Applied Animation 2 - Week 8

Recording Zap's voice

This week has mainly revolved around the assembling of the animatic with gathering and creating all of the necessary assets for it. Firstly, me and Luke rearranged bits of the content-driven narrative so that we discard the unnecessary parts and add in the character interactions. Once we had done that, we booked the recording studio for two days per 2 hours, 4 in total, seeing as we were unable to record everything during the first take due to performing voice tests. In the meantime, we simultaneously finished off the remaining animatic panels we needed to do so that we may have them ready in time for the final assembling of the animatic. Furthermore, as I had self-assigned myself to create the background ambient music, I had started working on it on Tuesday and kept adding to it and refining it everyday. By using my guitar with a digital direct connection through an interface, I messed around with all sorts of VST effects and filtered the organic sound so that it may exert a sci-fi cosmic vibe of ambience. Working in Mixcraft I found is a lot more effective for ambience pieces than in Ableton, partially due to the already pre-built VSTs that filter a grand proportion of the natural sound, making it seem as if it is almost purely synthesized. Seeing as both of us stuck to the schedule of the Gantt chart, we had everything ready for Friday where we spliced together the animatic. We ran into several conundrums while we were compiling it, one being that the totality of the narration was FAR too long - approximately 5 minutes. Thus, we removed all the unnecessary bits that added nothing to the flow of the animation and purely existed as cosmetics, which indirectly also complicated the flow of the narrative due to their verbal complexity - a mistake on my end. To narrow down the length even further we sped up the voicetrack - from 100 to 111 percent - which coincidentally gave it an even more alien-ish touch-up. We found that the soundtrack I produced fitted the animatic perfectly, and even more so had a moment where it synchronized with the movement - something that I can envision to happen in the actual animation. We interchanged in the making of the animatic so that we may simultaneously focus on other projects as well - I did the initial arranging, Luke did the shortening down, I did the sychronization and sound arrangement, and Luke the final touch-ups and effects, in that order. We are quite proud of the animatic although I believe that it is far from perfect, which is a perfect opportunity to raise questions from fellow peers and absorb their feedback on how we can modify the animatic or reflect a change in the final animation itself.

Animatic frames from the remaining panels