Since around the beginning of this year, on and off, I’ve been trying to wrap up the third part to my HALF-LIEF series...

And it’s safe to say that I’m over it in many ways.

After drafting and recording each scene, I realized that I bit off more than I’m willing to chew. It’s been evident for a while now, but I’m finally putting the project aside for my own reasons.

Recording all the footage was its own beast. Being a perfectionist, many scenes each took hours to achieve the movement/events that I wanted. When I was converting the demos (replays) to videos, much of the in-game audio needed to be muted or isolated for editing, and the game had to be restarted each time I applied a change to any of the sound files. Plus, I had to ensure that the EAX sound effects were still on, since the feature often didn’t work if I alt-tabbed out the game or simply did not cross an acoustics trigger within the map. These issues were just a few of the main hurdles that I had to fight through for the series to retain its quality, at least.

Once I recorded all the footage and headed into the editing stage, I quickly discovered that there was still a whole lot more work to do in many areas, mainly the flow. Some shots didn’t flow into each other very well, some audio needed to be rerecorded, and some video files had visual artifacts (a glitch with NVIDIA’s ShadowPlay that happens a bit too often). That’s just the main issues.

Overall, though, something about the project’s results feels off, as if something is missing, and I still haven’t figured it out. (Fun, maybe?) It’s just doesn’t carry the same immersive vibe as the other two parts.

Still, as weary as I already was, I tried to work through it. Re-edited entire sequences, rerecorded videos, isolated more audio for whatever reasons... But it came to a point where I couldn’t bring myself to open up the editor for it. Being restricted with free time due to real life responsibilities doesn’t help, either.

And when I found myself completely drained and unmotivated to continue (months ago), I tried recouping and finding inspiration/motivation by browsing Half-Life-related content, such as the Half-Life subreddit and Twitter accounts... to no avail. Hell, I couldn’t even find myself interested in the Half-Life series for the most part.

It’s funny how counterproductive forcing yourself onto a project can be. Not only did it make me neglect and nearly resent the project, but it also shut down my creativity nearly all together. I haven’t played with photography or photo-editing in a long while now, nor have I been writing any ideas down like I usually do. Every time I drift off into other ideas, I’m reminded of this mess of a project and feel guilty for taking so long to complete it for my followers. To put it simply, this project is holding me back from adventuring into other ideas.

With all that said, I'm shelving part 3 of HALF-LIEF for now, potentially permanently. I understand if this comes as a disappointment.