It's been a while since I last posted a blog, and to be honest, it's because I didn't want to write one for this episode. This is probably my least favorite episode, and it's entirely my fault. We needed to get a special set of golden armor from the blacksmith (named Dylan), and I remember telling Zach that he's going to want something in return, so we can't just show up and say "Give us magical armor or we'll beat you to a pulp." So the plan was to do a simple quest, kind of like something you would find in an RPG. So here is the plot:
Go into an abandoned mine and find some iron.
Take the iron to the psychedelic hipster in exchange for cake.
Take the cake to Dylan the blacksmith to appease his appetite so he will make us some magic armor.
Sound dumb? It is. It was totally ridiculous, but at the end of the day, ridiculousness is what ID10T's is all about, so we went for it. Zach only agreed to this silly plot if we added monsters to fight in the abandoned mine shaft. It's a dumb episode, I know, but we tried our best to make sure we never put up another episode as bad as that again.
Fun Fact: The guy that played the voice for the blacksmith Dylan is actually named Dylan, but he is better known as the voice of Herman the Hermit.
Part 6 of the Minecraft Adventure Series more of a break for us than anything else. We had been working very hard on jam packing the series with loads of excitement, but sometimes constant adventuring can be tiring. So this episode was less about fighting and trying not to die and more about exploring this world a little more and seeing what other inhabitants lived there. While I was building the dungeon seen in the previous episode, Zach had spent his time working on a village that featured houses, shops, and even a washroom. Some of these shops and designs would later be improved on and used in a large city called Haven.
After Herman leads us to this village (and disappears before we can ask him about it), we find a psychedelic hipster named Ben. He tells us that Telemindred scared everyone away to a city called Haven, and only he and the blacksmith have remained. This episode ended up being slow as far as pacing goes, but it was a necessary transitional video.
Fun Fact - In the story, Herman was supposed to lead us to this new village, but the guy playing Herman kept forgetting where he was supposed to go. Zach ended up leading Herman to the village, while making it look like Herman was the one leading us. That's talent!
Episode 5 was a fun build. Zach and I build almost everything together, but in this episode I wanted to build a jumping puzzle for him and I didn't want him to see it until it was done. After he finally saw it (and yelled at me for an hour because he hates jumping puzzles) we practiced it and then recorded it. There's actually a jump at 5:48 in the movie where you have to jump up and away from the wall and then push yourself back to make it. We practiced this jump over 25 time and I made it almost every time but Zach could not make it. He made it once and that was it. So in the movie he bypasses the jump by dumping water and swimming up the water instead. This episode is crucial to the plot of the story, because at this point Telemindred has an artifact that can detect us, and so he ends up finding us while we're trying to get the apples. This is why we need the apples; they prevent Telemindred from detecting us.
Fun Fact: Near the end of the movie I mention something called the "Curse of Telemindred". This may sound a little crazy, but this is a real curse. There's a phrase that Zach and I like to use that goes "I'm good at what I do." Every time we use that phrase on a night that we are recording SOMETHING goes wrong. Every. Single. Time. The night we started recording episode 5 I was showing Ben and Dylan the Dungeon and they said it looked really good. I said "Thanks, I'm good at what I do." And all hell broke loose that night. Technical errors, minecraft glitches, me dying in the game, Herman teleporting magically to us without anyone of us doing anything. There's actually a bloopers video we released that has the scene where Herman kept teleporting to us magically. So now we don't use that phrase when we record, because something is bound to go wrong, and the Curse of Telemindred will get us.
Episode 4 is one of my favorites, even though the pacing is a little slow. In this episode we introduce Herman the Hermit, an eccentric, mysterious, and flat out crazy character. He's also everyone's favorite character (including myself and Zach). At this point in time, there's not a lot known about who Herman is or where he came from, but he seems to know a lot more than he lets on. To be quite honest, I wasn't expecting Herman to be a major character. I figured Herman would be a good minor character that we meet, but everything changed when he spoke for the first time. I guess I'm jumping ahead here; let me start from the beginning.
After filming the first three videos, Zach and I realized that we needed more people to help. We needed to start building a team that could not only help portray characters, but also help us build. So Zach brought two of his friends onto the server for an in-game interview. Ben and Dylan were fairly experienced in building, so I decided to see what their vocal ranges were. I knew what I wanted for Herman, but I'm always open to new ideas, so I started with Ben and asked him to do a few lines using whatever voice he would equate with "a crazy hermit". He did his lines and when he finished I asked Dylan to do the same thing. He opened his mouth and started speaking, and Zach and I laughed for three minutes straight. I honestly don't know how we were able to breathe! The voice was hilarious and he was good at improvising as well. Thus, Herman the Hermit was born.
When we realized the potential of Herman's character, we decided to expand his role and now he is central to the story in ways not completely revealed to the viewers...
Fun Fact: Herman has a chicken that we named Clucky Cluck Cluck the Chicken. What most people don't know is that the chicken is not a regular mob. It is, in fact, Ben in disguise, which is why the chicken seems to have a mind of it's own.
The third video in the series was a more of a beginning for us than the first video we put up. So far we had a series with a general (maybe even vague) direction we wanted to go. But this is the first time we actually show the main villain of season 1, the Dark Lord Telemindred. Telemindred's skin was designed and played by my younger brother, who still assists us with certain builds. At this point in the series, not a lot is known about Telemindred (Zach and I didn't even have much of a back story at this point), but it was evident (eventually) to our characters that his guy was bad news. After this point, Telemindred actually takes a step back and doesn't normally attack us directly, with the exception of a few episodes.
Also a first for us was the city we find. It was very small and only had a few houses and some other rooms, but this was a milestone for Zach and I because we hadn't actually done this much building before. As I mentioned before, Zach and I were still somewhat new to minecraft, and so much of what we know now was learned in the process of preparing and filming this series. We also began to see what our individual strengths and weaknesses were which allowed us to work on areas of the series that we were better at, and to this day we still work as a great team together, pooling our resources, knowledge, and skills together and making something awesome.
Another first for us was tinkering with texture packs and mods in this video. While we did use a mod for the redstone fire in episode 2, it was nothing compared to our elevator mod which allowed us to click a sign and be transported up or down. We haven't used this mod in a while, but we may be implementing it in later episodes. We also began changing certain things in the texture pack to suit our needs for the episode, and we end up making many changes later on in the series as the story progresses.
Finally, I've promised to add clues and insider information about upcoming episodes in this blog, and so far I have not put any in, so I've decided to give you guys a "spoiler" for season 2. The way I am going to do this is by asking for your help. I have two working titles for Season 2 and I want you guys to tell me which one you like more. Here are the titles:
"The Rise of Telemindred"
"Herman - From Man to Hermit"
For those of you who have speculated that Herman is actually Telemindred, you are wrong. However, there is a connection between the two, and all of those related questions will be answered in Season 2, so there's your first spoiler!
Fun Fact: In the scene where Zach and I fight Telemindred, we weren't actually supposed to die. Our characters were supposed to be "knocked out" and then rescued by Herman, but I couldn't find a better way to produce a "knocked out" without actually being killed. Looking back, I'm sure there were better way to do it that didn't involve people asking me if the series was over because our characters were killed, but the past is the past, and it's actually quite comical in retrospect.
So after we filmed our first episode we showed some of our friends and they actually seemed to like it. So, we started crafting a story for this new dimension we were transported to. We decided to use a new texture pack for this alternate dimension, that way the geography would be the same, but everything would look different. We were still fairly new to minecraft, so we started building things just because we though they looked cool, and we learned how to do things like make a hidden passage using paintings and how to make a working redstone clock.
To be quite honest, we had no idea what we were doing and the plot at this point was "Travel to alternate dimension, find a bad guy, fight the bad guy, fix the portal and go home." It was originally going to be a much shorter series, but as I developed the plot (which has been changed probably 20 times), we realized that there was so much more we could do and accomplish.
Fun Fact: The scene where we had to run through the fire was a nightmare to film. Basically, we were using a mod that ignited netherrack when powered with redstone. So Zach made a redstone pulse that would not only turn the fire on and off, but it would do so at different speeds. We had practiced getting through to the end without being hit by fire and had done it perfectly. However, on the night we filmed, we walked into the hallway and I noticed something was wrong. The fire was pulsating really fast. For some reason something had happened to his wiring and it was pulsating twice as fast as when we had practiced, which left it virtually impossible to get through without catching fire. We decided to just keep recording and run through the fire to the water at the end, which we thought was much more funny.
When Zach and I first started our minecraft adventure series we had no real intention of actually going anywhere with it. For us, it was just fun to play and fun to make. A few of our friends saw the first video and thought it was actually pretty funny and the end was very suspenseful. So we started our series and here we are, still working hard to make people laugh.
Video fun fact: The scene where our tent catches fire was not originally planned. We were recording and improving most of the scene, so Zach thought it would be funny if we tried to light a fire inside the tent. 10 seconds later the whole thing was burning down and we were dying laughing but we stopped recording. After we fixed the tent, we decided that we should have just let that be part of the scene, so we started the recording over and started another fire inside the tent.
