1) What is your name? Where do you live?
My name is also Daniel (geez we seem to have alot of Dans here). I live in Alberta, Canada.
2) How did you first hear of/get into timeattack videos?
The same way everyone else seems to have. I learned about timeattacks when I saw Morimoto's SMB3 video, which caused me to search for more "speedruns" (not timeattacks, heh) and I found SDA. The thing that really got me hooked was the Metroid speedruns there. Metroid is my favourite series, and watching people full off tricks and obtaining times I had never dreamed of seemed amazing to me. Naturally this caused me to go back and replay the games with my newly learned moves. I eventually watched all the movies there, and thirsted for more, and came across this site.
3) What about timeattack videos captivates you? What makes it worth spending many many hours creating them?
As with feitclub, I the main thing that draws me to these videos is watching games which I have played in my youth. My favourite runs are those which make me go "Wow I didn't know you could do that!" or "Oh man it took me FOREVER to do that". I prefer the movies that don't abuse slowdown/save-states too heavily, and could TECHNICALLY be possible for someone to do, unlike a movie like Morimoto's Gradius movie. An example of this would be TheAxeMan's Jackel movie, where he just trucks through the game ignoring everything around him. Something you would never attempt to do when playing the game yourself, but is a blast to watch.
The main reason I started to make timeattacks was for enjoyment really. Mine, as well as everyone elses. I had some free time, and decided I would pick up a game and work with it. It's enjoyable to do, and other people out there will hopefully like the final product.
4) What is the process you use to start, plan, and complete a timeattack video?
Well, as i've just started timeattacking this is a very easy question to answer. I started out by thinking of a popular game which I enjoyed as a child. I came up with Ninja Gaiden as there wasn't a published run for it yet. I then went about learning about the emulator, and how to use it's tools. I toyed with that and produced a small section of the movie which consisted of the first level. I think came onto these forums, and found a thread for Ninja Gaiden containing some work from other people. I read the thread and compaired what was there to what I had done, realising that what I had done was not very good. It was a decent enough attempt, but I had done no prior research to the game at all, so I was missing out on some very important tricks and information which are very important to the run. I took the information from the topic, and also read about the game at GameFAQs to get as much information as possible. I then went back and redid the run, and added the second level. At this point my run was pretty good, and faster then any of the other two runs out there at the time. Though, as I played through it I found more things which could save time. So far I have done this 6 extra times, for a total of 8,which has taken an extremely long time as i've been playing through the game frame by frame. At this point, I decided that things needed to change, as I would go insane if I kept having to do the first acts over and over again every time I find a new trick which saves a few frames. I am now going through the game, doing one level at a time, and analysis each level before I record it a number of times.
So in short, now my method will go like this: Pick a game, research it fully, if I haven't already beaten it do so, and then research and record one level at a time until it's done. I will also probably be posting progress to get suggestions on this messageboard.
5) Which timeattack video that you've created are you most proud of? Why?
Ninja Gaiden I guess, but that is kind of by default ;p
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?
There sure is, although in my opinion their argument isn't really a valid one. Alot of them base their arguement on the idea that what timeattackers are doing is wrong because we are using software and hardware that different from the stock console to "cheat" and do things not possible on a console. This slightly bothers me as i've seen a number of legit speedruns that seem like they use rapid controllers to attack at a very fast rate, which also goes against this thinking. This is defended by the idea that it can TECHNICALLY be done on a normal controller, but I could also TECHNICALLY press on a NES D-PAD so hard breaking it during a run allowing me to push left and right at the same time, which causes some interesting glitches. The timeattackers aren't trying to compete with or steal the thunder of legit speedrunners, infact I have alot of respect for the guys. I think most of us think of what we are doing to be way different then what they are doing.
This animosity towards timeattackers isn't always the case though, some of the "great" speedrunners hang out with timeattackers and use our material to help improve their own runs.
7) Do you consider yourself a film maker?
I haven't though about this up until now, and thinking about it now i'm not really too sure. I don't think I do, i'm just someone in it for fun, the end result happens to be a movie.
