A Pixelated Point of View

 Production is 67% done. All demo's have been recorded. Demo/footage capturing has been completed up to 120/203 maps. This week I hope to finish capping another 20 maps. I'm aiming to finish production of the demo capturing process somewhere in July and to start production on the custom maps afterwards. By then, production would then have taken four full months. There will be 3 custom maps. I am still thinking about what these maps should contain. One of the maps will be used as background footage during the credit roll. The other two are used within the film itself. My aim is to start post-production of ARENA during fall 2022. The idea is to release it before the end of the 2022. Expected runtime has been scaled down from 90 minutes to between 45 and 75 minutes. I will try to compose my own music for this film with my trusty new Novation Launchpad X. Emphasis is placed on 'try' because I have the musical capacity of a green pea. okbye. Here are some raw shots from capt

  Did you know that depth of field maps are present in certain Source games by default, such as Half-Life 2 (2004)? By using a console command 'r_depthoverlay 1', your in-game view changes to 'depthmap view', or how Valve likes to call it: a depthbuffer. Not all Source games contain depth of field information (like Left 4 Dead for instance) and so far I have only gotten it to work in Half-Life 2. There is some interesting information on the Valve Developer Wiki about this topic, yet I must say the information remains highly technical. It would take me quite some time to decipher everything that is on offer on the Wiki. Luckily, I don't have to decipher anything, as much of this information is obsolete (at least in my eyes if you take the purposes I use depthmaps for into account, as depth of field maps are implemented by default in the Source Filmmaker. So, in a nutshell, what is the Source Filmmaker? First I'd like to give a bit of context of Source machinima-m

Photo courtesy of Alex Karantanas Taken during Athens Digital Art Festival - 25 - 29th of May 2022, Athens, Greece

 In this post I'll share some news about two recent releases: ONRIDE and DUSK. The former was released around three weeks ago, and the latter just a mere couple of minutes ago. Both films take place in the Left4Dead and Left4Dead 2 universe, but have been made with different tools. ONRIDE was created with the demo smoother inside of the actual game. You record a demo, and then adjust it with the demo smoother, a piece of software inside of the Source demo player that allows you to cut, play and edit demo's. DUSK was created with Valve's Source Filmmaker and uses assets from Left4Dead and Left4Dead 2. Instead of capturing gameplay in a demo format, I was able to place assets, props, characters, camera's, particles and lights in real time inside of the map and adjust things on the fly. The source filmmaker also had better camera support with various lens presets and proper depth of field. Both films have been released on 4K resolution; a big leap forward in quality. Two v