Elite: Dangerous – Fuel Rats Rescue #2000

After becoming a part of group of Elite: Dangerous players called the Fuel Rats, and racking up over 100 successful rescues in the process, I had an opportunity an early Friday morning to reach a milestone for the group, successfully completing our 2000th rescue of a commander stranded and in need of fuel.

Taking this opportunity to record some footage, I set on putting together a video to commemorate the event, as well as add some commentary to help explain everything that was going on, resulting in the below product, involving six minutes of narration dissecting a typical rescue performed by the Fuel Rats.

Fly safe, fly fueled!

PlanetSide 2: Regret

In another collaboration by some of the great creative minds in the PlanetSide 2 community, Regret is a short film providing a dramatic look at the lore of PlanetSide, specifically the scientific breakthrough of rebirthing and the unintended consequences that humanity was faced with in the never ending conflict on Auraxis.

I serve up the background in this short story with some narration, which is accompanied by impressive visuals from Alexs189, leading into a stirring monologue given by voice actress Ellie Underscore set against some great animated stills and ingame footage captured by p4nda (who I previously worked with on Connery’s Redemption).

“While the law has many penalties for the atrocities we inflict on others, there are no punishments for the terrors we inflict on ourselves.” -Dr. Leonard Church

Elite: Dangerous – Fangs 09: A noir web comic adaptation

Yet another video inspired by Lee Hutchinson’s Fangs, a web comic set in a noir stylized Elite: Dangerous universe, this ninth entry into the series offers a cautionary tale to new pilots out there with eyes bigger than their hardpoints.

There were definitely some out of the way locations to get footage for in this one, and an amount of time spent, which I would prefer not to disclose, hunting for the right strong signal source to get the footage I needed.

Elite: Dangerous – Fangs 08: A noir web comic adaptation

Continuing to be inspired by Lee Hutchinson’s Fangs, a web comic set in a noir stylized Elite: Dangerous universe, this eighth entry in the series shines a light on one of the professions on the dark underbelly of society: the smuggler.

Featuring the usual nods and references scattered throughout the work, this piece closes out with an adaptation of, “Home on the Range,” causing a rare example of me attempting to sing…at least, however I think a smuggler would sing about the wild frontier of space and the wares with which he works.

Elite: Dangerous – Fangs 05: A noir web comic adaptation

An interesting noir sytlized web comic, Lee Hutchinson’s Fangs sets out to tell a series of short stories using threshold filtered screenshots from Elite: Dangerous. The fifth entry in this series, “Why does Rice play Texas?” illustrates the innate human aspiration for exploration, and is sprinkled with all sorts of homages, even down to the title reference to John F. Kennedy’s personal addition to his famous, “We Choose to go to the Moon,” speech at Rice university.

I am a sucker for good monologue, so after reading this I felt like recording a take on it. Of course I did not think that audio alone would really do this justice, so I set out to adapt this web comic into a video using footage I could obtain from Elite: Dangerous. Due to time constraints, it did not end up as a 1:1 recreation (getting a shot of Sagittarius A* and coming back to civilized space is about a week long journey if you’re not trying to marathon it), but I am pleased with the end result.

Elite: Dangerous – Ctrl+Alt+Space Film Competition

To showcase their game’s new debug camera feature, Frontier Developments created the Ctrl+Alt+Space Film Competition, encouraging CMDRs to find creative uses for the debug camera given a background music track by Erasmus Talbot that had to be used.

Though the background track did not inspire me at first, after giving it some thought I decided to take an approach offering an introspective look at the Elite: Dangerous galaxy and our place in it. Most of the time gathering footage for this was in setting out in my ship to explore the Cat’s Paw Nebula (a quick two day trip) and then coming back to civilized space for the rest of the shots, working with the Crimson Eagles formation flying team to add some closing shots.

On top of all this, I wrote and voiced the narration of what I came to call, “The Spacefarer’s Pledge”:

Elite: Dangerous – Welcome to the Galaxy, Commander

Recently I picked up Elite: Dangerous, and I have been having a blast playing in this galactic space simulation sandbox, as a pilot of a number of spacecraft. Looking through a lot of tutorials that are out there for the game, there are a lot of detailed guides that cover all sorts of different aspects of the game. What I did not find was a short and concise introduction guide to what it’s like getting into Elite: Dangerous. With that in mind I set to creating a tutorial of my own, trying to squeeze as much primer information into 15 minutes as I could.

I first tried a take with my normal speaking voice, but got tired of listening to that after a few minutes, so I decided to take a more character driven approach. Watch the video to check it out and learn a few things about this game!

PlanetSide 2: Freedom

One of the things we like to do in Recursion is make videos. One of our more technical creators with access to motion capture resources has done some work to bring that to the PlanetSide 2 universe, resulting most famously in the rap music video Ambush.

Not as heavy on the motion capture this time around, the latest video provides some background story on the oft maligned fourth faction play that happens in PlanetSide 2. Why would players abandon their side and choose to fight for their sworn enemies? In the case of the New Conglomerate, you can check out this video and see for yourself what would drive us to pursue our freedom…through other means.

Planetside 2 War Stories – The Anvil Drop

Quick on the heels of my last story, we ended up dropping on an embattled tower to defend it, only to be pushed out by an overwhelming amount of enemy armor and aircraft. Deciding that we weren’t quite done, what happened next is worth a listen, as we execute a tactic we have come to call The Anvil Drop.

Head on over to the full post if you want to read the transcript