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One Hundred Unfinished Projects

Finally, the debut of a project that kept me from posting on my blog most of this spring:

This came out of a night when I was trying to get an essay on being bourgeois to work, realizing I wouldn’t be able to, looking back over the path of broken potshards that is my hard disk, and feeling depressed. Also to some extent by Lynda Barry’s encouragement to paint out your own demons in One! Hundred! Demons!. Unfinished projects are definitely my demons. I feel better having purged them. Enjoy.

7 Comments

  1. itamar wrote:

    Sometime during high school or junior high a couple of friends and I decided to write a computer game. It was an adventure game, Lucasfilms style (Monkey Island, Indiana Jones). We had the whole plot and puzzles planned out, involving a woman named Allison Rose. but my desultory attempts to program it in HyperCard never got anywhere.

    I just asked one of my friends about the plot. He didn’t remember either, but he reminded me of *another* game we’d planned to write called Dragon’s Treasure.

    Considering I’m hanging out with glyph these days, I find this vaguely embarassing. I’ll try to shame him into posting Divunal when he wakes up.

    Monday, June 16, 2003 at 1:03 pm | Permalink
  2. kermix wrote:

    Here’s one for you…

    Project: Dragon’s Lair Music Video

    Circa: August 2001

    Background: Anime music videos were all the rage, and a handful of them were actually amusing. I wanted to see something a little different, and learn something about video editing in the process. The concept was simple: a collage of Dragon’s Lair/DL2 death scenes, and occasionally non-death scenes, set to Jawbreaker’s “Accident Prone”.

    Sordid Details: I was first learning how to extract the video from DVDs, and I happened to have both a Dragon’s Lair 2 DVD and an MPEG of the original laserdisc (originally meant for use with the DAPHNE emulator, which I couldn’t run). Between those resources and Adobe Premiere, I figured I could at least have a little fun with it.

    Why it was left unfinished: While I still love the idea, the actual execution is tougher. There’s only so much death in the two games combined, considering that several of the death scenes are duplicated exactly or with minor variance, and the tune I chose was an epic at about 5 minutes in length. Plus, it’s one thing to just throw a bunch of clips together – or worse, to run the raw video with no changes and overlay music – and it’s quite another to splice things together in a way that you think makes sense. And like most of my spare-time projects, this turned out to be bigger than my attention span.

    What I learned: I did get to school myself in some of the cheap effects in Premiere, including overlaying multiple video tracks and fading them in and out. I even had one of those standard-issue music video text overlays at the beginning. I also learned that I take pride in my work far too early in the project, which gives it a feeling of completion long before it’s anywhere near complete.

    Prognosis: Comatose. This one’s going to be a veggie for a long time, unless I remember the idea later and come up with an equally appropriate, and much shorter, song.

    Or, maybe I can score some video captures from the short-lived Saturday morning cartoon of the same game…

    Tuesday, June 17, 2003 at 12:41 am | Permalink
  3. kermix wrote:

    Oh, and I had the exact same dream in high school of designing epic adventure-puzzle games for phat cash. Later on I tossed those aside in favor of a dream of designing a completely whack-assed adventure-puzzle that nobody would pay for anyway, and _that_ turned out to be the same deal – too big for my attention span. I still have a crapload of notes on it somewhere though.

    Tuesday, June 17, 2003 at 12:46 am | Permalink
  4. itamar wrote:

    Phat cash? We did it for art, man, know what I’m saying? for art!

    Tuesday, June 17, 2003 at 3:32 am | Permalink
  5. gus wrote:

    Kerm, we should really get you hooked up with the Twisted crew. You’ve had some of the same goals at one point or another, text-based game-wise.

    (see? networking! social engineering will get your dead projects what they want)

    Tuesday, June 17, 2003 at 10:04 am | Permalink
  6. kermix wrote:

    itamar: I eventually realized that, but only after getting out of school.

    Still, a man can dream!

    Gus: You are absolutely right, and here I thought networking was merely a synonym for lying and schmoozing. 😉 Perhaps I’ve been in proximity of Hollywood too long…

    Tuesday, June 17, 2003 at 9:55 pm | Permalink
  7. Anonymous wrote:

    imperiously egos!lease unlink,renegade.prepare

    Thursday, November 16, 2006 at 5:29 am | Permalink

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