2015 – A look back

2015 was another ambitious year. I took on projects that there wasn’t time for, but I did anyway. And I loved them.

The two biggest ones were the Board James: Nightmare finale, and the Jekyll and Hyde trailer. Each of these projects took a few months each to complete, from pre-production to Post. Together, these consumed about half the year.

There were 8 Board James episodes, for the first time taking the front stage from AVGN, a chance to shine it never had before. This was the first time I put a big story arch into it, and thought of it as a season, as whole.

On top of that, I squeezed in 5 AVGN episodes, my favorite being the Seaman episode which may have broken the record for the most hours ever spent on the gameplay portion. There was also, of course, the 25 Bad Game Cover Art videos which were surprisingly much more time-consuming than they seemed.

There was the traditional Monster Madness, though 20 of them (of the 31 total) were the standard scripted format. I can’t forget that making 10 Friday the 13th reviews early in the year, set me behind schedule.

We kept James & Mike Mondays going, making time to play 52 games for every Monday of the year. On top of that, there were many other gaming videos, including ones with Bootsy, Doug and others.

There were lots of miscellaneous movie reviews, the Batman 66 tribute, the Turner Classic Movies tribute, spontaneous movie reviews like Jurassic World, Creed, Star Wars, the Back to the Future 2 future date, and my own retrospective on my own film A Night of Total Terror (1996), and others.

I made time for a few convention appearances, such as PAX East for the first time, TooManyGames, Comic Con, RetroCon PA, Retro Gaming Con NY.

In addition, there was lots of technical maintenance this year, behind-the-scenes. I learned lots of new software, with lots of frustrations coming with it.

I’m happy with everything I did, but with a personal note to myself, I must be reminded that it was a big sacrifice to my own personal time with my daughter and family, and I don’t want to run into that problem ever again. In order to get the videos done timely, I had to work without ever stopping or communicating much with the outside world. My new year’s resolution is to find balance, while still keeping the Cinemassacre machine going strong in 2016.