About Us
We are the Janus Syndicate, a community that first formed in November of 2005 around a few source mod communities. We’re basically a group of college-aged kids that play a lot of online games, mostly focusing on Half-Life, Half-Life 2, and all related games and mods on the engines made by Valve.
While more people began to circulate and become regulars on our JS Ventrilo server setup, forums, and the now-offline game servers, an interest in creating Machinima videos formed (Machinima is making movies in a real-time 3D environment, such as using PC games to accomplish something you normally wouldn’t use the PC game for). We began creating shorts and sketch-based videos, mainly with the Goldeneye Source HL2 modification (Which Xanatos was a PR developer of, doing numerous interviews and creating two quick trailers for their beta release).
Our machinima videos are Half-Life 2 related comedies, shorts, parodies, homages, and more. It’s like Tim & Eric style stuff for a more niche audience, like source gamers. A lot of our earlier videos were created almost entirely as inside jokes made for small forum crowds, while our recent stuff is more well-rounded. It’s pretty much all R-rated & NSFW content with a prerequisite to the video usually being that of knowing the video game platform/game modification the video was made with. It’s not necessary, but it probably helps. I love movies, too. You’ll find plenty of references to a lot of older and more contemporary films. But beware of the nature of the content. It’s a lot of cussing and blatant buffoonery. They’re not all like that though. Actually, yeah, they pretty much are. See our videos page for a full listing of what machinimas we’ve made in the past, the present, and works in progress.
In September of 2006, we started expanding our early machinima agenda, first by releasing the humorous and satirical guide called Counter-Strife: Noob’s Guide to Counter-Strike Source, based off an old article on Somethingawful. The next big project after that was Dirty Garry, a spoof of the 1970 film Dirty Harry with Clint Eastwood set in a mock garrysmod roleplay environment, which placed third in the Condemned contest at Machinima.com. Another video which placed third in a similar contest prior to that was a Goldeneye Source frag video entitled Jaws Frag Rampage.
Since 2005-06, We have made a total of over 35 machinima videos – including a 39 minute Garrysmod video that is a spoof of Stanley Kubrick’s Dr. Strangelove set in Half-Life 2, a 18 minute Team Fortress 2 video comically set in the wild west, we won first place in both Judge and Audience categories at the Ivy Film Festival Machinima competition with a machinima entitled Half-Life 2 Anxiety (Hitchcock meets HL2), and accepted an offer from Machinima.com to be a part of their “Director’s Program”, in which our work can be found on their website and youtube page. We have since reuploaded a majority of our videos originally made in 2006 onward to their channels.
Some of the other videos we have made more recently include the viral hit Counter-Strike For Kids with a viewcount over the five million mark, the Source Mod Todd and Gman Squad series, Soldiers of Misfortune, Source Wars, and more. We have a steam community page and a facebook group as well.
We hope to now expand into a full-blown community with plans for game servers and an active forum for machinima and gaming. If you’ve seen some of our videos, you probably can guess how we usually act on something like an internet message board, so again, leave seriousness at the door, enjoy it, and laugh.
A little more about me and how I make the videos. I record game footage using a program entitled FRAPS. For more CPU-demanding shots in some videos, I sometimes use (a term that has been coined in the Garrysmod community) what’s called the Source Recorder method, which is hardwired into the Half-Life 2 engine, and with it you can create a batch of .tga files and render the frame as one continuous video using a program like VirtualDub, which is freeware. Using this method to record .avi footage from a game is free and efficient, but tedious. I edit my videos with the Sony Vegas software. I like using Audacity, another freeware program, for simple audio editing and recording lines of dialogue to be used in videos.
Check us out on Youtube and take a look at our videos. They’re located in the Favorites box on my page. Each video in my favorites box is a portal to my uploads on the Machinima.com YT Channel, so that’s the place to look.
CONTACT US:
You can contact me about anything by emailing me at cexanatos[at]yahoo[dot]com, or by messaging me on facebook or youtube!
-Xanatos
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