(Photo courtesy of Kelly Bracha from Xensin)
In the immortal words of AC/DC “I’m back”! After a little over eighteen months away from the Analog Catalog, to focus on Old Abbot’s website, productions, and the companies direction as a whole. Earlier this year I returned to radio after six years away from to the BEC-TV Radio Studios to do a weekly podcast called, High Voltage Radio. My co-hosts Brian Johnson and radio newcomer as well as Old Abbot’s Chief Operations Officer Jon Sadeh. The show airs live Friday’s from ten to Midnight. You can also listen find us on iTunes anytime. I’ll cover that more in-depth on that as well as where and what Old Abbot and I have been up to for over the last year in a future post, but right now I’ve got some major news! We’ve partnered once again with Focus Fire, The Hadou, and Keits. As well as musicians André Lipsey of R.E.A.L. Entertainment and Mike Wood of Thawed Out Productions to document the Ultimate Fighting Game Tournament 9: Guts Community Panels, which have now gone live on YouTube as well as Shoryuken. UFGT9 took place at the Crowne Plaza O'Hare Hotel in Chicago, Illinois over the Memorial Day weekend. This meant another trip to Chicago to film the Ultimate Fighting Game Tournament for the third year in a row, and the second year in a row for us filming the panels.
Joined once again by Producer Jon Sadeh, and on her third production with the company, Production Assistant Nora Dean Smith, we headed out early Friday morning to the windy city. After an eight hour drive we arrived at the Crown Plaza, and made our way to our room for the weekend. We dropped off our luggage and lighting equipment and made our way down to the ballroom where the tournament was being held. The new venue and single room layout for the event really opened up the options for me as a Cinematographer and eventually Editor. I wasted little time and began grabbing pickup shots of causal games and tournament pool bouts for the intro credits and outro credits for each of the panels which featured an amazing remix of the theme song of the nineteen-nineties Nickelodeon show Guts by André Lipsey for the intro credits as well as the track What You Need by Mike Wood for the outro credits.
Early Saturday morning and setup was well underway for the panels scheduled to start at ten with Tech Talk Live. The first panel was all about arcade sticks and the guys at Phreakmods who use it as a venue for creativity, expression, and a some profit. Testers Among Us featured two of the top Mortal Kombat players in the world as they discussed play testing and strategy guide development for the newest Never Realm Studios game Injustice: Gods Among Us. They also discussed using their long developed gaming knowledge and skills to help give back to the studio whose games have brought them respect. Home Grown Business: Players to Providers brought some of the biggest names behind the fighting game community together to talk about how their services, products, and businesses evolved from a love of the community, and where they hope to take the community moving forward. The E-Sports Connection: Hadoukens in the Spotlight was an open discussion about the progress of e-sports in the global gaming community, and its often difficult relationship with the fighting game community. Both content providers and consumers alike attempt to analyze the community’s place in the ever evolving world of competitive gaming. Lastly, An Evening with the Best: Mike Ross was about a simple gamer who didn’t own a console, but became the co-owner of CrossCounter, and (most recently) went on to become the proud fighting game community spokesman of IGN Pro Leauge’s defunct fighting game division; all of this done by Ross in the span of five short years. Once the panels wrapped production, and a dinner break was had I began the process of rendering the panels from their Canon source .mpg / h.264 files to Final Cut Pro’s native .mov / ProRes 422 files, I headed back downstairs with camera and tripod in hand to shoot additional footage for the intro and outro credits. Most of the footage was still mostly of casual and pool matches, but I also grabbed shots of the Fun and Games Corner which featured Super Balrog Ball and Divekick 21, as well as vendors like Phreakmods and Iron Galaxy Studios. With Midnight drawing near came the closing of the ballroom and the end of the second day of UFGT9.
Sunday was our last full day in Chicago as well as the finals for all the games in the tournament. The titles ran the gamut from obscure like Persona 4 Arena, new like Injustice: Gods Among Us, to veterans like Ultimate Marvel vs Capcom 3 the day was filled with action on both of the stages. The crowd was hyped to see some of the top players in the county do battle for a top spot at the ninth annual Ultimate Fighting Game Tournament. I spent the nearly the entire day filming either on one of the two the stages, or in the crowd toward the stages. Capturing the moments of elation and disappointment in the players, commentators, and audience's faces and body language. Filming and seeing first hand Alex Valle defeat Joshua ”Wolfkrone” Philpot in the Super Street Fighter IV Arcade Edition 2012 Grand Finals, Christopher “Chris G” Gonzalez take the top prize in three different games, and the hilarious madness that was the Mystery Game Tournament not only provided for some storied and stellar compositions, but also reminded me why I became a fan in the first place and why I still enjoy covering these events as much as I do. As UFGT9 was coming to a close we conducted some interviews with some of the best and well-known players in the world like Christopher “Chris G” Gonzalez, Mike Ross, Jay “Viscant” Snyder, and Alex Valle to help explain the fighting game community and games themselves a bit more at length for our long in the making documentary about the competitive fighting game scene 99 Seconds. Icing on the cake.
It was early afternoon on Wednesday when the files were all rendered and ready to begin editing. The only break in the rendering process was about ten hours on Monday during our return trip to Minneapolis. After doing the Community Panels for Ultimate Fighting Game Tournament 8: Infinity, Prime Time Wrestling, and other various long forum projects things came together quite well in the edit bay for nearly all the panels. However Tech Talk Live and the hard drive it was on caused some problems. The drive had an inherent defect, and the location the master files for the panel where rendered to were causing I/0 errors during the editing and rendering process. This forced me to copy all 1.67 terabytes of video footage to a new and clean drive which took a nearly a day of transfer time. When I opened the project file off of the fresh drive the problem still persisted. Now knowing that the original location (and as a result the files themselves) were corrupted left me no option but to re-render all the video files associated with Tech Talk Live off of another drive used as a backup for moments such as this. After re-rendering the native Canon source h.264 files into Apple’s ProRes 422 format once again, deleting the original files on the new hard drive. I then had to reconnect them to the fresh and clean renders I remade. After all of that, everything else fell into place, and the editing process came into a steady rhythm and continued smoothly despite the twelve plus hour render times on each of the five panels for the graphical packages and color correction.
The end result of all this work is nearly six hours of Old Abbot produced content that I’m very proud of because it shows our growth as a company over the last year and a half. We have not only grown in regards to our new equipment like the Canon 5D mk III, Kino-Flo Divas, Mac Book Pro, and beyond, but also creativly and functionally. I’ll get more into that in a future post, but for now it’s time to say good-bye. However, before I do I’ve got some shout-outs to all those who helped in the creation of these bad boys. Special Thanks to Jeff Bangsberg, Brandon "TuboWare" Brockman, Ben Chandler, Andres Velasco Coll, Victor "Spooky" Fontanez, Ben "Fishstix" Goldhaber, Frankie Gomez, Christopher “Chris G” Gonzalez, David "UltraDavid" Graham, Matthew "Gummowned" Gummo, Adam Heart, Mark "Markman" Julio, Clayton "PhreakMods” Knight, André Lipsey, Bill "Tom Brady" Menoutis, Punnha Nom, Stone Nguyen, Lucas Olstad, Mike Ross, Jon Sadeh, Nora Dean Smith, Jay “Viscant” Snyder, Richard Thiher, Isaac "Delriach" Torres, Alex Valle, John "Rabid Duckie" Wade, Carl "Perfect Legend" White, Mike Wood, and to our business partners Focus Fire, The Hadou, Keits, R.E.A.L. Entertainment, Thawed Out Productions, and of course the Ultimate Fighting Game Tournament. Same URL, some other time, stay tuned.
Ad Captandum Vulgus
