AlexMuir

I own the course. As much as you can own a video these days!

We use photogrammetry for the block, head, dashboard and transmission. It's invaluable for these organic parts. Then retopologized.

BLENDER IS AWESOME.

The amount of things to do on this project is incredible. When I embarked I thought we'd shoot 'making of' stuff all the way, but the reality is that even filming the film is hard enough work - to film the filming of the film would just be too much. I'd like to go back at the end and cover how we do some things - we really learned a lot. The other reason it's hard to do a 'making of' is that I actually don't know how to do this stuff, so we'd waste a lot of time explaining how to do it, only to discover a better way two weeks later.

It's not finished yet! Maybe when it's finished I could charge more but at the moment I'm happy if I can just recoup some of the production costs each week.

You know what I discovered doing this! It looks more complex but there's not much chemistry or invisible magic here. It's all pieces of shaped metal that fit together and move when a piston is pushed down. In an electric car you've got chemistry that you can't see or feel, magnetic fields that are invisible and electron flow that is hidden.

I don't understand why everyone wouldn't subtitle their content. I used rev.com and it costs $1 per minute and the results are great. So to subtitle three hours cost $240. With many non-native English speakers as customers it is a no-brainer.

It's good to hear this too, because the text in that box originally said 'Filmed in 4K' and I only changed it to 'Fully subtitled' at the last moment.

Thanks, fixed ready for next deploy :)

We're making it all by hand because it needs to be relatively low poly for the app and website :) I'll write about the process when we've figured it out completely. I'd say we are about 70% done on the modeling. Rigging and animating is a whole other animal.

This was the state of the engine a few days ago - all internals are done. https://twitter.com/howacarworks/status/895417122385481728

I can't really share conversion stuff yet. But one interesting observation off the top of my head is that my customers MASSIVELY prefer paying with Paypal to Stripe, even though I deliberately steer them towards Stripe.

It was a massive pain to implement Paypal and I hated every moment of it but it produced an uptick in payments.

Absolutely :) There's a great porsche one too, and the most crazy of all is this one where they literally used an angle-grinder to erase a bike engine:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5CqeOXqtNxk

I can only imagine the amount of dust that created.

Feel free to submit it to /r/cars and reap the karma :) (Edit: Maybe wait a little! I'm not sure I can handle the front page of reddit too.)

Sorry. The last part is too strong. I take full blame for it - I made it myself on Friday night because I wanted to get this out before it burned up more of my time and limited budget. I couldn't face another week of delays while the end was put together so I just bunged a few videohive templates together and went for it. I will redo it on Vimeo because I can replace the video there, but sadly it's now permanent on Youtube and Facebook I think.

(This is one reason why I'm running Youtube through my own site - I can upload a new version and anyone hitting this link in the future hopefully won't be forced into a seizure.)

Thanks! The hardest thing is to try to remove multiple parts staggered over shots. Because the smallest distraction and you've forgotten which bolt you already turned and which needs to be turned more.

The honest truth: This whole car is headed for the scrapyard at the end because it's not worth the extra time ($$$ per hour) while we film to mark parts, directions, alignments etc. I mark things when there's time. We're also modeling the whole thing in 3D and I'm sure the guys doing that will be mixing the bolts and fixings up. I'm kind of interested in how well it runs after this reckless teardown and rebuild.

I'd never even heard of synthwave before I did spent 5 hours on Audio Jungle trying to find good music for this video. Now it's all I listen to while I'm coding.

String. Coat hangers. Bits of wire. Sticks as fishing rods. We tried various ways and in the end I mainly used some conductive cotton thread that I bought from Adafruit ages ago. It was strong enough to take a lot of weight, but nice and thin too.

For the heavy stuff I just had to hold it and then photoshop my legs and arms out.

It took 2,500 photos and 4 days to shoot, followed by about 8 days of photoshopping & grading.

No idea why you’re being down voted. I don’t see any significant change from the WWDC demo months ago so this can hardly be called a ‘reveal’

I'm not sure where I read this suggestion, but a couple of months ago I unfollowed everyone on FB. Now my newsfeed is basically empty - and my Facebook experience is much improved.

I highly recommend it.

What would be a good way to start meditating? Nothing too intense - just to dip a toe in.

I'm sure there's a point in on the adoption graph of any technology which should be labeled as "Used to generate PR buzz". Second Life, 3D printers, etc. My gut feeling is that it comes just before the mass realization that something isn't ever going to be mainstream.

How a Car Works: http://www.howacarworks.com Revenue from Adsense and iOS app salse. Profits around $2,000 per month.

I'm now working on a video series about how cars work which I hope will be a good seller.

Good luck using Sublime or atom over SSH.

I think a lot of the successful Social-Network-for-X apps hit a critical mass before FB groups became popular. It's going to be much harder to do that now because now Facebook for X is the X group on Facebook.

I know many small physical businesses who get almost nothing from their website, and a huge amount from their 10,000 followers on Facebook. Coffee shops, tradesmen, bars.

Facebook isn't a competitor to most B2B products, but it's defintely the Excel of the B2C world.

A little under $1 for every home in the US [0], so far.

[0] http://www.statista.com/topics/1618/residential-housing-in-t...

I'm interested in the mechanics of this because it seems to be a very difficult scam to pull off.

First they need to hack a tradesman's emails, then register a similar domain, then open a bank account in the same name (presumably using some fake ID), then receive the funds and clear them out of the account.

I think this is a great example of finding an unglamorous problem and then relentlessly executing on it. It's been a pleasure to watch.

- There is clearly an opportunity here and it's more work than simply writing a webapp, putting stripe on it and pumping VC money into Facebook ads. These guys have been doing the dull background work and that's a long-term slog, but an even longer-term win.

- Unlike a lot of startups, there's no clear acquirer on the horizon. I'd bet on a profitable business quietly growing into an IPO and then staying independent. I see some Buffett factor here!

Thanks for this write-up.

I was a somewhat inspired by Monograph when I started on Car Projects (a space for people to share their garage projects). I had seen Monograph somewhere a while back, and then when I wanted to find it again I'd forgotten the name and it was REALLY hard to find. Googling things like 'website for sharing physical projects' took forever.

I'll email you when I get closer to launch with Car Projects because I'd love to get your thoughts Moe.

That's definitely true. I'm completely hopeless at sales.

But I've contracted Google (via Adsense) to sell my ads. For which I pay them a ~30% commission. Conclusion: the Independent's ad sales team is a lot better at selling ads than Google's algorithms.