Snippets and Trailers

 

I tend to use my Vimeo and YouTube accounts in a co-existential manner. However, sometimes I end up posting smaller projects and exercises on my YouTube channel due to storage constraints on Vimeo. Two examples of these are 'Things to Come', a short one-minute Grand Theft Auto IV trailer I created in February of this year, and 'Snippets', a collection of private gameplay and Machinima clips that I created between 2006 and 2010.

I created 'Things to Come' as a small exercise to re familiarize myself again with the game, as I am planning to use Grand Theft Auto IV again in the future for several projects. Since it had been over 6 years since I really dived into the game, I used this opportunity to create a short trailer. I installed the game, Simple Trainer and shot the footage as I went. In the end, I ended up spawning a lot of NPC's without spine cords and equipped with massive rocket launchers. The end result was a bit bizarre and quite interesting at the same time. I shot all the footage in a few hours time, and proceeded to spend around four days for the editing process. The trailer does not represent an upcoming project or anything I am working on right now or in the near future. It solely serves as a simple exercise for myself to 'get back into the game'. 

 

 'Snippets', in fact, was released just a few days ago after the initial release of 'Hyper Reality'. I used to have an extensive library of old gameplay video's, machinima and other gaming related video's which were now basically useless in 2020 due to their low quality, copyrighted music and toilet humor (the mini version of myself did not understand the laws of copyright in 2007). I created Snippets as a nostalgic reference to the past for myself, and to show what I used to create during my teenage years. During 2006 and 2010, I almost created game-related video's on a daily basis and used to upload them on YouTube. As a matter of fact, I dearly miss the tight community back then on YouTube, the ease of which you were able to reach high viewcounts on absolute amateurish content and the fact that professionalization of YouTube content was non-existent.

I have fond memories of myself booting up my laptop on a saturday morning, just play games for the sake of playing games, and create a video as I played. My laptop was barely able to capture consistently on 15-20 fps, resulting into my 'signature' choppy gameplay videos. I would proceed to edit everything all night into a small video and paced around the room as Sony Vegas took over 3 hours to output a 720p movie on my old computer at that time. Let alone the fact it would take another 5 hours to upload it to YouTube! Those pains are barely existing anymore due to the higher internet speeds and additional horsepower in computers. Snippets showed me how easy things were. Either you were able to do something or you were not. Now there are millions of ways to do something, which leads me to the topic of more recent projects, who have suffered from some technological constraints and difficulties during production. As there were lots of ways to solve potential errors, trouble shooting times increased dramatically during production. However, it also showed that due to the extensive trouble shooting processes going on, that many projects were in fact possible to create which were simply impossible back in 2006-2010. So yeah, that's good. I am bad at creating endings. Here is Snippets.