Hi. I'm Ian Chisholm

I always wanted to tell a story… One day, a lifetime ago, I was putting together some video footage of a friends blue car hooning around the landscape. Whilst trawling through all the special effects that EditStudio provided, I came across Chromakey – also known as Bluescreening. Hmm, thought I, his car is blue, this looks interesting… I reached for some non-car footage knocking around on my PC and found a long warp sequence from Eve online. I put it onto the side of his car and was stunned by how it looked. It’s not that it looked good, far from it, but as a test of a special effect, it looked…. promising. Wheels turned in my head, and thoughts arose along the lines of – “I can bluescreen Eve footage onto anything. What about using HalfLife 2 to build the bridge of a spaceship?”.

A quick, dirty, exciting, and frantic technology test later and I had a crude bridge interior looking out past a gas giant and towards a station in Oimmo. It worked. My arm hairs stood on end....

But if it was really to work, things need to be done properly. A script. Voice actors. Camera work. Figuring out how to use the Source SDK to achieve all this. Planning like I’d never done in my life before. It was a lot of unknowns, and a lot of work (how much I truly didn’t realise!) but the payoff could be that I could finally tell a story…

“How hard can it be?” became the watchword of the EveLife project. Quite hard indeed, as it turns out. The filming is such a small part of the process – consider even the logistics of it all. I needed to work out file naming conventions and folder structures for video clips, sound effects, maps, sets, voice acting sentences etc.. Dull but necessary when dealing with 150gb of video footage, a thousand sound clips, and a myriad of texture files and other miscellaneous junk. Bear in mind as well that these manifested themselves over the course of nearly two years, so in order to avoid a morass of confusion and inconsistency, and the time and work loss that results from it, I had to plan. Plan, plan, plan. It was over 12 months before I actually started recording anything that could be classed as ‘finalised’. Learning the SDK tools took up a lot of that as well, developer tools by developers for developers means an unintuitive user interface, bugs, hidden or broken features, and not a lot of documentation.

Finally, after about 18 months, I had worked past all the unknowns and the showstoppers, and figured it was all going to work. Oh, and I wrote my first ever script in the midst of that as well. It was always written as a ‘pilot’ episode, and that’s an interesting challenge in itself – exposition, character development, introducing the universe, and building a story and subplots, all juggling with it actually being interesting to watch, even if you’ve never heard of Eve Online before. Still, in at the deep end, eh?

All along I was doing all this as a creative outlet for myself and a bit of fun with my friends. I was very emotional when it was finally finished. It was a long journey and a made a couple of personal sacrifices to get it done, but it was worth it to me there and then, even before anyone else had seen it. I was happy, but certainly wasn’t going to do another one. Good lord no. Too much of my life had gone on this, time to do something else.

Then I uploaded it to Eve Files… I had imagined something like 15 responses, saying it was ‘different’, but that would be about it. I worked out it took roughly 1,500 hours of my time to make, and it ran for about 40 minutes. So I figured if it got 2,500 downloads then as much time was spent watching it as I spent making it, and I’d be happy. That number felt like a bit of a reach to be honest, but hey, I’d been setting my sights pretty high all the way through this, why stop now.

We cracked 2500 downloads in under 48 hours.