Felicia Day

Episode 5 is here! I’ll upload my commentary track later today/tomorrow and re-embed it. I know this is the shortest ep of the batch, but this does have some of my FAVE moments. The acting by Adam Rayner is SO amazing, he really embodies the tormented Templar here, he makes his mess-up BELIEVABLE, which is so hard to do. Bravo to the actor.

And this fight scene is my fave in the series, which is ironic considering we had HALF the time to film it as we expected because we lost a day of shooting earlier in the schedule due to Adam cutting his eye on a sword (yes, that cut is real, we had to go back and CGI it in a few places where we had already shot stuff. MAKE IT WORK!)

I feel like the end of the inn scene is really where the group is working together (as best they can). The nod to Cairn I do is a cool moment, celebrating a victory well done brings us together more than any words could.

Please take a moment and share the video with the people you think might enjoy it, and thumbs up on the YouTube vid are appreciated. Next week is the finale episode, it is VERY long and epic, and I hope satisfies this amazing journey.

Hey all!  I used this cool YouTube feature to create a playlist that has commentary videos from me between each released DA: Redemption episode. It will automatically play through from commentary-episode through episode4!  So hope you enjoy if you haven’t seen the eps, or just watch the commentary videos if you already have!

Episode 4!  We are nearing the end (and my favorite episodes which are 5&6, hehe) but this is a big turning point in the series because the traditional “Dragon Age” party has now been formed!  Four characters:  Mage, Rogue, Tank and DPS Warrior.  Well balanced, right?  (Except Josmael is a level 1 mage, erg).

I love the introduction of Nyree, Marcia Battiste is an AMAZING actress, she was absolutely who I pictured in this role when I wrote it.  I actually combed through hundreds of submissions and her headshot caught my eye outside the list that was actually scheduled.  I’m so INCREDIBLY meticulous about casting, i really feel like it’s never an actor who is bad in a piece, most of it is the casting.  Our casting director Helen Geier (from The Guild too) has a wonderful eye and is able to cull from HUNDREDS of submissions great choices to see for each role.  As a writer/producer, you can hear a dozen actors read the same script, and some will make you want to retire from embarrassment, and some will make you want to accept your award during your audition because you feel like you’re so brilliant, haha.  Same lines out of different actors’ mouth can mean night and day.

Some people have mentioned the accents of the characters a few times, especially Dragon Age fans. To me it was UBER important for the human characters to have British accents like in the game.  The Qunari in the game have always had neutral American-ish accents, and as far as I knew (before DAII was actually released) the Dalish had American accents too, from Origins.  They changed that after we knew better to Welsh, but finding Welsh actors would have been impossible anyway in LA so it worked out fine.

The cave scene is darker on YouTube than we actually have on the master files, we’re looking into why those scenes got darkened so much, it might be because of the YouTube upload.  So that’s just a technical thing we’re looking into just FYI.  The acting however, with me getting Nyree into the group, I just loved that twist.  I love how Saarebas screwed her over, and then the gold I stole from the Dalish in ep2 gets her on board.  It really pleases me, that story thread.

The inn is MY FAVORITE set in the whole piece.  OMG when@gregaronowitz showed me the designs (which you can see step by step on his blog now!) I was so geeked out.  Seriously, acting in a RPG inn in REAL LIFE has to be one of my top 10 dreams come true.  And having Tallis’ big backstory monologue was something I almost cut out, but it actually ties in REALLY nicely to the DLC piece of content you can play with my character.  In this and the DLC you really get the full flavor of Tallis (and for DA fans the easter egg that Nyree worked with Cassandra!  #highfive).

I can’t wait for you guys to see the beginning of next episode, you’re gonna flip!

I’m going to use the longer posting capabilities (on here and Google+ which DOES NOT have RSS haha) to express my irritation about people removing RSS as a way to subscribe to websites.

Basically I’ve noticed a huge trend not only in websites moving away from RSS to Twitter and FB, but REMOVING IT COMPLETELY! Personally, I feel like this is NOT a good move for people who provide content to stay in touch with consumers. Why?

-Twitter has no good way to filter information sources and brands from friends. Lists are really not useable, I don’t think a lot of people use them, and the UI has them buried so it’s a pain in the ass to get to them. People are HIGHLY selective about who they follow, and they’re not gonna throw a dozen small blogs in with their best friends’ updates or the experience of using the service become greatly diminished.

-Facebook is a mess for trying to sort “likes” and pages, I don’t see how having a MASSIVE unwieldy feed of constant centralized updates helps ANYONE disseminate information. I would say you could check 5-6 Facebook pages a day MAX for blogs you like who have pages there. That’s a far cry from the 200+ blogs I check every day in about an hour.

RSS is a way to consume a LOT of information very quickly, and STORE it in nice categories if you miss it. So I can catch up with a small blog’s output at the end of the week and, if I so choose, read EVERY article easily in one sitting. You think on Friday I’m gonna go browse that same site’s Twitter feed on their page (digging through all the messy @ replies) and see what they did that week?! Or go to their Facebook page that is littered with contests? No way dude, I’m too busy for that!

I feel like small blogs cut their own throat by taking away the RSS capability. I give this analogy a lot, but social media outlets are INFO COLANDERS! 5% of your followers will see anything you post, and that’s probably only within 20 minutes of posting. That’s the way it is and it’s gonna only get worse. Apart from email lists, RSS is the best way you can collect stuff across the internet to read quickly, and I am so irritated when that choice is taken from me.
/rant