This is the first episode of Frank and Dale. Enjoy!

We'll be releasing a new episode every Friday, so stay tuned by subscribing to one of the feeds at the top of the page. We should have a Windows Media Video feed by the end of next week.

Tell us what you think, what should change, and what should happen next.

Frank and Dale meet a new friend, and find that the situation in Normandy isn't exactly what you'd consider as standard invasion operating procedure.

Over the last week or so I've made a few improvements to various things.

First off, there's now a Windows media feed at http://www.frankanddale.com/wmv.xml, which is also listed at the top of the page with the QuickTime and iPod feeds. Note that the QuickTime version of each video is always the highest quality, due to the hoops I have to jump through to get the iPod and Windows versions encoded.

Next, I finally found a way to remove all the game artefacts from the screen, there's a console command which removes everything except the actual 3D modelling and the green target circle used for movement destinations. Originally I was having to orientate the camera so that all the little blue selection tags that each unit had over them, were out of shot, which was very time consuming, and limited the sort of angles and framing I could do. From now on, about half way through episode 3 and onwards, I can pretty much "block" most scenes (position and move characters) as the shooting script dictates.

Speaking of blocking, all the movements are done in single player mode, so there's only one version of the game running, and all the blocking is done on that one machine. The editing is therefore pretty important to maintain the continuity of movement. None of this easy multiplayer blocking here! Yeah I know, I'm making it hard for myself. No matter.

And finally, I'm still not doing many close ups, because the mouth movements are all hand edited, and not too realistic. Hey, I'm not an artist OK. It will get better over time, but for now there's very few.

Frank and Dale come face to face with Fear.

Frank and Dale discuss their predicament.

This was supposed to be a much longer episode, but an impending house move has intervened. Please consider this episode and the next, as two halves of the same written episode. Make sense? Now, back to the house move...