Wednesday morning, Kelly and I tested the online play and live streaming, and everything ended up working out great (see my previous post for info on the setup)! Be sure to check out the Carnegie Library of Pittsburgh Teen Media page on Friday, August 22nd @ 3:00 PM for streaming video directly from our Wii. We’ll be streaming the menu process as well, so if you catch us early you can see how to set things up.
Oh, and as promised, now you can watch the video of the Carnegie Library of Pittsburgh’s public “call out” to the teens of PLCMC, featuring Shing, Spig C, and myself on the mic:
or download the MP3.
To make the song, I used principles culled from the making music guides available at the Teen Tech Week site. Sound effects came from a mix of SoundSnap, JamGlue, small samples from the SSBB theme song, and a sample from the Super Mario 64 soundtrack. The whole project was assembled and recorded in Ableton Live, though there are a number of cheaper resources in the guide.
For the video, I took the character art from the Super Smash Bros site and used copious amounts of the magic wand tool in Adobe Photoshop to delete the backgrounds. I then took what was left and dragged characters into architectural photos of our library. If I needed to put a character in the background, I selected the part of the background I wanted to place in the foreground and copy and pasted it back over the character. With a few subtle shadows, gaussian blur, and some color balancing and saturation adjustments, the Carnegie Library of Pittsburgh was saturated with video game characters. (I’ll happily make a video tutorial about how to do this, if anybody requests it.) I then quickly threw everything together in Windows Movie Maker and voila!
The issues we were having with participation are now largely non-existent. We posted a call out on the blog and started getting a number of interested participants. What I soon learned is that there is a huge gaming expo & tournament going on the next day, at a local convention center. So when teens search for super smash bros tournament pittsburgh, they are finding our blog. I’m also going to do a last minute-post on our region’s SmashBoards tournament forum to see if we can drum up any more interest.
We’re about a week away, so I wanted to check in and let you know how things are going. Teens are really starting to coalesce around the concept, and we’ve been able to build a healthy team atmosphere here in our library.
Joseph Wilk
Carnegie Library of Pittsburgh – Teen
