Welcome to the home of ViP's
Introduction
Welcome to the BST:ViP's website.
Battlestar Tales: Viper Pilots, follows the adventures of two less than average viper pilots as they conduct a relatively simple routine asteroid sweep. James "ARGOS" Simmons and Augustus "HERPES" Finchley are two draftee nuggets who just about made it through training, get put on the dagett's end of the pilot roster doing the missions no-one else wants to do.
Biographies
James "ARGOS" Simmons
Born and raised in a mining family on one of Caprica's lesser known city of "Dranka" in the industrial province of "Volska". It is note worthy that he came top of his class in applied biological consumable technology, James later went on to dig the mines of Dranka, mining that ever so precious Futilium ore. James still feels bitter that he wasn't allowed to continue his studies in fast food, and one psychologists' report stated: "James' problem stemmed from the constant lack of achievement, therefore it is safe to summarize, that he will not be positively responsive and quite frankly irritating until he gets a life..."
Augustus "HERPES" Finchley
Discovered abandoned by a religious Geminon family, Augustus spent most of his early years in a cupboard. This was not done out of cruelty, but in love, as Augustus had severe problems with aggression and spoke in tongues. Since the local community did not have an electrical supply and relied on live stock for transportation and commerce, therapy was not available. It wasn't until, at the age of 15, due to a purely coincidental piece of luck, that a young Guyus Baltar was on a university field trip in the area. Whilst Augustus' adopted mother was taking him out for a walk, he managed to slip his lead and came across the university party. The party stunned at the sight of this very angry young "wild" man talking gibberish, One student became alarmed. It was Guyus Balter who was the first to draw out his personal stun device and stun Augustus, with 30,000 volts of electricity. Whilst being unfortunate in one sense, in another, it cured Augustus of the control problem and he subsequently became a valued member of the local community. Although still a loner, he became well known for his honesty and bravery.
About the creation of ViP's
The idea for creating the episodes came from stumbling across the videomaker toolkit on scifi.com and discovering the freeware game "Beyond the red line". This gave us the engine and footage that was needed to create something.
Lunchtimes were pretty boring at work, so Tony and Steve would ponder questions and concepts often being called mad by their work colleagues. So the idea was born of creating a short machinima project about two bored viper pilots and the strange things can happen in space. Tony sat back at his desk and started penning the script.
The next few days in October 2007 where spent on creating a rough audio treatment. After the initial feedback, Tony contacted Darren to provide a voice over for Argos. Whilst Darren was put his mouth to computer (Eventually giving up on using his bluetooth headset and investing in a pc microphone) - Tony was busy with foley and atmospheric effects.
It was at this point, that the decision to include in-cab shots was taken, the audio was adjusted to reflect the changes. With the audio coming along nicely, attention was turned onto the graphics engine. Beyond the red line was chosen as the render software and fraps as the capture application. Fraps was set to capture at 720 x 480 resolution, and creating the initial shots used over 10GB of space! The render hardware was provided by James Gorman, a AMD x2 3.8Ghz machine, performed quite well indeed. The composition was done on Apple iMACs using Logic for the audio and iMovie 6 for the video.
Be sure to watch out for the DVD edition due out soon with extra features!
Updates
19/04/2008
A forum has been added so you can pop in and say Hi, and ask us a question. We'll be discussing the upcoming episodes and giving you the progress update in there. Feel free to click on Forum link at the top of the page, or if your too lazy, click here :)
23/03/2008
Happy to announce that Episode 2 is now done, and you'll find it on the episode page :) Due to limitations with YouTube, we've had to split the video into 2 parts.
30/01/2008
Episode 2 Teaser uploaded !
We've not far off finishing episode 2, however we thought we'd give you a little teaser to keep you going. You can find it on the episodes page.
19/01/2008
Happy New Year everybody ! Due to lack on interest in the torrent side of things, I've taken down the torrent site, thinking about it now, it was probably a bad idea as my ISP hates torrents, and my upload speed as kinda poor. So I've updated the download links.
30/12/2007
I've created a torrent tracker to allow you to download the high resolution version of "Pebbles". Shortly the mini DVD version will be added to the torrent site, with many added extras. If you would like to be kept up to date with new releases, we can add you to the list. Send an email to news@viperpilots.co.uk and we'll keep you informed.
29/12/2007
Episode 2 script is written and tweaked, good to go, website created.
28/12/2007
Episode 2 script is written and tweaked, good to go, domain name www.viperpilots.co.uk registered, and package setup.
26/12/2007
Due to getting bored of waiting for Darren to get up to speed on Flash, Tony pieces together an intro using BSG footage, and completes episode 1 pebbles and uploads to YouTube.
10/12/2007
After many hours of pulling his hair out, Tony finally gets the visuals how he wants.
30/10/2007
After many retakes, Darren finally got his lines right and the audio was finally finished.
19/10/2007
Theme tune was written and created to have that funky CHiPs style
10/10/2007
The first script was written for Pebbles
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