@Kitsune: give me a couple of years and I'll be chasing "those darn kids" off my lawn, too. I'm already working on my proper voice intonation :)
@Receptor: I wish I could say something awe inspiring, such as - "Well, the first two stories were handled by our team in Tokyo, and we shot half of the trailer with our team in New Zealand. But my favorite time was working with folks in Paris. Nothing like a fresh croissant in the morning as you head off to work." :) The reality is far more ordinary and probably not very different from most people producing iPhone apps these days.
Here is a condensed version:
I got my first Mac, a laptop, about a year ago. What I know about Objective-C and iPhone programming came from Apple's docs, although it took a while to get used to. Team-wise, I'm generally flying solo, but I have connected with others in the past to work on one-off projects.
The kicker is, most of the time I have no idea what I'm doing. Graphics? Hello doodles... Sound? Good thing the Mac came with a built-in microphone. And I sure enjoy banging various objects together above the laptop's keyboard while being surrounded by plush pillows to deaden street noise. Videos? I took a stab at my first digital video ever with the Doodle Blast trailer a couple of months ago. Everything I used to create it came with the Mac, including the music which was out-of-the-box GarageBand stuff. I learned a ton and I really enjoyed it, so I kept going and reading those tutorials on the net.
As far as equipment goes, I have my shiny little MacBook Pro, a simple tablet, a scanner, and a pair of headphones. And then, there is lots of trial and error.
This last trailer I had to face some interesting challenges - namely, a very reflective iPad screen. So, I dressed myself all in black and wrapped my head in a black t-shirt. I put a point-and-shoot camera on a tripod and shot simple video. The first go around, I realized that the ambient sound from the camera was unusable - too much noise. So I had to reshoot the footage, but this time I plugged a male-to-male microphone jack from the iPad directly to my laptop and recorded sounds from it at the same time as the camera was recording footage. That produced much better results.
Basically, I tinker until I feel I got it right. And from what I read on this forum, that seems to be the modus operandi these days. :)
