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Oculus has forgotten its reason to exist

Start with Why. Then figure out How. That leads to What. Never start with What.

Oculus kickstarted the modern, fledgling virtual reality industry – literally, on Kickstarter. VR has been around in various forms for decades. The Oculus Rift represented a major leap forwards and received massive goodwill and public support.

Fast forward to now and there are multiple players in the market. Most notably Oculus (now owned by Facebook) and the Vive from the odd pairing of Valve and HTC. But this industry isn’t like home video in the 80s – back then, home video was definitely going to happen. The format war between VHS and Betamax was daft, but it didn’t threaten the very concept itself.

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By Simon Jones, ago

I’m leaving FXHOME: here’s why

After 14 years, I’m leaving FXHOME at the end of this month.

14 is not an insubstantial number of years. One of my colleagues was 10 years old when I started working there. Back then, the Internet (and thus, the world) was very different. No Facebook. No YouTube. Google was still just a search engine. The iPhone hadn’t been invented. George W Bush and Tony Blair were getting ready to carve up the world. Nobody had seen the battle for Helms Deep. Half Life 2 was still two years away, as was Steam.

Anyway.
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By Simon Jones, ago

Heads Up: Riffing on Iron Man

Something I don’t think I’ve blogged about is my recent work at FXHOME on a Marvel-inspired campaign called Heads Up, designed to launch the new HitFilm 4 Express product. I ended up writing and editing a ton of videos, which have already nabbed over 204,000 views. A truly mind-bending stat.

Here’s the main sketch that everything hangs off:

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By Simon Jones, ago

Fierce Light & Dan Carlin: returning to WW1

Through most of 2015 I was listening to an enormously long audio documentary series about World War 1. It’s called Blueprint For Armageddon and is part of the Hardcore History show hosted by Dan Carlin. It has a very rambunctious intro, which might make you think that it’s going to be frilly and overblown. Don’t be put off – the show itself is nothing like its intro.

What you get is a six episode series, with each episode being about four hours long, in the form of a free podcast.

I’ll just let that sink in for a moment. We’re talking 24 hours of audio documentary. That doesn’t come around often. (more…)

By Simon Jones, ago

Feeling the chill: summoning the trolls

A recent video I produced and presented for the HitFilm channel was all about editing gaming videos. Pretty simple but useful stuff, presented in a nicely relaxed manner. Given the channel has a fairly diverse viewership, I wanted to have a brief overview that established the culture of online gaming videos for anybody unfamiliar with the concept. Here’s the finished video:

When scripting the episode I had a moment of weakness and it’s been irritating me ever since. (more…)

By Simon Jones, ago

Do Not Cross: my new game project

I’m contributing my writing to a game! This is exciting news. I’ve written novels and short stories, worked on screenplays for short films, created my own comics and worked on audio drama scripts but games development has remained elusive. They’re the exciting new frontier but share a similarity with filmmaking, which is that they’re really difficult to do on your own. (more…)

By Simon Jones, ago