Best Way to Convert MP4 to Playable DVD?

I needed to turn an audition clip file into a DVD that a funder could throw into a DVD player and see the movie on their TV.

I wound up using iDVD. It's meant to be a super simple program for putting your home movies on a disc. But if you actually want to do something really simple, it's not that intuitive.

What I wanted to do was make a DVD that plays one movie file once, without a menu. I could not figure out how to skip having a menu. You can put a movie before the menu. But the menus all seemed to require a minimum of two movies after. So I had to put the movie (an audition clip) before the menu, then twice after the menu.

It worked, but it was ugly. Also, the menus themselves, in their efforts to look "professional," came off as cheesy.

Eventually, I was able to download 1.6GB of other menu options, some which only demand one video after the menu, and don't look as cheesy.

So now: hey, I can make my own DVDs now!

What Games Can Do

Brenda Brathwaite has a compelling argument for what games can do that other art forms can't do as well: implicate the player in the moral universe of the story by giving them choices with moral consequences.

In less fancy talk: her seven year old daughter came home from Black History Month. She'd heard all about the Middle Passage, but she didn't get it. It hadn't reacher her emotionally.

Then Brathwaite made a little game where some pegs were people and her daughter painted them different colors to be families. And then some of them got put on a boat. And the boat had a certain number of turns to cross the ocean. And there wasn't necessarily enough food for everyone -- unless she kept rolling low numbers. So what could she do? Throw some people into the ocean, or risk everyone starving?

After playing the game for a few turns, her daughter got it. Then, she cried. And so did Brenda, and her husband, too, when he came home.

A movie can ask the viewer, "What would you do?" In SOPHIE'S CHOICE, which child would you save? But you don't have to participate in the decision. The movie will keep rolling on to its conclusion.

A game can make the player choose to do it.

Daughter story starts at 4:30.

Sync Problems on Vimeo

I'm having sync problems with some videos I've put on Vimeo for private distribution. Has anyone else had this problem? Anyone know a better site? (I don't think you can upload stuff to YouTube but restrict its availability.)

Walking Dead, the Game

I played Episode 1 of Telltale Games' WALKING DEAD on our Xbox. (It's also available on PC/Mac/PS3 and iPad.)

It's a point-and-click adventure: a "choose your own adventure" book brought to life on the small screen. Mostly you are making choices of which thing to say and whom to side with, and the other characters react differently depending on what you do. There's also the occasional button-mashing combat with a zombie.

Philosophically, I don't like point and click adventure games. They're much more about branching narrative, and much less about gameplay.

The difficulty in branching narrative is that, to tell a truly powerful story, it has to be of a piece. The ending has its seeds in the beginning. The characters are the right ones for the plot. But if you're going to let the player choose his ending, then how do you make sure the character is the right one for that ending? How do you foreshadow an ending, how do you commit to a theme, when you don't know what the player is going to do? The more outcomes, the vaguer the characters have to be, don't they? So how sharp can the storytelling be if one beginning has to serve sixteen endings?

I guess one answer is to make the player character mysterious, and reveal more of him as the player chooses his actions. It would be interesting to try revealing different backstory depending on the player's actions, but I don't have the impression that the game is doing that. We know he's a professor who was convicted of murder; he's pretty up front that he was righteously convicted.

But I gotta say, I never found the game boring. I played the two or three hours of Episode One. I definitely got my $5 worth. (Actually, Hunter's $5 worth.) The game does convincingly put you in situations where you have to choose who to save, and you feel bad about the ones you have to leave behind. Because the characters are rotoscoped, rather than CGI animated, the acting is pretty good. So I really did care about the 8 year old girl I'm trying to save.

Will I play Episodes 2 and 3? Jury's still out on that. This game might be more convincing on iPad, where it would be a really big game for the platform, rather than on Xbox, where I can't help comparing it with AAA games. And I could play it on the train to TIFF.

Final Draft Writer

Final Draft has released an iPad app.

This is a nice little app. It provides all the basic functionality of Final Draft. You can easily edit and format text. Typing works via the iPad keyboard.

If you touch the screen and hold down, you get a little magnifying glass you can move around to make it easier to land the cursor where you want. You also then have the option to add a Script Note.

When you're done, you can email from the app, or use Dropbox. The app autosaves fairly often.

All in all, this does just about everything I would want an iPad app to do. You can't do the fancier stuff, but on the other hand, you don't have to lug your entire computer around to do it.

I don't see myself writing an entire script on an iPad. The touchscreen keyboard is too unwieldy. Anyway, I don't go very far without my laptop. But I could imagine making notes on a script, or trimming some dialog, on the subway or at a cafe or in the park. When I'm at TIFF, I'm not going to want to schlep my laptop with me everywhere, but I will have my iPad at all times.

Right now the app is $30. They say they'll jack that up to $50 at the end of September. For $30, it's a handy little app. You might find it handy, too.

The Path

My old writing group friend Kay Reindl has a cool digital series on Ideaboost. The fae have been getting a bad deal for years in pop culture -- they're either Tolkien elves, or they've been Keeblerized. The fae were, traditionally, divided into the nasty, capricious, dangerous sort who would trick you into falling off a cliff, and the really bad ones. Only lately have they been getting their bad reputation back in series like LOST GIRL.

Knowing Kay, she's going to get them right.

I would totally watch this series. How you do it on a digital series budget, you got me.



If you dig it too, Boost it.

A Little More About Contrast

Here's a little quick'n'dirty promo video I shot for the game I'm working on, Contrast.



That's the spectacularly good Vanessa Mitsui playing Kat, our film noir shadow dame; she was a joy to direct. Yours truly is talking narrative.

We made the video for our pitch on Steam Greenlight. The idea is that game creators pitch their games, and players vote for which ones they want to see distributed on Steam. We'll be updating our Greenlight page as we progress towards our release early next year.

Headset Keeper

I have designed a new iPhone headset keeper. Originally I didn't have a keeper, and my iPhone headsets got all tangled up. Then I got this one:



It was a big improvement. But it takes a lot of turns to wind up the headset cord. A lot of turns takes more time, and it leaves the cord all twisty.

Also, only one slot to hold the cord in place. The cord has two ends, you know.

This one is cute. And it has two slots, one to hold the beginning of the cord (with the plug), one to hold the end of the cord (with the earphones):

Still, way too many turns.

I'm happier with the one I just made myself:




Four slots to hold the cords -- because when you wind the cord, you don't know where the end will wind up. The little horns keep the looped cord from slipping off the keeper.

And it takes roughly a third as many times to wind up the headset.

Also, it's free. I used a pair of scissors to make this one out of an Indigo customer card.

You're welcome!