The Tenth BETA

In today's entry, the title's meaning is quite simple to figure out:

• "Tenth" would refer to the tenth blog on this New Year's resolution. Ten for ten! Yay!
• "BETA" refers to the second revived project I said I'd talk about today, Shock Squad BETA.

And yes, the "the" doesn't really refer to anything. Herp.





Current Movie:
The Karate Kid [1984]
Such a good movie. Enough said.



Current Music:

Journey - "Don't Stop Believin'"
Escape
When someone starts belting this song out, I can't help but join along.
Screw my untrained vocal chords; I'll sing about that "small town / girl living in a lonely world" and that "city boy / born and raised in south Detroit" any day*!

(* = Unless I'm sad. No Journey song should be sung when you're sad.)


Hiroyuki Nakayama - "Memory of the Wind / Legend of the Eternal Wind"
Final Fantasy III Original Soundtrack
The opening cinematic music for Final Fantasy III really caught my ears when I heard it.
Blissful.



"Wherever we want to go, we'll go. That's what a ship is, you know. It's not just a keel and a hull and a deck and sails - that's what a ship needs. But what a ship is - what the Black Pearl REALLY is - is freedom."
       - Captain Jack Sparrow
       (Pirates of the Caribbean: The Curse of the Black Pearl)

Quite an interesting quote by an equally-interesting pirate. Despite all his piracy and... let's call it eccentricity... Sparrow is one of those outlaw-styled antiheroes who knows what they're doing.

Now, as Sparrow (sorry; "Captain" Sparrow) refers to his ship, the Black Pearl, as a means to freedom, so too will I proclaim something as a vehicle to freedom.
Right now, the only escape I'd say I have would be my writing, but it's done a heck of a job thus far. I don't think it'll let me down just yet.

Okay, I'm wrong. There IS a second thing I have at the moment that can act as a vehicle to freedom - my car.





Now, on to the two important things this blog will cover. First things first, though - I have to cover the second project. Those of you expecting a "10th Blog Speech" will have to wait.



Shock Squad BETA

Back in early 2006 (my Junior year in high school) I was heavily interested in the media form known as "machinima."
To those who don't know (or are just too lazy to look it up on Google), machinima is  "the use of real-time graphics-rendering engines to generate computer animation" (retrieved from Wikipedia on 10 Jan 2011).
Usually, said graphics engines are usually video game ones (such as Halo: Combat Evolved, Quake, and The Sims), and the game itself is used to act out scenes for whatever purpose.

One of the biggest hits at that time (and one of my big inspirations) was Rooster Teeth's famous series Red vs. Blue: The Blood Gulch Chronicles, a Halo comedy series that told the story of two squads of combat-inept soldiers and the madness they experienced during their "conflict" with each other.

I wanted to create my own machinima series, and so I began writing out the script to a series that would come to be known as Shock Squad BETA. Originally, it was going to be a Halo 2 machinima that showed the tale of "the worst special forces team in history" and their hilarious combat operations while working with another, better special forces team.
(Looking back, I think I found it to be quite similar to Red vs. Blue, but to be honest, a LOT of Halo-based machinima at the time felt like a Red vs. Blue clone anyway...)

As time progressed, however, I came to realize that the original concept was too slapstick and mundane to grab the focus of the audience - the characters felt one-dimensional and fresh off the stock character shelves, and the story line I contrived threw suspension of disbelief out the window.

So, a bit after my 19th birthday, I scrapped the original concepts and plot and began anew. At the time, I was experimenting with more dramatic elements of writing and decided to weave in some of that into BETA.
"The worst special forces team in history" became a squad in a special forces unit that would end up becoming a group of unsung heroes in the Halo timeline.
"Hilarious combat operations" transformed into a campaign so twisted and controversial (story-wise) that the audience would be biting their nails with each passing minute.
The one-dimensional characters were replaced with a cast that felt more... human. They weren't just any ordinary "antihero" or "damsel in distress" or "straight man and foil comedy duo" that would say completely cheesy lines and be forgotten afterward. They became people that the viewers would care for - be cheered for when something good happened, and become empathized when the opposite occurred.

And that's where I am currently - the eight main characters of BETA, a story that would grab the audience, and no urge to continue nurturing them.
Granted, to even begin filming any of this would be costly* and time-consuming, but I've realized that I'm nowhere close to the production stage.
It's a good thing, too - in my opinion, the characters are the most important part of the story. I'd rather they get fully fleshed out before I even begin filming.

All I know is I'm definitely going to have a lot of fun going over the stuff I have again. I always dreamed of BETA being a sort-of magnum opus, and... well, that kind of importance always made it interesting for me.

(* = I'm not kidding. If I were to start filming right now, I'd need three to four XBox 360s, multiple controllers and copies of Halo 3, three to four televisions or monitors, a video capture card, video editing software, and the willpower of everyone involved with the project. Yipes.)





And now, the celebratory part of the blog... because, y'know... this is the tenth blog!

YAY! (Yes, that's it. What, you expected some crazy Java applet that threw confetti all across your screen?)

I'd like to thank people, but it's only been ten days. That, and nobody's really been on this site commenting or whatever...
...maybe that means I have to advertise some more.





Now, if you'll excuse me, I have some writing to do before work tonight! I will see everyone later!