Describing something as “sweet” is a very rare thing for someone like me. It’s a very feminine thing to say, you see, whereas I am an extremely manly man. It’s more my kind of thing to be outside fixing my pickup truck, or in my garage sawing some blocks of wood in half, or sat in front of a TV, scratching myself and grunting.

But even I – an extremely manly man – have to admit that QRP is a terribly sweet little game. A retrospective, autobiographical game, from an indie developer who evidently spent his schoolboy years pining after girls who were, like pretty little fluttering butterflies, always a little out of reach.

The game is one song long – that song being “Close to You” by the Carpenters, appropriately recreated in the cute and slightly sleazy sound of MIDI. To describe exactly what you do during that time would spoil the experience somewhat – but quite brilliantly, however you choose to play QRP, you will in some way come to understand and re-live what this person went through as a teenage boy at school.

It’s quite a funny experience, and also slightly sad. Play it:
www.wyrdysm.com/qrpgame.php

A couple of months ago I posted about a bunch of nice skate photos I took at Exhibition Park here in Newcastle. I said that I’d like to do something similar again sometime, but a little more ambitious, which I’m glad to have gotten round to last weekend.

This time it’s a little skate video (well, if you can discount the fact that there are barely any skateboarders), which you can watch on youtube by clicking on any of these thumbnails below, or the url:

   
(http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=acW6N2ZHQ7A)

Again, I’m pretty pleased with this – this time particularly because of what I used to make the video with. Whereas I should’ve been using a DV camera and some respectable video-editing software like Premiere / Final Cut, I managed to make do with my Canon Powershot S5 IS (a photo camera which happens to do 30fps, 640×480 video), and Windows (bloody) Movie Maker.

On top of that, I came back from the park feeling pretty underwhelmed with what I’d shot – it didn’t seem as most of it would be up to scratch – but after deciding on the Mr. Oizo track (M-Seq), it all (hopefully) came together surprisingly well during the editing process. Which was nice. It’s been a nice experience doing all the video stuff myself for the first time (shooting, editing, colour correction, cutting the soundtrack together), and I’m happy it turned out to be worth sharing on youtube at all. So hopefully, there will be more video to follow in the future.

(Another thing I’ve always wanted to shoot / make is some kind of music video. We’ll see how it goes – I’ve got bigger fish to fry at the moment…)