The Nintendo Boy Project

As I sit at a booth in my dining hall finishing my breakfast, I have much on my mind that I want you to know. I don't know if I'll get everything down I want to say without having this blog post not too long, but I'll give it my best shot... here we go! Today, right now... summer 2010, is a great time to be a fan of The Nintendo Boy Project! The most amazing thing that could ever happen to us, happened: we upgraded. The news I have to tell you is so exciting, that I'm constantly dancing like Conan O'Brien on a day-to-day basis... it's the best! (; If you're on a time crunch and can't read this rather lengthy entry, I suggest at least skipping to end where everything is capitalized... that will give you the gist!

So, what did we upgrade, specifically? Well, I'm actually not gonna tell you, because it will ruin the MAGIC! Hah, just kidding, I'll tell you. Or, actually, I've already told you. But I'll say it again for this entry... MY BRAND NEW MACBOOK PRO! I'm typing on it right now, actually, and it's a dream come true. Guys, Apple computers really as awesome as we all think they are. The interface, the features, everything. I could go on with a lengthy scroll on what I like about my Pro, but maybe another time! Although I must mention the incredible power it carries, the HD graphics, the beauty, the operating system, the outstanding battery life (8-9 hours... unbelievable, I know), and just... ahhh, I am so lucky to have this, and I owe a huge HUGE THANK YOU to my parents who got this for my birthday. A bunch of people asked me about the specifications of my MacBook Pro (okay, just two... thanks Adam & Brett! teehee), and I promise I shall in an upcoming entry, I just don't want to get too distracted as I write this post. But anyway, let's talk about my new MacBook Pro... after all, it is the title of this blog post! (;

Don't mistake me for bragging, that's not what I want to get across here, believe me. If I just happen to emphasis how much I LOVE LOVE LOVE my new laptop and what it is capable of, it's because I want you to truly understand what it means to me and how it's upgraded our project here. Sip on some orange juice (or another drink of your choice), kick back, and relax as I serenade you with even more words about how excited I am.

Let me start off with something in our FAQ, that I will end up having to update soon. It's about our editing process, pasted below. The question was: What editing software do you use? Your editing is fantastic!

• My answer was this: Why thank you, imaginary person! I edit using the Sony Vegas Movie Studio Platinum 9.0, although it's not as great as it sounds. Okay wait, I take that back. It's not great... for my computer. You see, the software is specifically for AVCHD files, which is the format, which is the format my camera shoots in, which is great and all, but my little laptop isn't powerful enough to playback the AVCHD clips in real time, so I can't watch it which basically means it's impossible to edit.

Pretty crazy huh? I then followed up the topic with one another question: Wait... so if it's impossible to edit, how do you do it? 

• My answer was this: Good question, sir/ma'am. As I stated in the question above, with the simple laptop I have as of now, it is impossible to playback the AVCHD files to edit. So what I have to do is watch the beautiful HD clips playback on the actual camera, write down the ties where I need to trim and clean up, and manually do it on the software without being to watch my edits in real time. Once I'm satisfied with the editing project I basically just completed blind, I then render the movie (which takes hours) and cross my fingers hoping that I got everything right so that I don't have to go back to square one... so in reality, it's not impossible, but it's certainly a tedious process.

Now that you understand how pretty much every video from Hiatus (June 5th, 2009) up until now has been to produce... wow... talk about giving me a pat on the back, huh? ... and not to continue polishing my own trophy, but I certainly think I did pretty well with the editing considering it was BLIND EDITING (I just now made up that phrase for my situation). But alas, I'm here to tell you that that era, is over. That's right, I think you've figured it out by now. Let me confirm your speculation with some numbers... everyone loves stats, right?

On my brand new Macbook Pro with Final Cut Express HD pre-installed, I was able to create a week's worth of editing in just 20 minutes. 20 MINUTES. In my book, 20 minutes > 1 week, any day. But I must mention that learning FCE was pretty rough to start out with, but it helped that I'm not new when it comes to editing & editing interfaces, as well as watching all the tutorials on the Apple site as well as some on YouTube. Alright, so the next paragraph (and hopefully last, I realize this is becoming lengthy) must utilize caps to show my excitement...

OH MY GOSH. WHEN I CONNECTED MY CAMERA TO THE PRO AND WAS ABLE TO SELECT, IMPORT, AND PLAYBACK MY AVCHD CLIPS IN BEAUTIFUL HD REAL TIME IN THE FINAL CUT EXPRESS EDITOR, I SCREAMED AND CRIED OF JOY. I LITERALLY CRIED OF HAPPINESS. I AM SO EXCITED, BECAUSE NOW MAKING VIDEOS WILL BE SO MUCH EASIER AND THEREFORE, EVEN MORE FUN TO DO. THIS IS A DREAM COME TRUE, NOW THAT I HAVE A POWERFUL MACHINE TO PRODUCE VIDEOS AND COMPLEMENT THE AMAZING HIGH DEFINITION CAMERA I HAVE! THIS IS LITERALLY IS THE BEST THING TO HAPPEN TO THE NINTENDO BOY PROJECT EVER. AHHHHHH. YOU HAVE NO IDEA HOW HAPPY AND EXCITED I AM. WELL, ACTUALLY, YOU PROBABLY DO, SINCE YOU'VE IMAGINED ME SCREAMING THIS WHOLE THING. WHICH I AM, IN MY HEAD. WOOHOO, I'M SO HAPPY!!! :]]]]]]]]]]]

Before you go, let me just say that the all-caps paragraph you just read... it doesn't even scratch the surface of what I'm feeling right now. The Nintendo Boy Project and I... we're on cloud nine. (:

P.S. Stay tuned for the long-delayed video "Trumpet Lessons," tomorrow, Wednesday, July 14th! A blog post will be posted with the respective bloopers at the end of the month. Hope you enjoy it!!

Good News Everyone! (Hmm, that's getting quite repetitive by now, with the blog title and everything... or is it when it's said 3 times? Anywho...) Seven years ago, my favorite cartoon ever was canceled by Fox, but on June 24th, 2010, it was brought back from the grave and began airing a new season on Comedy Central... FUTURAMA! But anyway, this post isn't about Futurama, I just awanted to tell you guys about this in case you have been living under a rock! And yes, this little personal blurb of info you just read was to justify the animated image, IN CASE you haven't caught on yet! (;

ANYWAY, this post is to give you an update from the last entry about the hiatus we've been forced to take. Good News Everyone! (OH, there goes the repetition...) The hiatus is coming to an end, but the exact date is yet to be known because it is basically whenever MY BRAND NEW MACBOOK PRO comes in the mail!!! That's right, you read that correctly, a MacBook Pro!!! My birthday is tomorrow and this is my present... pretty fantastic, don'y you think? (: It has all the bells and whistles, custom configured at the Apple Online Store, including FINAL CUT EXPRESS preinstalled! If you don't know what that is, it's basically a very VERY nice movie studio software exclusively made by Apple, and has quite a price tag. But in these cases, you get what you pay for, so I am quite excited with all the amazing new features I'll be able to take advantage of! The 15" Macbook Pro I am receiving (with a student discount I might add!) is of the newer models, that came out in April earlier this year, and has the new Intel chip and HD graphics, and ahhhh I COULD GO ON, and I WILL. Actually, just kidding. I won't do that, because you want to keep reading this and be done with it, so let me just move on. One quick thing though: MACBOOK PRO! Okay, I got it out of my system!

That whole paragraph being said, there are some sadder news, if you also didn't figure this out.

My old HP Pavilion laptop... Compy, Rest In Peace.

It is back in my arms now, and after a long horrendous month of being laptop-less (see the date on the last blog post), we have figured out that the motherboard is fried, and it's too costly slash not worth it to fix. Apparently it did turn one once in the hands of one of the people with the task of fixing it who were looking at, so I will continue to be optimistic and hopes that maybe I can get it working again...

But for now, I must succumb to buying a USB enclosure, remove the old hard drive and spew out all my goodies from the HP onto my new Apple computer! I am quite excited to get things moving again, as I have SIX, COUNT 'EM, SIX NEW VIDEOS PLANNED, including a special message video (more on that coming soon) as well as a special video about my HP. A video that was completed by the end of May, Trumpet Lessons, will finally see the light of day once I salvage the edited files, render, and complete the publishing process on my new computer! GET EXCITED! See you guys soon!!!

Phew. It's been a while hasn't it? Well for me at least. I realize that no one really notices whether or not I post a new entry for a video, save for a few people. ;) Okay, so that's just me wanting attention. But isn't that what the point of having a blog is? Actually I love just having an archive of all my posts to read. I always go back and read old ones, and it's like... wow... why did I say that, or wow I'm cool, haha. BUT anyway, let's get straight down to business. I apologize for the mini-hiatus in bloggery, but the last month and half was home to all of busy events, including me concluding my freshman year of college! I'm actually finishing up the"2 week break" between Spring & Summer semester, so let me take this time to take a large gasp of air (I know that's a weird saying, but I just love this image haha)!

Alright... so, let's talk Awkward Moments. We all have 'em. What better way to connect with everyone than a video of awkward moments? My personal favorite was the one where you run into someone, try to get out of their way yet the person tries to get out of their way in the same direction you did, and- ahhh... so AWKWARD. Haha, I love it. I was lucky to be able to pull this off with a great collaboration lined up with the people on my dorm floor, so you may recognize a few from Floor Interviews. It starred myself, Alex Goran, Ashley Corrao, Branden Riggins, Danielle Ballew, Femi Ogun, and Lauren Dickey, and was filmed by me, Danielle, and Femi, with the exception of the awkward elevator scene, which is filmed by Tyler Price (who just randomly showed up to help... thank you so much man!) It was a lot of fun, and took a lot of time to film, as evidenced by our special video of outtakes exclusively on our facebook page. So... yeah. Eh. Wow, it's been a while since Awkward Moments, actually. I really shouldn't wait this long to write up an entry. ... and yes, as you can tell, I am and always completely winging it. :]

Anyway, here's what I'll do, if you have any questions about Awkward Moments, leave them in the comments, and I will answer you! (considering I have a small fan base on the site, I don't really expect much response... but hey, surprise me!) I apologize for the lacking entry, again, but I really am just coming up on empty on this subject... now THIS is awkward!

Click here to watch it in our video theater! | Click here to watch it in HD on YouTube!

Click here to watch our "Awkward Moments" Outtakes exclusively on our facebook fan page!

Spring Break can be very productive. But actually, they usually end up not being productive at all. You're at school, the Friday afternoon before Spring Break, thinking... "alright! I have a whole week to do that essay and catch up and everything... everything's gonna be just fine!" Fast forward to Sunday night before returning to school... "crap." Here at Nintendo Boy, we want the exact opposite of that to happen. So instead of having all this free time with everything to do, we were PREPARED (like Daffy Duck and his handkerchief) AND PLANNED SOMETHING!

For us, our Spring Breaks were nothing like how I described seconds ago. My Spring Break was about the second week of March, which allowed me to pick up Plastic Beach by Gorillaz at home (yay for an amazing album) as well as get together with the original Nintendo Boy crew (it's been sooo long), as well as meeting up with old high school friends to make The Great Bowl-Off video. It has almost 300+ views and it hasn't even been a month since it's uploaded, so I call that a win (remember the fact that we're not popular at all)! For the high school Spring Break, I was able to meet up with some more fantastic new people I met from Ubersuperbular... they were hilarious and we hope to do another collaboration in the near future! As the high school break nears the end of this week, Andrew Shain makes time out of his busy schedule of getting his driver's license to come visit me at Kennesaw! Okay, well, he didn't have to go that far out of the way... his cousin is the head IT guy at Kennesaw Hall... small world, huh? But seriously, it was so much fun, and I was lucky that 2 out of my 3 classes were canceled for that day so it was more time for our shenanigans!

After binging at the dining hall, and him making a mess in my room and writing all over the walls (you need to pay those fees, you hear me Andrew?!), we finally came up with an idea for a new video where I'm a total jerk to him as he tries to visit me and makes a home movie out of it... ohhh, good times. But really though, Andrew actually is that annoying in real life. *WINK + SMILE + THUMBS UP*

Click here to watch it in our video theater! | Click here to watch it in HD on YouTube!

Oh, and by the way... we had so much footage for this video! Probably at least like 18 minutes, ahaha! Sadly, we can not do that (well we could, but who would watch an 18-minute video?), so it is quite possible that a director's cut slash deleted scenes video will be released to our facebook fans! Sigh, if only you knew how much I had to cut. So many one-liners will never be heard.... and by "never be heard," I mean "recycle for use" in the next video, HA! Thanks for reading!! (;

After I kept uploading a test version of our new video to YouTube, I literally looked like Spongebob in that episode where he had to work the scary night shift! Why's that you ask? Oh... you didn't ask? Well, this is awkward. Okay well I'll tell you anyway! It's because SO much editing went into this latest project that I was twitching, panting, and pretty much freaking out until I finally got everything perfect! I think I've talked about before how my computer isn't powerful enough to handle playback of the AVCHD files I film with, so that makes it really hard to edit. So basically I have to watch it on the camera, write down the times of where I need to cut, clean up, etc, and then do it on the software, AND THEN upload it to YouTube as a private clip so I can watch it and see if that will work. Pretty time consuming if you ask me... but hey, it's worth it.

So this new video is a special one. Because it is the first video of this year (FINALLY!) that brings us the long-awaited return of the Nintendo Boy crew to the theaters!!! Ahh it's been so long. I've had to fill the gaps by coming out with videos that feature special guests, and they've definitely proven to be a successful video series! But ohhh, there is nothing like our original sketchy videos that I started with Josh and Andrew (and Ellie here and there!), and I'm excited to say that I have finally seen their beautiful faces again over spring break! While it was great hanging out again, we were all excited to make the next Nintendo Boy video! Not only is this occassion special because you see some familiar faces, but you see some other famous faces as well! Well, okay, none of us are really all that famous, but I can dream right?! This new video features guest stars from the YouTube channel, Ubersuperbular Productions! I approached Danielle of the video group and had an idea for a collaboration. You see, dear reader, our own Andrew Shain is a part of this production as well. I have no idea how or when that happened, but it was probably when slash because Josh and I are in college, haha. Either way, I had the idea that the Nintendo Boy group and the Ubersuperbular group should go head-to-head somehow and fight for Andrew's love- err, I mean... rights to use him in videos! So, that's what we did! And like any good ol' fashioned arguement about wanting someone in a video, you settle it with a bowl-off!

Woohooooo, exciting stuff! As I mentioned earlier, there is a lot of hard core editing that went on in this video because the footage we had from the bowling alley was so raw... and after many trial-and-errors, I finally was able to pump out a great new video! Again, it features the original Nintendo Boy cast, a really awesome collaboration, and all of us bowling terribly... what else could you ask for?! Nothing. (:

Click here to watch it in our video theater! | Click here to watch it in HD on YouTube!

Oh, and in case you wondering, this video will not be uploaded on facebook due to personal reasons... also, I've finally pretty much decided that it's not worth having the views of my videos spread out because of Facebook (as opposed to having all views on one video link) when not that many people like/comment on it (so I can see feedback since they don't show you the views)... plus, the HD setting on Facebook isn't up to par with YouTube (aka it's awful). So yeah. I will no longer upload Nintendo Boy videos to Facebook... sorry for the inconvenience (although special clips like bloopers I might still consider uploading...)! I will, in return, provide more exclusive stuff (yet to be announced!) on our fan page, so make you are a fan of us!! Thank you for reading this great blog post and PSA... have a wonderful day!

EDIT - April 18th, 2010: So... I'm not gonna go into details just yet why I chose to do this, BUT, this video is now on facebook for your viewing pleasure!

 Click here to watch it on Facebook in case you would rather "like" it than comment on it... haha!