EPT
I’m not very good at multitasking in my personal life. From March to July I was focused on (unsuccessfully) trying to buy a house. We’re still looking. These days, despite oil still being so low, I’m crazy busy at work – working 12 hours per day and weekends.
Is Mana Spirits Dead?
Nope, not at all. Since my last blog (a long, long time ago) I’ve printed two new revisions of the cards. I’ve polished the rules, and played probably ~50 hours of play testing.
Next Steps
1. Make a “How to play” video.
2. Make a “Play through” video.
3. Short-term promotion.
4. Kickstarter launch.
State of the Game
Since the last time I’ve posted, minor changes have been made to the cards and rules. The biggest change was added a second way to win by starting your turn at the highest Hero level. The other way to win is still to eliminate all other players. This is something I suggested to my play testers about 18 months ago but they rejected it. Still, I’m trusting my gut. I think it’s important to have this other way to win because it offers a way for passive, defensive players to win. It also puts a kind of maximum clock on 5 or 6 player games, because they can tend to drag on. The game seems like it’s in a good place.
”How to Play” Video
I can’t explain why this took me so long, it just did. It’s the perfect storm of skills that I have no experience with: writing a script, filming, and video post-production. Working solo on something you have no clue on is a good way to ensure it never gets done, and that’s what happened. Finally, I managed to get the script written and the raw footage filmed last weekend.
The idea of the video is filming a top-down view of a table with fake situations while I narrate how to play. Simple enough I guess, but as I said, I have zero experience filming anything of quality. I borrowed a DSLR from my sister in law, and then started looking at how to film overhead shots.
It seems like there are two major ways: A tripod with an extending arm or a copy stand. Copy stands looked to generally be for close-ups, so it wouldn’t work for my set-up. I don’t own a tripod and I’m cheap, so the idea of using an extending arm for this one project seemed dumb. So I set out to make my own.
I stole my ideas from:
This Youtube Video
This Blog
Here's the plan. I resketched it up quickly to try to show what the plan was.
![[image loading]](http://i.imgur.com/mKnyUTN.png)
Original sketch. This is largely what we ended up making.
![[image loading]](http://i.imgur.com/exeCw36.png)
Cleaner version of what we bought.
I needed it to be tall, that’s why it’s so big. If you don’t need a 6 foot vertical, scale everything way down. I chose 2” PVC because it was solid and came with a lot of options for fittings. Guides online suggest 1” or ¾” Pex. It’s more expensive than PVC and more flexible, so we stuck with PVC. I needed the filming arm (black pipe) to be moveable. If I didn’t, I would have installed another small pipe tee and omitted the large pipe entirely.
The idea was to buy “large pipe” so the black tee could be slid up and down to change the filming distance. It was to be secured with a bolt and a nut. I considered drilling holes in the vertical pipe at various elevations to thread the bolt through.
In the end, we found there are two standards of PVC. One looked to be for vacuums, and another for plumbing? The pipes are both 2”, but for some reason the inner diameter of the plumbing pipe (black) is slightly larger than the outer diameter of the vacuum pipe (white). I don’t know why, but it worked out. The only 2” plumping caps we found were these orange test caps. They were extremely weak and caused a lot of problems for this project. If I was to do this again, I would buy another tee and use it to push the screw through.
![[image loading]](http://i.imgur.com/M7uZpKd.png)
All the stuff we bought. I guess PVC tees have flow directions? Today I learned… oil & gas tees definitely don’t…
It was about $30, and it definitely could have been $20 if I planned better. I already had a hand saw and vice grips. Note: This ended up being way too wide and I shaved the 24” down to something like 13” so this beast would fit in our tiny condo living room
![[image loading]](http://i.imgur.com/pPNg8i3.png)
Dry run of the fitting. It goes together super easily.
![[image loading]](http://i.imgur.com/g0llzAD.png)
The vice grips to hold the arm in place. There are probably 50 better ways to do this
![[image loading]](http://i.imgur.com/bTFoNQ0.png)
Here’s the cap assembly. You can see it’s super flimsy.
![[image loading]](http://i.imgur.com/pw5Mj00.png)
Here’s the assembly threaded on. This is not my camera, so I was extra nervous to do this with it.
If you make this, don’t use these kind of caps. Use another tee (as shown in the Blog I linked to). I thought a cap would be more appropriate, and maybe they are if you can find a more solid one than I could. But I'd recommend you just use a tee and you will save so many problems.
![[image loading]](http://i.imgur.com/uU3GZxu.png)
![[image loading]](http://i.imgur.com/SZCBzbH.jpg)
First test fit.
There are two problems:
1. The long runs of pipe with a heavy camera on the end make the assembly flimsy. If I had any sort of space for tools, I would have cut a 45 degree support to tie the arm back to the vertical pipe. Instead we ended up just jamming another piece of vertical pipe. This stopped and movement from bouncing and wind.
2. The cap is so flimsy that the weight of the camera pulls the screw down, angling the camera back towards the vertical stand. At this point I was just looking for quick fixes, so we used a paint stick to hold it back at the proper angle. Unfortunately, this fixed the angle in one plane, but twisted it two other ones.
Eventually we ripped that out and used a level and shoe laces to more or less center the angle of camera.
![[image loading]](http://i.imgur.com/zF9kGQh.png)
![[image loading]](http://i.imgur.com/7aQk4fi.png)
The Frankenstein creation that resulted. It actually worked pretty well
Here you can see everything is ready to go. You can also see the camera is very slightly angled forward. We were aware of it, but couldn’t fix it because tightening the shoe laces pulled the camera off-plane in two other directions. I doubt it will be noticeable.
![[image loading]](http://i.imgur.com/T18g8hB.png)
All done.
Here’s the final shot after 2 hours of recording in my hacked together studio (aka condo living room).
![[image loading]](http://i.imgur.com/6UapwNJ.jpg)
Raw Screenshot from the output video
Improvements
If I was to redo this, I would:
- Use 2" PVC. It's sturdy and cheap and has a lot of fittings.
- Build the size I actually needed, and not try to maximum the size for the materials I bought.
- Consider if absolute flexibility in filming height is a requirement. If not, I would just install a few tees up the vertical support rather than have vice grips.
- If flexible height is a must, build a 45 support to stabilize the arm.
- Use a tee or more solid fitting for the camera thread. If not, reinforce the area behind the cap with wood, at a minimum.
Overall I think it was worth it. Sometimes you finish a project and it worked so poorly you think "I should have just paid to get the professional version" but I don't think that's the case here.
