Saturday, October 1, 2011

Escape from New York

September has been a insane month. Lots of new stuff going on with Haley Strategic including a merch offering which pretty much sold out of everything in 24 hours from time of release. This is gratifying because I designed everything in the store.

As of today I have 4 new patch designs and 2 new shirts for the Non-Permissive Environment Specialist series, which is actually a Black Powder \\ Red Earth thing, that should hit shelves before x-mas 11. It's pretty insane and gratifying to see people posting images of themselves rocking the patches from CONUS to Iraq and Afghanistan. More to come there hopefully...

Speaking of BPRE, pencils on issue 2 are done and we are hoping to have the entire book inked before NY Comic Con so I can letter the whole thing and submit it for printing ASAP.

For fans of the games, initial design work has concluded and production kicked off on a new isometric BPRE action game inspired heavily by Bullfrog's Syndicate and Syndicate Wars. Over the past 4 months, I charted a rough sketch of the game out in pixels and then used the Starcraft II Galaxy Editor to make it "real" and by real I mean a fast and dirty proof of concept.

Incidentally, we launched a new BPRE website here. I decided to push the new material a little more caustic and go less with the Frontline Documentary-War Photographer vibe I had been trying to cultivate. I still have a BPRE coffee table book that I want to make one day with the images we made for BPRE and some short stories thrown in.

Back to Haley Strategic, you may or may not know that I was the lead creative and writer for the recently released Bravo Company MFG website. It's one of the largest video, photo and web projects I've directed and it is certainly one of my best commercial pieces to date. Learned a ton on it and am hoping to turn that on a BPRE short film in the near future (:

So what else...

I recently purchased the "new" Escape from New York Blu-Ray. Unfortunately, there's fuck-all that's new with it. Even better, turns out it's a foreign release Blu-Ray. None of the extras work on my Blu-Ray player(PS3) and the film was mastered with a deep green hue that doesn't match what's on the Special Edition DVD(apparently the definitive version of the film) at all. That's not to say it doesn't look OK, but they went deep and dark with the blacks and lost a ton of detail as a result. For those who know me, this is one of the first films that had a lasting impact on the way I write and create. John Carpenter and Kurt Russel went on to make The Thing and Big Trouble in Little China together, which are both master pieces in their own right, but EFNY will always be number one in my heart (:

I snuck out to Two by Four, a BMX shop in Pennsville, NJ, to catch riders from; FBM, Fit, Shadow and Subrosa as well a swarm of local kids tearing up a bunch of ramps, bars and some rounds of Feet Down and Bunny Hop. Highest jump was 3 feet 6 inches. Unreal and inspiring to see. We never had a clue any of this was even possible when I was kid. Want to go out and ride tomorrow :-D

Music wise the latest Sex Machineguns album SMG is dominating the iPod/CD player followed by the new Merry album Beautiful Freaks (actually available in the US via iTunes). SMG maybe the best record in the entire Sex Machineguns catalog, relentless shred and fun, the whole thing just gets me pumping. The Merry record is also the best the band has dropped since I first got into them in 2004. Every song is haunting, creepy and really captures distress in an incredibly catchy idiom. Both are highly recommended ^_^

New Syndicate title was announced by EA this past week. I am cautiously optimistic.

BF3 Beta began. After 3 days of play, I ordered a new video card. Long story short, I have a smoking card for a DX9 system. BF3 requires DX11. I had bumped to Windows 7 earlier this year but performance on a lot of my games and game editors, quite frankly, was terrible. With BF3 and CODMW3 right around the corner, I'm hoping the new card, GTX570, gets the job done and I don't have to grab an i7 to get the full performance bump I need for 60 frames stable.

Despite nearly a full month between locations, October and November look like more of the same. I was hoping to park myself in the NY area for a few weeks but it looks like that won't be in the cards now :\

OK. Hasta.

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