So Winter Break's a Wrap!

Well that's all she wrote.  With UCI starting classes up again tomorrow, my 2011 Winter Break is officially done.  But with most certainty, I can say that it was the most productive and busy one I've had...ever.  I'd say I'll get back to you with a dedicated post per activity I did, but seeing my own track record, I'll just do decent descriptions right here right now in chronological order.

Motherlode

As the Fall quarter of school wrapped up, my Intro to Sound Design professor mentioned to the class that there was a Master's student looking for help on production sound for a short film.  Intrigued, I contacted the student, and got to be the boom pole operator for the shoot!  It was a great experience, being able to work with the whole crew, from director to ADs to grips to PAs, we had the whole hierarchy thing going on!  The project is another Master student's final thesis, "Motherlode", and will be shown in an art gallery I believe sometime later this year.  It was a lot of fun being the boom op, and I only had one instance of "CUT!!  ...boom was in the shot..." Oops... :)

Thunderfish Entertainment + Microsoft WP7 App Development

Remember that game company I co-founded last June?  Well we're making quite some progress :)  Thunderfish Entertainment is now about 20 people strong, has 3 games wrapping development, 2 more starting pre-production, and 82 submitted apps to the Window Phone 7 marketplace!  And it's those 82 apps that ate up a large portion of my first half of break.  After getting home from a nice trip to Vegas, I was alerted that the company had been given a special opportunity to go into Microsoft and learn how to build WP7 apps.  Naturally we took up the opportunity, and gathered all of our members, even searching for new prospective ones!  We spent 5 days total at the Microsoft Technology Center in Irvine, spending 10am-4pm creating purposely simple apps.  Our only criteria to meet, while working under a Microsoft employee's wing was to create 50 apps before 2012 hit.  And while we had a hard time getting started, we got better with each visit, and ultimately submitted 82!  So if you own a Windows Phone, go ahead and check them out.  Just remember that they are purposefully simple :)  In fact, we created Bonefish Studios as our mobile division to sum up all of our WP7 games.  Just remember that TFE isn't focused on mobile dev right now, and is much more focused on Xbox Live Indie Games!  That's where all of our real efforts go :)  Which you can read more about below under "Game Trailers".

If you could do me a favor too, as the Community Manager person for TFE, please like our Facebook page and follow us on Twitter @ThunderfishEnt!  :)  Building a fanbase is what we're looking to do now, and we'd be happy to have you in it!

Night Before Christmas

I'll just save the time, and reference you to the post I managed to write up on this project!  First one I had posted in months!

Christmas Ashes

Same goes for this project!  Here's it's own post!

Loss

Ah "Loss", my first experience with film sound post-production :)  At the beginning of last year, I met with an aspiring director/fellow student here at UCI.  He was looking for a guy to do the sound for his short film project!  I immediately offered my services, excited to work on a film project.  Before this project, I'd made lots of videos in the past, but more with me in the producer/editor's chair.  Simple neighborhood skate videos, stop motion ones, the occasional scripted video, documentaries for school classes, those kinds of things.  But this time, I get to do what I want to do as a career: film sound.  Dialogue editing, foley work, sound effects, mixing, collaborating with composers, all that good stuff :)

This truly is something that deserves its own post when completed, but for now I'll say that I've been doing a lot of footstep recording/editing, dialogue-aligning, and trying to make things scary with this horror/drama short :)  Because this is still a work in progress, if you want to stay up to date with how it's going, feel free to follow me on Twitter @BryanPloof!  In fact, for anything I'm up to I'd recommend following me there because I sure do tweet a lot more than I blog!

Game Trailers

As mentioned earlier, Thunderfish Entertainment has 3 games nearing submission to XBLIG:  Music Island, Space Debris, and Tarik's Tomb.  And in order to promote the games once they get approved, I made the trailers for two of them!  I'll link you to the trailers, but just be aware that even though they say "Out Now!", well...they're not yet haha :)  Let this just be a sneak peak because you keep up to date with what I personally am doing :P

Trailers: Music Island  Space Debris

Finally Own a 360

As Thunderfish Entertainment (TFE), is an XBLIG focused company right now, it was a little difficult to help my fellow co-workers when it came to debugging since I didn't own an Xbox 360.  However, problem solved now!  Now the proud owner of a 360 and a Kinect.  Really looking forward to experimenting with the Kinect in terms of little sound projects too!!

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Phew!  Long-winded I know, but that's what I've been up to this break!  :D  If this is all possible in just a month, I'm really pumped to see what can happen in all of 2012!  Happy New Year everybody!  And let's have a great one!

- BP