"Today may be the beginning of the end... or the end of the beginning... or the beginning of the beguine." -- Leslie Zevo, Toys

Happy Explorers is the short tale of our day to day experience in the cavern and Ages of D'ni. Download/Play Happy Explorers (length 6m31s): MPEG-4 (preferred): Happy Explorers MP4 (39MB) Legacy Windows Media Video: Happy Explorers WMV (46MB) Legacy Mac/Quicktime Movie: Happy Explorers MOV (62MB)

This music video is a machinima, with footage captured in a video game called Uru: Ages Beyond Myst and synchronized to The Happy Worker by Tori Amos and Ebudae by Enya. These songs are from the Toys soundtrack, Copyright © 1992 Geffen Records. The video was assembled using Windows Movie Maker 2.1. Important Note: This video shows puzzles and some solutions from Uru: Ages Beyond Myst, part of Myst Uru: Complete Chronicles and Myst Online: Uru Live. Some players may prefer to skip this video to avoid spoilers. Problems viewing this movie? Help is available. Like this video? More Uru Videos here. If you like these songs, please support the original artists.

The Making of Happy Explorers

• This project was initiated in response to a contest advertisement by TomahnaGuy.
• The time goal for this project was to complete a project with many other participants (not just myself this time), yet still finish within one week.
• The story goal for this project is a bit more complex and can be summed up in three parts.
  1. My first two videos were filmed almost entirely solo, and didn't show the multiplayer aspects of Uru. So this third movie goes multiplayer in a big way, showing groups of folks working together.
  2. Second, the first two movies were semi-serious, this is meant to be very comical. To match the music from Toys, everyone wears santa hats. And it mocks exploring a bit, to make people think, "What if our jobs meant doing these tasks every day?" (Everyone is hyped up to do the Uru Live beta after all.)
  3. Finally, Happy Explorers gives me a chance to show how some puzzles in Uru are really meant to be solved with multiple people.
• Filming began Friday, June 30 for offline scenes. Filming began Saturday, July 1 for online scenes with explorers. Additional filming occurred on Monday, July 3, and Wednesday, July 5. With final assembly on the night of July 5, this makes this the fastest film I've produced yet (5 days), while also the longest (6 minutes, 31 seconds).
• As with my prior videos, video and still pictures were captured with FRAPS, and the video and song were assembled in Windows Movie Maker 2.1. I also used VirtualDub to improve the video quality, as with Gorahyantee.
• Offline footage was filmed solo using Uru: Complete Chronicles with a "FlyMode" patch installed.
• Much of the footage in Happy Explorers is shown at double or quadruple the original speed. Rather than decimating the video with VirtualDub, this time I used the double speed video effect option in Windows Movie Maker. Turns out that decimating is better, especially if I need to modify brightness/contrast anyway, because it uses less hard drive space and doesn't bog down Windows Movie Maker (which chokes while trying to play 2x and 4x video in realtime in a complex video arrangement).
• Windows Movie Maker also seems to dislike the Windows Media 1 compression format that I used in lieu of uncompressed video when saving brightened video with VirtualDub, and chugs on that, too.
• Online footage was filmed on The Great Tree shard, hosted by Ashtar. Without the help of Ashtar and co-admins a'moaca' and weldergeek, this project could not have occurred. Thank you again! (In the light floor dance scene, a'moaca' controlled the lights, and weldergeek choreographed the dancing.)
• Participants (in alphabetical order): a'moaca', Ashtar (WA USA), Dav'on (England), ghaelen (IA USA), Lady Chaos (CA USA), Durin (as Marten) (WA USA), Owehn (WA USA), Sandra (France), and weldergeek (WA USA).
• New Virtualdub tip: If you've used the tips I've previously mentioned for brightening your film without making everything look hazy, you may still experience some color wash-out. This can be mended with the HSV filter. Add this filter as you would Levels, and select preview. Then, adjust the Saturation level to the right to bring color depth back into your video. If the max (200%) is not enough, you can add this filter multiple times. Oversaturation will give a somewhat cartoony look to things, as you can see in some scenes of Happy Explorers.