Following up on my previous Portal posts, here’s Escape from City 17 part 2, a Half Life which boasts a city in ruins, striders, zombies, headcrabs and more. THe creators of this film claim they spent less than $1,000, which sounds doubtful given what’s on screen.

Portal is a fantastic series of games, and it’s built up such an interesting world that several fan films have sprung up to expand upon its themes of imprisonment, quantum physics and puzzle solving.

Dan Trachtenberg of Totally Rad Show fame has upped the bar with his Portal fan film, entitled “The Escape,” which you can see below:

Others have also put together Portal fan films. My favorite is this one, which eschews action for something a little more moody and introspective:

I’m sure there are more fine fan films out there, but these, in my opinion, are the true standouts.

Jim Munroe is the multimedia genius behind No Media Kings, which started as a way for him to self-publish his work but has since morphed into a DIY mini-empire featuring comics, games, film and books.

A few years ago he and several collaborators made “Infest Wisely“, a lo-fi sci-fi film that they broke into chapters and filmed separately with a overarching story written by Munroe. You could watch it online in segments or as a feature.

Jump to several years later and Munroe and friends have created
“Ghosts with Shit Jobs,” a near-future extrapolation of what happens when North America goes bankrupt and China outsources all the jobs they don’t want to us. It’s being done with the same low-fi ethos as Infest Wisely but with better equipment and a little more money ($4,000 this time as opposed to the $700 they spent on the previous film.)

I’m looking forward to seeing what Munroe hss in store with this latest film…it looks like they’ve upped their game visually while hewing to the same approach of ideas over pointless spectacle. Keep watching here and nomediakings.org for further news on the film.

Lately I’ve been looking into the web series phenomenon, given my proclivities towards sticking it to the man and/or making cool things with video and computers. Here’s a few good ones to whet your appetite.

First of, here’s the Guild, the gold standard by which all other web series are judged….

and here’s Standard Action, which is filmed right here in Vancouver…

and for something a little less fantasy-oriented, here’s Andy and Chaz Bugger Off to America, a sort of Guy Ritchie meets Entourage tale of two hapless and murderous criminals from the UK who cause trouble in LA…

And finally here’s some sci-fi goodness in the form of the Mercury Men. Unfortunately, you can’t watch the series unless you’re in the US or have a proxy, so here’s the trailer.

Got any more favourites? Tell me about them in the comments!

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note: the sound on this episode could be better, but hey, it was shot on an iPhone 4.

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Precisely none of you may be wondering how we make FruityGamer here at Freyburg Media. Well, I’m here to tell you the thinking, process and methodology I used. My methods and tools may differ from what’s available to you, but you’ll at least get a general idea as to how to pull of your own video podcasts.

When myself and my business partner made “This is Yaletown” we did so thinking the internet would soon push up its production values to the levels of television, and that we’d better be ahead of the curve. But in fact this has not proven to be the case. People watch internet shows for many reasons, but slick production values (to a point) doesn’t seem to be a necessary part of the equation.

I figured that given my experience creating Radio Free Skaro there was no reason I couldn’t create similar podcasts on video and in audio form, and do so in such a way that they’re quick and easy to make.

But in order to do so, I had to work past a few mental hurdles of my own. Through much effort I’ve taught myself Final Cut and quite a few other high-end post production programs, and I didn’t really want to leave my comfort zone to create video podcasts. So for Fruitygamer 11, I actually recorded my video, Todd’s video and our audio sperately, then after converting the video into DV files used the multiclip tool in Final Cut Pro. That approach worked, but it chewed up hard drive space and meant doing the show once then doing it again, and slower.

So for episode 12 I decided to once and for all tame BoinxTV and make it do my bidding. BoinxTV turns your Mac into a powerful video switcher, but it has a really unfortunate interface that is at once confusing, overwhelming and obtuse. However it’s a better set up than Wirecast, Ustream Producer Pro or Procaster, with much more flexibility.

The biggest challenge was to get individual lower thirds underneath different camera shots.I managed to do so by assigning the same keyboard shortcut to the lower third and a camera angle in the Interview layer, which lets you go to Camera A, Camera B and a “two shot”. I also piped the Skype audio for Todd in through Soundflower and my own audio came from a cheap USB headset I picked up at Yodobashi Camera in Akihabara. Normally the iSight camera on my Macbook Pro doesn’t like to share its image across applications, but by using the excellent and free Manycam application I was able to get both my sot and Todd into the interview layer.

From there it was a simple matter of hitting “record”. I save the file using Apple Intermediate Codec and then throw it into Final Cut Pro, where I add pre built opening and closing credits and b-roll where appropriate. I master the file at its native resolution (640 X 480) then convert that file into an .mp4. I strip the audio to an AIFF file, convert it in iTunes to mp3 and upload and post the audio podcast via the Powerpress plugin on Fruitygamer.com. I upoad the video to Blip.TV, though I will in future expand the reach of the podcast by putting it on as many video sites as possible. As of right now it isn’t possible to put the video podcast on Youtube because the site has a strict 15 minute limit which I regularly break.

So that’s it! Hope that’s of some help to those of you out there looking to create your own video shows on the cheap, and don’t hesitate to ask me questions or add comments if you want more information.

This Monday I appeared on Hey! with Dane Golden. I met Dane in 2008 at Macworld, and then again when he came up to help with a “Lab with Leo Laporte” shoot. Dane went on to help Leo form TWIT, and worked as president of the TWIT Network until this year.

Dane’s now concentrating on HEY!, his new interview show. Usually it consists of both video and audio, but technical difficulties meant my wordsmithing will have to be listened to and not witnessed in the full audiovisual glory that is the Tokyo Hacker Space. Anyway, give it a listen and feel free to comment below or at Hey.com.

New Macbook Airs? OS X 10.7? John Sculley taps out? EA in Tokyo? Yes!

BTW, we planned to do this episode on video as well as audio, but technology conspired against us. Next week for (maybe) sure!

AKB48 is a super popular group in Japan of young girls who croon at otakus, who then swoon at the attention from real live females. The group’s creator decided that this formula is successful enough to take it in a bold new direction, and so he’s created OJS48, the world’s first supergroup composed of old retired Japanese detectives. Pure genius.