. It has been a fantastic week, and we’ve seen technology that will likely change the world. We’ve had our view of Machinima and our plans for the next while turned upside down and shaken. It’s been tough and it’s been fantastic. It was the best of times, it was the worst of - er. Wrong thing again.
But now, we’re back, and it doesn’t seem like the right time to end anything. Because this is in no way an end, even of the road trip - that end happens around midnight next Wednesday, when we hand in our final 100 pages for the book, and collapse like two sacks of drugged armadillos. I love the smell of drugged armadillo in the morning. It smells like victory. No, wait, wrong again.
So this isn’t an end piece. It’s just a few thoughts, and some ranting dragged from the depth of my tortured mind. And even once we’ve handed the book in, it’s not the end. What we’ve seen this week shows us that the excitement for Machinima is just beginning. There’s so much new stuff coming up. Machinima is getting to the level where visually it has mass appeal. There’s movement toward Open-Source, Massively-Multiplayer game engines that will provide yet more space for Machinima creation. There’s a package coming out which makes it both entirely legal and substantially easy to use. And behind all that, there are looming shadows of larger things: in-home motion capture, viable business models for independent, online video producers, copyright reform.
“We’re off the edge of the map, mateys. Here there be monsters.” And treasures. And wonders. All starting to loom up out of the fog of time.
Now that was the right quote.
I’m told that Strange Company Early Adopter Sally Brewer is the originator of the legendary comment that I used for the post title.
I’m back in glorious Scotland, and feeling - quite frankly - terrible. Not because the Roadtrip (the capital R is obligatory) wasn’t a success. Quite the opposite. I feel like the weasels are trashing Toad Hall inside my skull, and the main reason is that the Roadtrip was a complete success. In fact, it was more of a success than I could possibly have anticipated.
MovieStorm is going to be amazing. I can’t really talk about any of it yet, and I can’t tell you the precise reasons that I think it will be amazing, because I’m under a Non-Disclosure Agreement that’s as savage and water-tight as a rottweiler in fishing waders. In fact, Matt Kelland has made me a solemn promise that if I tell you any of the great stuff I know about, he will never buy me beer again. Since he has set a precedent of buying me more beer than I can drink over the course of an evening, I’m going to hide behind the NDA and make sure that Matt knows that he’s my very special friend and is welcome to visit me in Scotland any time he likes.
This leaves us with a problem. I can’t prove to you that MovieStorm kicks more ass than the Annual Donkey Abuse Championships. You’re just going to have to take my word for it. Rest assured: as soon as I get permission to post a screenshot, video, hint or nugget, I’ll have it up on this blog so fast the Short Fuze lawyers will double their hourly rate. Until then, you’ll have to wait breathlessly like everyone else.
The new movie-making features for Medieval 2: Total War are also amazing, as Hugh’s breathlessly-enthusiastic last post suggested. After Pete had talked us through the basics, Hugh and I could no longer resist getting our hands dirty, so we pushed him unceremoniously out of his comfy office chair and started hacking.
After an hour’s work, we’d produced about 45 seconds of footage that looked better than you could ever have believed. We were right in the thick of the battle, with some authentically shaky hand-held camera work showing the truly amazing Medieval 2 combat animations. To say we left the building speechless would be a lie. We didn’t shut up about it all the way back to Brighton.
Why, then, am I feeling so godawful?
Because these past few days have involved almost constant travel, early mornings, late nights and a lot of hard work. Yesterday was particularly fun. Having established very early on that Creative Assembley were based in the hip English seaside town of Brighton, we were a little perturbed to discover that they were in fact based in Horsham, a tiny rural village about twenty miles from Brighton.
Not a problem, we thought. There’s a direct train, so we just have to get up a little earlier than we were planning to. The train, needless to say, was not direct. We should have changed once. We changed twice because the helpful cockney manning the information desk at Brighton told us to go to completely the wrong station.
Eventually, though, we arrived in Horsham. What follows is a verbatim transcript of several exchanges that occurred between Hugh and myself after we left Horsham railway station. Remember, you’re reading the words of two highly intelligent individuals. Hugh Hancock is a guru of the machinima movement who’s run a successful production company almost single-handedly for ten glorious years. I have a genuinely frightening CV, a wide-ranging skill-set, and several letters after my name.
(our heroes have just left the train station. The birds are singing, the sky is clear, and they’re both feeling pretty optimistic)
J: Shall we get a taxi, then?
H: Nah, it’s a nice day. Let’s walk it.
J: Do you know where we’re going?
H: Yup. Got a map right here. We head down this road, take a right, then another right. The Creative Assembly building should be a few hundred metres down the road.
(a little later)
H: I think it must be just over this hill. This town is so small the map is almost 1-1 scale.
J: Good - it’s getting a bit too hot to walk much further.
(later still)
H: Right. I see what we’ve done wrong. Creative Assembly is not in_ Horsham. It’s _near Horsham.
J: How near, exactly?
H: It’s in Southwater. Just on the other side of town. Well, this side of town, really - we’ve walked right across it.
(even later)
J: Hugh, do you see that bus? It says “Horsham” on the front. People are getting on it. That means that there’s a bus that goes from Horsham out to here. Why did we walk all this way?
H: Well, how was I to know there was a bus?
J: Where are we, anyway? I can’t feel my toes.
H: Nearly there. We just have to cross this motorway.
J: Cross the what now?
(later)
H: Ah-ha! This sign says “Welcome to Southwater”. We’re officially here. Now we just have to find the place.
(oh yes, later still)
J: There’s another sign.
H: What does it say?
J: Erm … “Welcome to Southwater”. Again.
We did eventually find it, by which point we had walked across half of the county and I was beginning to smell - as Hugh so tactfully put it - like a real journalist. I had to stop at a motorway service station to buy deodorant. If you consider for a moment the fact that we were able to stop at a motorway service station halfway through our journey, despite the fact that we walked all the way, you may be able to understand why I no longer place much stock in Mr Hancock’s map-reading skills.
My plane back to Edinburgh arrived in Glasgow at about seven o’clock this morning. It should have arrived in Edinburgh, but I’d booked the wrong ticket. I got a bus into the centre of Glasgow, waited half and hour for the next train to Edinburgh, spent an hour on that train, and then got a bus back to my humble little flat. I finally arrived here at about half-past eleven, having managed about four hour’s sleep in total - on the back of an already-sleep-deprived few days. I’m sure into the office to carry on writing the book in a couple of hours time.
I’m going back to bed.
