Rintel Family House Tour

Rintel Family House Tour is a virtual tour of the Rintel family house from 90 Has No Secant. It was produced in the fall of 2008, in keeping with Streaming Media Production class with Connie Morcom at Ferris State University. It was also a part of the 90 Has No Secant official website, which was produced for class at the time.

Content
The show begins with a shot of the house's facade. The camera dollies in, going through the front door and ending up inside the living room. Several angles are shown, in order to give viewers a very clear sense of direction with where things happen in the book as it was originally written. The immediate hallway between the living room and utility room is depicted next, with descriptions of which events happened there. Several angles of the utility room are shown next, complete with descriptions of story-relevant details. Next, a panorama is given of Mandy's bedroom. The other hallway, which leads to the kitchen, was depicted next. A short amount of time was then spent showing off the Rintels' kitchen, which features in only one chapter. Since almost no events happen in Tom's room, it's skipped over.

A 1st floor layout is shown, explaining where the garage and other items are located, before moving on. A 2nd floor layout is given next, showing that there is a large hallway in the upstairs with an entrance to the master bedroom and to Eva's office / game room. There's also a ladder leading to an attic. The office room is given a brief overview, before moving on to Rick and Eva's bedroom. Eva's closet, where the snails attack Lenny, is also shown up-close. Two major angles are given of the upstairs bathroom, showing how Lenny is almost killed by flying Landana debris that comes in through the window. The attic, where Rick has left his transceiver, is also shown off. The transceiver ends up being the device that saves everyone, similarly to how the book Hatchet ends.

Finally, the video ends by showing off the Rintels themselves, and thanking viewers for watching. A few ads for The Dozerfleet Forum and other Dozerfleet entities were provided in the original release, before the video came to a complete close.

Visuals
With the exception of a photo at the beginning and a few Dozerfleet graphics (made in Photoshop) and the title card graphics (made in Premiere,) all other graphics were made with The Sims 2 and its expansions. There was some heavy addition of custom content as well, including custom floors and a wheelchair mesh for Rick. The house model was based on a similar house model originally designed in The Sims Deluxe. Both models were, in turn, inspired by memories of 415 65th St. in Kenosha, WI. However, the model houses turned out to be significantly larger in size than the house they were based on. Also, since the story took place in Louisiana, there was no basement in the models. Instead, a utility room was created to take the place of a basement. Otherwise, visuals were based on the 2005 shelved edition of 90, with character designs harkening back to the initially-inceived 2002 version.

Music
Due to not knowing about Incompetech.com at the time, and unable to produce sufficient music bed through Dozerfleet Records at the time, and due to the limited audience expected for the video, its initial release was embedded with the end credits to The Ring. Not only was this deemed appropriate mood-setter for the type of story that 90 is, but the tradition of alluding to music from The Ring harkened back to at least 2005's Wireless: AAO.

Distribution
Shortly after its release for class, the video was also released to the Dozerfleet Channel on YouTube. It remained one of several videos to receive little-to-no recognition, as sillier stuff like Wizard of Oz Rangers hogged the spotlight. As it was in need of several repairs to grammar and usage, as well as being in need of a new soundtrack to avoid copyright issues, it was pulled in November of 2012 and placed in Ivan's Vault.

Reception
The project was a video, which was embedded into a website as part of a streaming media exercise. The end result was a website promoting 90 Has No Secant as a book, and also selling its shelved-for-development sequels Cursed is the Ground and The Natural Logarithm. The website that came about after all work was completed astounded classmates, especially in regards to the fact that only the streaming video part required Dreamweaver.

Everything else was done from room #207 of North Bond, and involved Visual Web Developer Express 2008. Classmate Nathan Wood, who struggled to develop his website for class at 13 MB in size before a single video was added was more than a little envious of how the much-more-feature-packed 90 website, before video, was a meager 2.53 MB in size, requiring no more than two floppy disks to hold everything. Classmates were also envious of the end results knowing that most of the site was constructed by playing directly with source code, whereas the WYSIWYG tools in Dreamweaver were heavily utilized by others in class. Connie herself liked the project enough to warrant an A- for the class grade final.

Envy and resentment from the class over this project were not a first-time experience. The B- grade in Computer Systems for Video was the result largely of Connie misplacing students' assignments. However, the class grade was not made worse because what did survive was of some quality. The Trapezoid Kids got their own website in that class. And that too led to class envy for the efficiency of its design. Assisting John DeBruyn in the spring of 2008 with designing a DVD cover for Tales of the Past III also yielded more envy and resentment than praise. While John struggled to gain an efficient design using Photoshop CS3, the Dozerfleet founder was able to design a better cover....using Photoshop ELEMENTS 1.0! Like with the predecessors, the 90 Has No Secant Official Website became a lesson in why showing off has its downsides.