Name: ika
Notable Work(s): ikas quake tutorial guide ep 6 : what monitor to use in QUAKE? and other gamer gear, Quake Champions: How did we get here?
Tell us a little bit about yourself, your background, interests, etc.?
Are you self-taught or have you taken formal classes on editing?
What software do you use?
When starting a project, what is your approach like? Do you have a specific workflow?
What has inspired you in your work? Are there specific movies or moviemakers that changed the way you approach your own work?
Which of your own projects are you most proud of? Which do you think were most instrumental in your development as a moviemaker?
There is a range of game movies in terms of editing styles and structure. Some you could call some "old school" (minimal editing) and then there are very elaborate projects with significant amounts of editing. Where do you think your movies fall? In your opinion, is there an ideal balance between editing and content?
What do you think the future holds for game movies? Are there new styles/techniques possible?
What advice do you have for new moviemakers?
Any last comments/shoutouts?
Notable Work(s): ikas quake tutorial guide ep 6 : what monitor to use in QUAKE? and other gamer gear, Quake Champions: How did we get here?
Tell us a little bit about yourself, your background, interests, etc.?
I didn't own a computer until 2012. I started playing quake during 2014, before then I would just play Minecraft and my N64 console, mostly Goldeneye 007. I like programming a lot and spend a lot of my free time programming now, more than ever, but I used to play Quake a lot more. I like game engines and programming, and old-style FPS games since the gameplay is a lot nicer, I have been playing HLDM and Quake 3 when I find the time to still play them.
Are you self-taught or have you taken formal classes on editing?
Sometimes I would play CS 1.6 with my friends and I would record demos and make movies about it in windows movie maker, and so I made some movies about that. I pirated some better video editing software (Vegas Pro 2012) which is still the only editing software that I really know how to use. I made a lot of videos with it that aren't frag movies, in 2014, but sometimes I would make very small videos of my quake gameplay in Vegas, it was always at 3 in the morning or something.
Then I started posting on ESR and I decided that I can submit a frag movie, because I have some cool stuff. I strung all of those movies together, the ones that were about quake, and I posted it and people thought it was funny, it was the movie "Fragged by IKA 2014" which is still a big favorite for me. This is basically how I learned editing, by making frag videos and other videos for my friends.
What software do you use?
I used Windows Movie Maker but now I use Sony Vegas. When I want to edit images I use Paint.NET to edit them. I captured all of my stuff with OBS and WolfcamQL, and I also use ffmpeg a little bit to convert between various formats.
When starting a project, what is your approach like? Do you have a specific workflow?
I never started or finished a project in a coherent way, I just make various parts of a project and I add them onto each other, I end up sitting down and making something stupid late at night and eventually it can get longer. Eventually I have a few minutes of video like this. Some videos were coherent because they were supposed to be tutorials and those ones I just worked on one part at a time until I felt like it covered enough topics, that's why the configs look all different at each part, you can notice it in my videos how things don't have any consistency because I recorded them and edited them at different times.
What has inspired you in your work? Are there specific movies or moviemakers that changed the way you approach your own work?
There are probably movie makers that I thought a lot about, if I have to think of what kind of frag movie that I looked up too it would have to be Ace Dauntless and his frag movie: Spooky Fragin (Quake Live/CPMA Montage) which I saw before I had ever made a "real" frag movie, also since I had installed quake live and not felt a lot of interest in it, he made a post on an image board I was going on that made me give it another chance and is really the reason that I got into playing quake... I also liked a lot the frag movies "Das Ulbe", all of them since they were also very nice, I remember a lot of people compared my early movies to it.
Which of your own projects are you most proud of? Which do you think were most instrumental in your development as a moviemaker?
I considered the movie that I made which is called: "ikas quake tutorial guide ep 6 : what monitor to use in QUAKE? and other gamer gear" to be my best quake movie out of all of the frag movies that I made, I haven't been able to make a better one yet but maybe some day I will make one that is better.
I also very much like "Fragged by IKA 2014" a lot just because of how it is edited. It's done in a way that I can't really do anymore just because of how I was editing videos and playing quake, it reminds me a lot of that year and I think that I don't know how to work like that anymore, but maybe some time I can find out how to get that editing style back.
There is a range of game movies in terms of editing styles and structure. Some you could call some "old school" (minimal editing) and then there are very elaborate projects with significant amounts of editing. Where do you think your movies fall? In your opinion, is there an ideal balance between editing and content?
I think that my videos have "old-school" (bad) editing, but also the editing carries the videos a lot and there isn't really a lot of content beyond the bad editing, this is also why it is kind of hard to make videos in this way, because you have to carry the entire video with editing that can never look coherent. So maybe it has the old school style of editing, with no real content? In that way the content is just the bad presentation. Maybe the problem is, I spend too much time thinking about it.
What do you think the future holds for game movies? Are there new styles/techniques possible?
I don't know what the future will be like, I notice a lot of game movies have the same style and even though you can see it evolving like in CSGO movies, I don't think it evolves in an interesting way if I can't tell some frag movies apart from each other. If I look at a movie by wntt I can tell exactly that wntt made that movie even if nobody put his name on it, it's distinct, but a lot of other movies I couldn't tell who made them. So I think that as long as someone is being distinct, and taking the frag movies in a direction that it people aren't framiliar with, it's cool, but I get bored of movies that are the same, most of the time.
What advice do you have for new moviemakers?
I don't know any new movie makers who want " advices" from me, I just think, don't take stuff as seriously, have fun I guess? If you want to make movies like me, stop thinking about it too hard (sleep deprevation helps a LOT making these movies, I can't do it without that mental state).
Any last comments/shoutouts?
I want to shout out Fizzle, I know we talked about making something together but unfortunately we never did get to do that, it was pretty cool though thinking of ideas.