For more on Dr. Pettit and the Earth from space, visit http://dotearth.blogs.nytimes.com

Episode 1 takes place in Black Rock City, Nevada. Spaceship Excellent crash landed into the desert on planet Earth. Space travelers crawled free from the debri in their new human suits. They eagerly sought the leader of this solar system. Instead, the found a city full of dust and glow sticks, full of impossible inventions. Apprehensions clouded their consciousness as they anticipated their first interactions with the inhabitants of this strange world. Would the humans discover their alien origins? Would the humans reject their offerings and wage war on their galaxy? Find out in the first episode of Spaceship Excellent!

ABOUT SPACESHIP EXCELLENT
The musical Spacemen are on a mission to explore the galaxy of the United States in search of the leader of the solar system. They travel in a spaceship bus, a mobile laboratory used for inspecting foreign towns and inhabitants. The viewpoints they collect become raw material for their live shows, where their experience becomes one with their audience. The mission will culminate in the nations capital on Election Day, when the new leader will be named.

This is a tour of cosmic proportions that is soon to become the worlds first ever Interactive Rockumentary. Each venue and person they meet on the way will set the stage for this cultural phenomenon, and they want you to be a part of it. ALL ABOARD.

http://spaceshipexcellent.com

http://moongorillapainting.com

ABSTRACT

Jeff “Yak” Minter has been developing video games from the Sinclair Spectrum era on up through the present day. If you were alive in the 8-bit years, you’ve probably played one of his games: Llamatron, Attack of the Mutant Camels, Gridrunner and Idris Alpha were among the better-known ones. If you were one of the 30 people to buy an Atari Jaguar, you probably bought his “Tempest 2000″ and “Defender 2000″ cartridges. And if you own an Xbox 360, you’ve also seen his work: the builtin music visualizer is his creation. His current project is an XBox Live Arcade game temporarily titled “Space Giraffe”, which is an attempt to bring the classic Atari game Tempest…

HALO: The Machinima Picture (created 11-2006)

Since I discovered the Xbox game ‘HALO’ back in 2002, I have wanted to put this fabulous first-person sci-fi action romp on video for my friends and family to watch and enjoy as a two-hour cinematic experience. Back then I would have plugged the Xbox into my VCR’s and tossed in a blank tape and used the pause button to edit in real time, taping the cinema scenes back to back. Analog hell. Crude as it would have been, I did this very thing for a few old games… like “Sword of the Berserk: Guts’ Rage” on SEGA Dreamcast, and Rebel Assault II for the Playstation.

Flash forward to 2006. I have a computer, a movie maker program, and the DVD burner to make it all contemporary. Not to mention the ‘like-original’ copies I can make for friends and family, unlike the degrade of vhs tapes.

As for what I actually did… I plugged my Xbox console into the Dazzle USB converter and used my PC like a 30 GB recorder. I played through the game Halo (BUNGIE/Microsoft,2001) recording the cinema scenes that periodically would show the story… the one of humanity’s fight against an alien threat. Then I recorded key transitions, audio cuts and first-person action sequences within the game, editing them on the computer to make the beautiful cinema scenes tie together in a more ‘movie-like’ fashion.

With the help of the two soundtracks of music released by BUNGIE and Martin O’Donnell, I filled out the feel of the film by putting music and sound where necessary. A total of 37 separate mp3 additions to be exact. I also raised and/or lowered the audio based on the background noise or an overlaying song track. Based on the timeline from the Del Ray novels, I included a reoccurring ‘Mission Clock’ that appears on-screen to update the flow of events.

I turned the control sensitivity down to the lowest (1) to reduce the ‘jerky’ motion associated with the fast paced action of a first-person shooter game. The actual difficulty was on easy at times, normal at others, heroic and legendary too. I’m not some “killer player” who records his skill to show off. I used the settings that got me what ’scenes’ I needed to tell the story. Again, this is all about the “story,” this is not a video run-through of the whole game.

I spliced and cut scenes together to make the flow more comfortable. In other words… I took the gist of the story and only included the necessary gear and vehicles. For example, you won’t see the M808B Scorpion Tank. It’s not in any cinema scenes, so I didn’t take precious time out of the film by showing that part of the game. It’s a bad-ass Covenant-kicking machine, just not needed to tell the story. Now in Halo 2, I did include the Scorpion because there… it is in the cinema.

I didn’t use every weapon. Since I am not ‘archiving’ Halo so-to-speak, I respected the cinema in which Master Chief always has his Battle Rifle. True, the game is set up to where at one point you start a mission without it (i.e. sentinel attack in the control center) but I purposely grabbed another weapon just before that cinema to explain why Chief has the ‘new toy in hand.’

After six weeks of work on this thing, I am happy with the final one-hour fifty three minute version. Because of the limitations of the 4.7 GB DVD’s, that limitation being a one-hour time limit on the disc, I decided that instead of a shortened one-hour movie, I would make two one-hour episodes. I created a ‘debriefing-style’ flashback at the start of episode two, refreshing episode one events. I used the E3 trailer for Halo 2 to give it that ‘to be continued’ feel at the end.

For the Internet fans, who may actually care to see what I’ve done, I have cut up the 2 episodes and posted them as 12 ten-minute ‘chapters’ on YouTube, but remember that the Internet has poor compression, meaning that the film will look dark and shadowed at times, the bandwidth of the web makes uploaded videos dark and sometimes hard to watch.

Sadly, (laughs) ‘no retail release.’ This thing is a simple fan-film, made in my room, on my personal computer and is not available for widespread distribution. I only made 15 DVD copies for family and close friends (Halo clanmates). I love the games, novels, comics, even getting ‘owned’ online in Team Slayer, I love it all. Thank you BUNGIE for making one of the best electronic videogames of all time. “…yo, sniper’s down…”

HALO: The Machinima Picture (created 11-2006)

Since I discovered the Xbox game ‘HALO’ back in 2002, I have wanted to put this fabulous first-person sci-fi action romp on video for my friends and family to watch and enjoy as a two-hour cinematic experience. Back then I would have plugged the Xbox into my VCR’s and tossed in a blank tape and used the pause button to edit in real time, taping the cinema scenes back to back. Analog hell. Crude as it would have been, I did this very thing for a few old games… like “Sword of the Berserk: Guts’ Rage” on SEGA Dreamcast, and Rebel Assault II for the Playstation.

Flash forward to 2006. I have a computer, a movie maker program, and the DVD burner to make it all contemporary. Not to mention the ‘like-original’ copies I can make for friends and family, unlike the degrade of vhs tapes.

As for what I actually did… I plugged my Xbox console into the Dazzle USB converter and used my PC like a 30 GB recorder. I played through the game Halo (BUNGIE/Microsoft,2001) recording the cinema scenes that periodically would show the story… the one of humanity’s fight against an alien threat. Then I recorded key transitions, audio cuts and first-person action sequences within the game, editing them on the computer to make the beautiful cinema scenes tie together in a more ‘movie-like’ fashion.

With the help of the two soundtracks of music released by BUNGIE and Martin O’Donnell, I filled out the feel of the film by putting music and sound where necessary. A total of 37 separate mp3 additions to be exact. I also raised and/or lowered the audio based on the background noise or an overlaying song track. Based on the timeline from the Del Ray novels, I included a reoccurring ‘Mission Clock’ that appears on-screen to update the flow of events.

I turned the control sensitivity down to the lowest (1) to reduce the ‘jerky’ motion associated with the fast paced action of a first-person shooter game. The actual difficulty was on easy at times, normal at others, heroic and legendary too. I’m not some “killer player” who records his skill to show off. I used the settings that got me what ’scenes’ I needed to tell the story. Again, this is all about the “story,” this is not a video run-through of the whole game.

I spliced and cut scenes together to make the flow more comfortable. In other words… I took the gist of the story and only included the necessary gear and vehicles. For example, you won’t see the M808B Scorpion Tank. It’s not in any cinema scenes, so I didn’t take precious time out of the film by showing that part of the game. It’s a bad-ass Covenant-kicking machine, just not needed to tell the story. Now in Halo 2, I did include the Scorpion because there… it is in the cinema.

I didn’t use every weapon. Since I am not ‘archiving’ Halo so-to-speak, I respected the cinema in which Master Chief always has his Battle Rifle. True, the game is set up to where at one point you start a mission without it (i.e. sentinel attack in the control center) but I purposely grabbed another weapon just before that cinema to explain why Chief has the ‘new toy in hand.’

After six weeks of work on this thing, I am happy with the final one-hour fifty three minute version. Because of the limitations of the 4.7 GB DVD’s, that limitation being a one-hour time limit on the disc, I decided that instead of a shortened one-hour movie, I would make two one-hour episodes. I created a ‘debriefing-style’ flashback at the start of episode two, refreshing episode one events. I used the E3 trailer for Halo 2 to give it that ‘to be continued’ feel at the end.

For the Internet fans, who may actually care to see what I’ve done, I have cut up the 2 episodes and posted them as 12 ten-minute ‘chapters’ on YouTube, but remember that the Internet has poor compression, meaning that the film will look dark and shadowed at times, the bandwidth of the web makes uploaded videos dark and sometimes hard to watch.

Sadly, (laughs) ‘no retail release.’ This thing is a simple fan-film, made in my room, on my personal computer and is not available for widespread distribution. I only made 15 DVD copies for family and close friends (Halo clanmates). I love the games, novels, comics, even getting ‘owned’ online in Team Slayer, I love it all. Thank you BUNGIE for making one of the best electronic videogames of all time. “…yo, sniper’s down…”