I’m still recovering from this viral respiratory infection that’s been attacking me all week, and so I wasn’t up to working on a comic last night. As I did last Friday, I’m asking for some industrious soul to capture six (or more) screenshots of the Reclaimer at the current point in the story and going forward. Send those images to me today, and I’ll write the story around them – and send out a t-shirt to the individual whose images I end up using. Remember, the Reclaimer has just stepped into a (badly damaged) elevator in an attempt to get closer to the data line breach in order to repair it.
You know what to do.
This past weekend was a 3-day weekend here in the US in celebration of Memorial Day. As such I spent the time with family and so did not take the time to create a comic for Monday.
I’ve also managed to finally acquire a dedicated video capture/editing computer, so I’ve spent some amount of time working on learning the software necessary to create Halo videos. What this means for Reclaimer fans is that there will eventually be Reclaimer machinima. Eventually. For starters, though, I’m going to be playing around with making montages and such to get comfortable with Adobe Premiere Pro. Hopefully, sometime this summer I’ll be putting out a call for voice actors and puppeteers. So be watching for that.
Apologies for today’s comic being late. I’ve been suffering with a severe head cold and bronchitis since yesterday. Hopefully I’ll be feeling better in a day or two.
Some days the words just flow onto the ‘paper’ (so to speak). Today was one of those days. From start to finish, this script took me maybe 20 minutes to write (as opposed to the standard 60+ minutes it usually takes). It’s a little darker than usual, but then again, it’s another glimpse into the depths of the Reclaimer’s mind where we get to see some of his inner turmoil and realize that, in many ways, he’s still the same man we met way back at the beginning.
Many thanks to SonOfTheShire for capturing today’s screenshots and determining the course of this leg of the story. Your shirt will be in the mail soon.
There will be no Friday Reclaimer this week. I ended up being too ill this evening to do anything more than curl up on the couch and wish for death.
However…
I’m not opposed to a little community involvement. If anyone wants to capture six or more screenshots of the Reclaimer on Orbital – doing anything that you think he might do at this point in the story – and send those images to reclaimercomic@gmail.com, then tomorrow morning, I will write the story around those images in order to forward the current storyline. In the event that more than one person sends in screenshots, then I will pick my favorite batch to work with and that individual will earn a free Reclaimer t-shirt.
Deal?
The fellas over at Bungie dished out an extra treat this evening – 5 render minutes so we can play around with HD videos. Fortunately, I had a test clip all ready and waiting, and you can see the results below. I was happy to discover that a successful HD render also gives you the SD version for no additional cost. Take a look at the SD and HD versions side-by-side (you’ll need to turn the HD on in the second video and go ahead and expand it to full-screen while you’re at it), and let me know what you think. In my opinion, the primary benefit of the HD version is a 2x video size with a little extra pixel clarity. I suspect that if you want ‘true’ HD-quality videos, you’ll be better off going with an HD capture card on your computer – but feel free to disagree (or agree) with me in the comments below. Also, if you’re one of the lucky beta testers, post your render links in the comments so the rest of us can enjoy, too.
Bungie’s Render-To-Video service has finally gone into public beta – and I’ve already used my two credits to test drive the service on a couple of the video files in my File Share. (Incidentally, I found two more render credits available on my account this morning, which I’ve already put to good use.)
Below are a couple of sample videos from my Share that I’ve rendered, downloaded, and embedded. Both are standard definition, since HD rendering is currently not available.
I’m looking forward to seeing the HD renders and to seeing just what sort of pay-as-you-go plan Bungie comes up with. What this means in the long-term is that you may very well see some Reclaimer machinima appearing over the summer months. So stay tuned…

