We held a Minecraft & Terraria LAN Party in March and I took another timelapse of the event.
Gaming
NWRL 2016 LAN Party Timelapses
It took me a bit longer than I would have preferred but I finally completed the two timelapses from the 2016 Nerds With Real Lives Guild LAN Parties. The first is for our February Minecraft LAN and the second was for our Halo Reach Console LAN.
Minecraft LAN Timelapse
I used my tried and true method for this video. It was taken on my Nikon D3200 with one photo every five seconds. I used Adobe Premier Pro to put the photos together and crop them for the video.
Halo Reach LAN Timelapse
This event was my first time using a GoPro for our timelapses. It’s a Hero 3 Black edition taking one photo every two seconds. The photos aren’t quite 4k in size and I had to stretch them by about 5% to fill the frame but they are still higher than 1080p so I thought it would be worth it to preserve the detail. I prefer the angle provided by the lens of my Nikon over this and we were less diligent about monitoring the memory card so the video is more spotty and gets cut short. Fun fact, the plasma swirl at the end of the video was created in After Effects with this Video Copilot tutorial as inspiration and took about 17 hours to render a 5 minute animation – I chose the wrong settings the first time and had to re-render for a second 17 hour job.
NWRL LAN Party: Minecraft Edition – Event Timelapse
We held our first public LAN Party as the Nerds With Real Lives Guild. It was Minecraft themed and a huge success! We had an action plan but didn’t have any experience with an event of this scale. It’s fun to look back and identify some of the learning experiences where we weren’t as efficient and made some mistakes. That is what it’s all about though and adds to the adventure.
The video was taken using a borrowed Nikon D7000 and it’s internal intervalometer. It took a single photo every 10 seconds and would only take 900 before needing to be reset. I didn’t realize that auto-focus would make the video “bounce” the way it does. The camera was also running on battery…the reason it cuts before the event opens, to charge it for an hour or so, then it finally dies in the evening.
NWRL Plays: Minecraft Hardcore Survival – Our First Attempt
A few of us wanted to try our hand at a “Let’s Play” style video, I wanted to test out my recording setup, I was getting back into Adobe Premier, and we had never tried Hardcore Mode in Minecraft. This is our first attempt at the whole works. Overall I felt it turned out alright – there was definitely a lot learned.
Hosting A Small Community Minecraft Server Talk at Linux Fest Northwest
After hosting a Minecraft server for me and my friends for over a year I wanted to share my experiences with others on how we ran our small community. The talk was well attended and I had a large amount of content I wanted to cover. I think in the end I got a bit too bogged down on the installation of Java within Linux and lost track of time but it was a great opportunity to meet passionate people and get more experience giving talks.
Digital Game Table
We have been Playing Dungeons & Dragons but, as a DM, I have found map making to be one of the most time-consuming tasks pre-session or during if I draw them on-demand. I have an old 32 inch TV laying around so I thought I’d turn it into a digital game table.
Dice Tray
My friends and have been playing a lot of Settlers of Catan and have been getting in to Dungeons & Dragons. we typically used the lid of the Catan box to throw the dice in and I wanted something better – to the drawing board!