1) What is your name? Where do you live?
Joel Yliluoma, and I live in Finland, the real home of Santa Claus.
2) How did you first hear of/get into timeattack videos?
Seeing Morimoto's SMB3 movie somewhere.
I went on to collect all of his movies (URL was at the end of the movie) and since I was unsatisfied with the ASF video quality and good quality video files were nowhere to found, I created them and put them all for public viewing. The nesvideos site was born. I
often create web pages with inspiration like that.
3) What about timeattack videos captivates you? What makes it worth spending many many hours creating them?
I like to see the characters perform superhuman activities. I don't care so much about the numerical limits of the game, but the actual performance of the character whom the player controls. This definition mostly applies to platform games. There are more aspects, but this is the easiest explained one that I frequenctly crunch to the one word: entertainment.
4) What is the process you use to start, plan, and complete a timeattack video?
Picking a game is usually invoked by curiosity.
Planning is usually driven by trial & error, and some expertise on how games work and what kind of exploits to try. Some calculation might be involved.
Completing is process of iterative labor. Movies get better and better by each attempt. It's important for the player to keep the eyes wide open and look for things that can be done better and things that might lead to new discoveries about the game.
5) Which timeattack video that you've created are you most proud of? Why?
Definitely Rockman (aka. Mega Man) -- it was the most gratifying result of a huge work. It shows something that nobody has done before, it totally surprises the watchers, it is full of action and all of the action is meaningful.
6) There seems to be some criticism/antagonism directed at the creators of timeattack videos. How do you explain this? Does this represent competing philosophies about how video games should be played?
I'm a hacker (person who likes to make machines do fancy things), and I promote creative work instead of being breastfed by the game makers.
Although I don't despise high physical skills and reactions, I value intellectual skill more than that, and that's why I see no problem with tool-assisted movies. We're not competing with non-tool-assisted players anyway. These are two different schools.
7) Do you consider yourself a film maker?
Yes I do. I think of the characters of the video games as actors and the player as a director. Given the script of the game (eh, save the world et cetera), the director has the hard task of making the movie interesting to watch.
Here. http://tracker.tasvideos.org/finalfantasy3-timeattack-jyzero-lowqualitysnapshot.avi.torrent (23 MB)
The quality ended up being a little lower than I intended, but it's still followable.