Friday 29 May 2009

Sound shaping.



After getting some good initial feedback from the rest of the group about the foley i gathered, it was time to put it through the editing process. Some of this was done whitle the main editing was going on and some before (i.e removal of any unwanted noises and the cutting out of the sound clip we were going to use. The rain sample that we got hold of was a very good sample of rain outside. It is clear, constant (it can be looped without any audible seams or reoetitive patterns) and of a good bit-rate. For the rain sound inside we used one of the filters in premiere (the low pass filter), this still preserved the same rain pattern but took out the high frequencies. This damping effect is very true to life and the results, i feel are impressive.










Other dynamics that were altered in the rain nooise was when the car goes through the rainy road in the first scene, the sound has been panned from left to right to give the illusion of speed. (I was looking for a doppler effect in the software but could not find one).


The sounds in the 2-d section are only that of the narration, because it moves so fast and it is supposed to be a memory, this means that all the stairs foley that i recorded was not used; this stopped thed final animation being too busy. Another problem that we encountered was the sound of absolute silence. In the narrative it has an inherant ammount of natural background noise. When we had to insert silences in the recording to lengthen it we ended up with the 'absolute silence' this was remedied by copying natural pauses in Winnies voice and inserting them in the silent places. This worked.






The main worries i have.




The things that i am most concerned about in the whole are if we have conserved the original message, and if the the tones of the whole post-production have not put too much of a distraction on the narrative.
On a whole i think we have conserved a large ammount of realism, all the rules of physics are obeyed, there are no talking animals and the like, and everythig seems to be behaving as it aught to.
We have also gone down the route of stero-typing. Everything you see is of no surprise and in some instances is even expected (such as the cup of tea and the knitting). Where the realism lets go is on the whole ambience of the room and the outside; and the fact that you are invited into a very personal memory in the form of a flashback. The depliction of this memory is slightly hazey and lacks the same colour of the 'real-life' scenes. This is supposed to say it is of a long time ago.
I hope it does and all my worries are unfounded, but for me to say whether we have succeeded in doing what we set out to do is a hard shout, familiarity can chuck your perception.

Wednesday 27 May 2009

The Hayle Pipeline continued...

As the time gets closer to the deadline for our animation to be complete i thought i had better put a few notes up on what has been going on in the group. The modelling and hand drawn 2d animation have been taking place at the same time; with the 3d animation we are making the shots a bit longer than needed so that we can paraphrase what Winnie is saying and emphisize the speach with the visuals. In this way we can generate empathy for her situation and therfor fortify the narrative.
The weather has been kind to us today in the respectof foley; we needed the sound of a car going thruogh a wet road; a hard sound to get if the weather is fine, but today it is raining, so we got our noise. The sound of the clock ticking has come from an old metronome; which gives a very audiable clear tick; and this will enable us to duplicate it and dumb it down a bit in the wave-form editor (it only has one click per second and we are after tick AND the tock).
Other foley has represented its own problems; such as the stairs when i only live in a flat, (we tried the stairs all round the campus but the reverb was wrong on every attemp). We got over this by finding a creaky floor-board in my flat and having my son (Jake) creep over it inching forward all the time.
We have decided against the rain sound in favour of having stormy skys; this now gives the impression that it has just rained in the classic sunshine and showers (cornish fashion).

Wednesday 13 May 2009

Storyboard continued.

Hello again;just been through the work that i have done on the storyboard and done some work on the colour correction. On some frames i got rid of the colour all together and also i have played around with the timing on the animatic. The main criticism i would level at the story is the lack of pictures of how the fermenting went on in the creeps celler. But on the other hand i think you can use your imagination, or maybe have some action arrows on the brewing equipment.

Tuesday 12 May 2009

Storyboarding.

I have made a start to the finished storyboard. It has been altered from the original draught, by that i mean the narrative has taken a turn. The old story; i felt was unsurprising, boring and had no twist or surprise at the end. I have remedied that. Lol.
This could be compared to taking a medical realist drama and plonking it firmly into the relms of urban horror/fairy tale (think Brothers Grimm meets the Candyman).
It is a shame that this narrative can not be made into an animation; but if i have time and the reception is favourable i may take it on in my own time (maybe over the summer).
The advantage of doing the storyboard digitally is the way it can be instantly inserted into an animatic and the ease of correcting any mistakes made in the continuity. This brings me on to the dis-advantages. The fact you cannot see the previous peices of work (i work off a single screen lap-top at home) can lead to deviation in line thickness, colour palet and character dress,etc.
This is the first bit of the storyboard before i made corrections.

The next phase is to see if the story is working so far; that is if the narrative is being carried forward at the right pace (remembering there is no sound at the moment).

Friday 8 May 2009

Hayle, continued.

There is an obsession with most of the groups to use sepia and mixed mediums for the Hayle animation. For me it just shows what a strong picture the words of the interviewees (?) put over. Also it highlighted the way that an animation can gain a lot of direction when the sound is made before the animation.
The team is getting on pretty well and i feel that the pre-production and prodution are well on the way. Because we are dealing with two different time-periods the look can be changed to suit. In our case we are using 2d for the older 1940's stuff with some hand-drawn animation. I feel that this has to be got on with asap as it could be quite time consuming. The 3-d stuff is being modelled as planned and the shading is being done by one person as planned.
Had fun moddelling a ball of wool in a wicker basket today; used two different methods. I bump maped the wool and made the basket out of separate straws. Both i feel went well, but i must make sure my images for the bump map are dark/light enough in future (so the bump definition shows up).

What do you want to see and hear more about?