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.

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.

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”: