This has been one intensely busy week. Parts have felt kinda like juggling chainsaws, other parts have felt like being juggled by chainsaws. I guess.. Or you can insert a better metaphor if you have one… I must be tired…
For my disclosure on this or any of my posts or pages… please visit my Disclosure page.
Naturally, Aaron and I have been in a mad scramble this past week to get everything ready for our announcement of the Adventure Hook Podcast today, which all things considered, we did..!
Aaron got the new webpage for the podcast up and it’ll serve as the RSS feed for that podcast (while this site will be the Blackspire site). And we had a lot of resources to prepare.
I managed to edit together the new trailer for the general show. I used Movie Maker to do it, and for certain it will be the last project I edit using that software.
As I also had to edit the teaser that we’ll feature on Adventure Hook’s Patreon page. Now… while Movie Maker did its job when I needed to learn a program from scratch when making my Magick 101 videos, now the program both lacks versatility and is just too buggy to do what I needed it too.
Fortunately, after some searching (and tutorial binging) I settled on editing with Lightworks, and I couldn’t have been happier with its tool set. While I’d actually written a whole script and Aaron and I recorded a whole back and forth which was to follow after this part of the video, Aaron actually wanted to re-record his section, so I just mocked up the first part for today.
The rest of the script follows after on the Patreon page anyway.
Aaron and I have been hard at work tweaking those backer levels, and now have a pretty solid (and funny) list that should be quite enticing for potential listeners. We’ve even gone ahead and put our pilot episode Rats in the Cellar up on PAtreon a week early, so any new backers can listen to the show right now. We even came up with an “early bird” $1 special (limit 10 backers) promo to get that initial user spike.
We also took turns mocking up the new d20 lists that we use to set the premise of the next recorded show. I also did the table logos, which I think work…
I thought might were prettier…
But Aaron pointed out in the age of smart phones, our lists need to be readable on handheld devices, which admittedly makes complete sense. And if you watched the trailer above you’ll see where I used my old “super-pan” technique in Movie Maker to scan over the whole image.
So we’ve got these finals up on the Adventure Hook Facebook page for people to make their own suggestions on what should fill the open slots. Click yourself and make your suggestion in Facebook.
Adventure Hook: d20 Table (click to vote)
Adventure Hook: Crit Fail Table (click to vote)
And Aaron’s doing the social media thing today to start drumming up initial interest. We’ve already got some folks lined up to get the word out, so by the official launch next week we should have a sense of what about our promotional launch worked.
Of course, all the duties I’ve had to split with Aaron, I also have to replicate 100% on my own on the Blackspire side of things. I ended up writing and recording my own script for a Patreon landing video, and stringing it together with a clip from Season 1 Episode 2 (plus some music) to make about six minutes worth of audio I now need to make a video out of.
But aside from the landing video, Blackspire’s Patreon site is up and launched as well, including some decent tier incentives that I’m hoping many are enticed by…
And fortunately, now that I feel like I’ve digested enough of Lightworks making the Adventure Hook teaser that doing the same with this Blackspire Patreon video will be far less daunting than I’d anticipated. It’s still going to be plenty of work, but I think I can handle it. Ideally the sooner the better. I don’t hate the audio clip though… and I’m loving the new mic.
Speaking of, the B.R.U.W. Crew got together this week for some non-podcast gaming (where I’m just a PC) though, I did get almost everyone to re-record their character intros for the show, and man they sound great. Hopefully I can launch the show on the 21st with a new sweet intro and maybe even an Outro that I didn’t do the voice for…
Also, this week the episode of Laughfinder where Brian Posehn was the guest came out this week and I think it was the guys’ best yet. They knew they only had an hour with said nerd royalty so everyone brought their “A Game” and turned out a really tight episode.
Even though every moment counted, Jim still managed to drop a quick plug for Blackspire Studios during the show, which I definitely appreciated. And he had a blast, which is the most important thing, of course!
I had a blast playing with this crew. So fun. And Arlo the dog rules! https://t.co/k9vvdq9GRI
— Brian Posehn (@thebrianposehn) April 9, 2018
This week I’ve also tried my best to reorganize this blog to accommodate my new podcast endeavors, and hopefully I’ve made enough changes that its generally serviceable to get around the site and find what you’re looking for. I’ve asked for some expert advice on that front as well, so hopefully my foibles will be laid bare (and corrected) soon enough.
I’ve hosted the videos I made on my YouTube channel, and hopefully will start to get some cross-over with the subscribers to my Magick lectures interested in these podcasts. I actually just hit 200 subscribers and 4000+ views (50+ Likes) on my first video, so things continue to clip along slowly but surely!
This are growing and building as they’ve been for years now, and in many ways leading to this big turn in the road for a good while now… Even our poor sick cat Grimmy is in decent spirits, though the vet’s latest home visit prognostication wasn’t the best news, he’s already done better than her initial estimates, so there’s that. She’s great, and for having no car during the day, and an agoraphobic cat, a vet that makes house calls in a vehicle with full facilities is invaluable.
And it’s been over two weeks without a cigarette, and with the aid of the vape (which I use less and less of each day) I barely miss them… even after meals now..!
As, I said in the Rats in the Cellar clip… now you know that something’s on!
Sunday 5/7/18-
Sun: Taurus–
Moon: Aquarius (50% Waning)
If you’d like to start from the “beginning” of all this… you can read from my first blog post.
For my disclosure on this or any of my posts or pages… please visit my Disclosure page.