Thanks ladies and gentlemen. We're very close to half-way, which now turns out to be all we need.

The company PBL is going to match the donations, and we're at $340 right now. The goal has shifted to $420. Why $420 ? Because British Airways had a sale, and I took advantage of it.

That means we only have $80 to go.

On the perk side, we'll be documenting our setup, and if any of you wish, I'll show everybody exactly what I do to the sound too.

Thanks your help ladies and gentlemen. I'll do me best to give you a good show as part of the GXL team.

I record, edit and mix sound for animation, games, tv and film. The formal descriptions are field recordist, dialogue editor, sound editor, sound designer and re-recording mixer. Thus, most of my time is spent in post production. A good overview over what all this stuff is I do can be found at http://filmsound.org/ .

I handle most of these duties with programs such as Reaper and Protools. A session for a short film can look like this(very large shot of the session for the SFM short Gun Sided Justice. Extv's TF2 Top10 Plays of the Month has roughly half the tracks of such a film.

For example, the TF2 Top10 usually have several music pieces, edited together, quite a few extra sound effects to give the action focus, a recording of the games sound output and the voice over. Everything is processed if necessary, with equalizers, compressors, reverbs, denoisers and delays. The voice over is edited, sometimes more, sometimes less. Unnecessary breaths are removed, delayed responses are moved, bits and pieces from different takes are mixed if that will produce the best result. Everything is carefully balanced. Sometimes the music needs to be louder, often the voice over requires the most focus so everything has to stand back behind it.

For Gun Sided Justice, footsteps, props, movements with clothing, weapons and many other things were recorded, edited and later mixed. Every recorded line of dialogue is edited to remove any distracting noise and mixed with the use of volume, equalizers, compressors, deessers, denoisers and reverbs.

That's a bit of what I do. Not sure if that's terminally boring to anyone but me :) .

Thanks for the support folks. Wow. This is coming together well.

The first donations have come in, and we stand at $150, so we're well on our way. This is the first time I've ever asked anyone for money for a community effort, so my surprise is mixed with a little guilt at how much effort everyone is putting in to make it all happen. Thank you.

To show off our serious effort for this project, I'll detail some of the preparations we're making.

Dashner is handling the producer role, i.e. making stuff happen. When he told me about his plans we started drawing up what we'd like to do to impress the GXL event planners and possible sponsors

The signal flow plan, as it stands today is this :

http://stash.reaper.fm/21721/GXL-Production-Diagram-Signal-Flow-v06.png

Dashner can provide some background information on the ATEM switch(or whatever upgrade to it if possible). You can see a little of what Dashner did with OBS in Tagg's Behind The Scenes VLOG of the i52 event.

I'll be mixing the show on a Mackie DL1608 mixer, which I'm actively training on and will be subjecting to further tests in a local shop to see if all our signals go in and out in a clean fashion.

If you saw what was done at i46, which Comedian and me put together on the caster-audio side, the Mackie is basically 16 inputs with compressor, EQ and gates for every input, as well as similar processing available for the eight outputs it has.

If any of you have questions about the setup, ask away. I'm always happy to share.

Thanks.

The music is the focus here a lot of the time, and the whole mix is geared towards being played loud, sort of like a club track. The dialogue is the baseline. If you can listen to the interviews comfortably, you're on the right listening volume.

It's not neighbour-friendly, and was never meant to be :) .

Judging by the posts, everyone seems to happy with the sound mix too. Thanks to Cube and Bones for letting me be part of this project.

Wish I could be at i52. WIll try to at least help out anyone there with sound stuff, and watch lots of casts.

A sidenote on the sound.

Neither Huhy or Luc ever place any sound effects, which makes me responsible for any of the effects you either like or dislike. In the Top10 of Teamfortress.tv, I edit the VO(sparingly) and place effects, then mix the whole show. In the Extv Top10 I also pick and edit the music, which often works out fine but sometimes is just ok(IMHO). It's a matter of how much time I can invest in finding material and clearing it with the artist.

The soundscape of Teamfortress works great ingame. It does not work for anything else however. Shows like these require prioritization of the VO most of the time and then there's the music and the effects that play their part when they're needed.

In this way, the music sometimes gets shunned to the back, and with the gamesound which runs almost all the time, it is most often very quiet because it is a flat wall of noise with almost no highlights of value for a presentation that requires them. That's the reason the gamesound is sometimes mixed at varying levels and the reason I often resort to complementary effects, to highlight specific actions.

If this wasn't done you'd just hear a wall of noise, often unrelated to the onscreen action you're trying to follow. This is ok ingame, because the player needs to know about things going on around them, but it's a negative for focused presentations like these.

A small example of how the music goes up and down in these shows can be listened to here : https://soundcloud.com/airon-extv/top10-2012-04-b-music
It's one the better music edits and mixes, and stems from the April 2012 Extv Top10. The track has been turned up a bit as it would be a little low in volume for most folks in its original state.

We wish and hope we would be attending, but none of us will be able to.

That job falls to the folks who are actually there. From what I know at least three players from last years American teams will attend. B4nny, Cyzer and Shade. Does someone know whether Ruwin is going or not?

Vanilla TV will be broadcasting again. I hope they have a couple of cameras there to catch some interviews, and manage to share those videos promptly. All it took for Salamancer and Extine was a small Flip recorder and the Macbook I had(inbuilt camera and decent mic). And of course there's the Kritzkast folks, who are always a bag of fun with interviews and a great mood in general.

Perhaps we can collect all the footage from the event and compile it in to a little film in a similar fashion. I'd certainly be interested in that, and will try to follow the action on the weekend.

Don't I wish we could have shot more.

It is easier said than done, and it's likey we'd do a much better job on our second try. What you have here is literally the best we could do at the time.

The money from the fundraiser was not spent on anything concerning the documentary, apart from one thing. The accomodations for the four Extv guys, which were dorm rooms during the summer break actually. We got press tickets for the i46 because of our intentions to film the documentary and do shoutcasting(Jeff and Eric only obviously).

If someone interested, here's what we used:
1 x $300 Sony camera to film everything. Qun shot some more footage which we used, which was a nice surprise, but since we only had one sound recording rig, we effectively had one crew.

A Sound Devices 722 sound recorder, a shotgun mic on a boom pole and a handheld vocal mic. This was actually the only professional-grade equipment we had I might add. And we only had that because it was my own equipment that I use for my work.

We shot stuff for three days, as often and as long as we could, limited primarily by availability of the people we interviewed and naturally our own experience in shooting events and interviews. Many of the players arrived before we did. We would have loved to have them shoot stuff of their trip and how things are going, but such is life in the no budget lane.

We didn't shoot 300 hours of material(like the Indie Game film), have professional gear and multiple crews who operated with no time limits(Valve) or were highly experienced film makers. We winged it quite well considering our level of experience and free time to edit and produce it(little to none). I edit, design and mix sound for a living, but just like Luc, Jeff, Eric and anyone else part of this production, there are jobs and lives taking up our time in which film making is a hobby, not a full time job.

That said, we would do things a little differently now. More planning, hopefully with more (any)money, so players could perhaps film themselves during their trip for example. Everyone with a camera, a professional preamp and two mics in hand so we can shoot multiple angles, interview more people and document the general excitement around the event.

But we only had one camera and one sound rig, and were basically making it up as we went along with a general idea of what we wanted to achieve. And based on those goals we did ok, and we'll get much better next time.

Yeah, you're right, it's not a great film. It's a short film about some of the things that went on at the i46 tournament, and it focused mainly on the American TF2 players coming over for the first time, and what European players thought about it. This even includes the couple after the Grand Finals.

Btw, here's a little fun from the Kritzkast room at the i46. I recorded two people performing "Hey Soul Sister" in the middle of everyone buggering about. I wish we could have used it in the documentary, but I guess the record label or artist that wrote the song would have slammed us or something.

http://soundcloud.com/airon-extv/hey-soul-sister-i46

And keep the feedback coming, keeping in mind the scope of this film. Ideas are most welcome, since I hope it'll at least inspire people to shoot their own little stories.

Could you be using VLC 2.07 by any chance ? I've had a slight problem with that too.

The Media Player Classic Home Cinema has no such problems. All on Windows 7x64 here.

Thanks for the feedback folks, for both the positive and negative. You grow with both.

As Luc already said, we're not done yet. More interviews to come.

Maybe a little Making Of, who knows. Some folks are probably wondering how to make their own, and this being our first documentary, it's worth sharing the lessons we've learned.

Interested ?

Glad you guys like it. I certainly enjoyed working on the soundtrack for Huhys video, and it's great to have a different style and goal in such a video. Variety is spice.