I just wanted to take a moment and thank all of you for your kind words of encouragement! I felt that you all deserved and encore, so I created a
Brand New video!
The Hidden Forest: A Beginner's Guide to Gearing uphttp://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3s6zmm482QYBackgroundI felt that my last video lacked a lot of cohesion, so I set out to create a short tutorial that focused more on THF custom content, specifically, the starter armor, charm 1.0 and epic 1.0.
Even though the total running time on the video was just under 1:18, it took me about 7 hours to complete from start to finish. Why so long?
The Music:I composed the background score from scratch using Skale Tracker, music composition program based on the DOS application, FastTracker ][. I've been writing music using Amiga Module wave-table synthesis for about 15 years, so it only took about an hour to write the background score, export it to WAV, master it, and export it MP3 with Audacity.
The opening Title/Closing Credits backgrounds:This took up the majority of my time as I sketched these
by hand...it took a lot of time to get it "just right"

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Brand new (to me) effects:This was the first time I used a transparent PNG to superimpose images on top of my videos. I accomplished this by taking screen shots from the THF alla/magelo clones and cropping them out. I wasn't even sure that I'd be able to do this until I tried, so I'm glad I did as I'm very pleased with the result!
Production details:I turned on Luclin models, advanced lighting and shadows for this movie. As a result, I occasionally saw the shadows of an NPC on the other side of a wall, so I had to re-position my camera to get it out of the shot.
Post-Production details:In the course of filming, I had to discard a few scenes for continuity purposes - the shot I had of Bootless running to the fairy to teleport to Paludal was taken after he turned in his epic and some pieces of ornate armor, I had another one of him getting buffed by Sune but had to cut it for the same reason...
I wanted to keep the video short and to focused on the theme. I took some footage of Unrest and CoM, which I may use in my next videos, but left them out of this one and shortened the theme from "Life as a Beginner on THF" to simply "Gearing up as beginner".
Even though it took a very long time to put together, I had a lot of fun, so I hope you enjoy this one too
