Dec 29, 11:00 am
It’s finally time to reveal the winner of the Gingerbread House Vote of 2011! As you may recall, I asked for your votes on what video game to theme my Gingerbread House on this year, and out of four great choices, you chose… ASSASSIN’S CREED REVELATIONS!
Pretty neat, huh? I had a blast making the gingerbread house and video, but at times it was quite difficult. Here’s a little bit of background on the project…
Be warned - baking gingerbread takes a long time. Each batch needs to bake for roughly 1 to 2 hours, so make sure you have plenty of games lined up to play while you wait. Also, you’ll probably need to use A LOT more flour than the recipe calls for...that stuff is so sticky, and it gets everywhere! You’ll definitely need a rolling pin to level out the gingerbread before you cut and shape it into gingerbread men, and remember: parchment paper is your friend, don’t bake without it!
After all the votes were tallied and I knew that Assassin’s Creed Revelations had won, I then needed to decide how to theme the Gingerbread House - Do I construct a building from Constantinople that is featured in the game? Should I nix the whole “structure” premise and instead build a gingerbread hidden blade that I can wear? I had many options, yet all of them seemed daunting. After much thought, I decided to create a traditional gingerbread world with an Assassin’s Creed twist.
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Building the house, creating the ambiance of the gingerbread world, and decorating the scene were all easy – the tough part was creating 3D gingerbread men! To make sure that these gingerbread men baked in the oven correctly, I had to create tinfoil forms that held them in place.
I wanted the reveal video to be as epic as possible, so I turned to my group of independent film friends for help. After some discussion, a plan of action, and a number of Amazon deliveries later, I had all the tools I needed to film this video.
Now if you can’t tell just from looking at it, that’s a full 10’ x 10’ green screen permanently attached to my dining room wall, complete with 6 ballasts with fluorescent lights focused solely on lighting the screen (when filming green screen footage, you want to avoid shadows at all costs). I also ended up getting 2 soft box lights (each with 5 lights in them) to light the gingerbread house, and even used additional lights to light me during my speaking part. If you’re interested in getting into green screen filming, I’d like to stress that you can never have too many lights.
For editing purposes, I used a pre-made Animus background by Jamie on YouTube. You can download and use this as an animated desktop background on your computer here!
After all that was in place, all I did then was film, edit, and release to the interwebs for your viewing enjoyment! Don’t get me wrong, this was a HUGE project to undertake, but it was super-fun every step of the way. Did I mention that I permanently attached a green screen to my dining room wall?
Happy Holidays and Happy New Year!!!
-Sabre
