Saturday, March 13, 2010

Moving the blog

Have moved my blog over to my own domain.

Sound

The more I learn about Audio, the more worried I am about recording the dialogue and SFX. I've joined a few online forums and made some contacts. The consensus is that I have acquired a good lightweight setup but the advice I am getting about processing is using terminology and jargon that is foreign to me.

The general advice is that I should only record one character at a time. So now I have a spare Mike stand and Pop filter - anyone want to buy some as new gear off me :)

More changes

Heavy on the critiquing, I have had lots of more detailed feedback from various sources including the author of the original story. Yes - more changes - not huge, but they do make sense. (Well this is a learning experience for me).

One of my mentors (Chris) has strongly advised that I actually complete a storyboard BEFORE completing the Animatic. It appears that I may have got lost in camera placement and timing before sorting out what it was I actually wanted to capture. Chris gave me some of his ideas in storyboard format for the first and second scene and I will try to emulate this effort. I didn't bother with the storyboard because of my drawing skills (I had thought I would be concentrating more on the drawing that what it was that I wanted to capture) but Chris showed just how effective they are even with very basic drawing.

Wordpress and Blogging

I'm in the process of setting up Wordpress on my own domain so may move this blog over to my domain. I'll keep you up to date as this occur.

Sunday, March 7, 2010

Animatic - 2

More work on the Animatic and have completed Scenes 1, 2 and 3. Packaged, uploaded and off to my Critics for review. The process is getting a little easier and I finally (hopefully) know what I am doing :)

Animatic

Spent all yesterday trying to add rough sound to my animatic in progress. The software I was using either didn't offer any tweaking to the sound or didn't allow real time playback.

As it turns out, ScreenFlow, the screen capture software I bought for the Mac, does all this and what took me 7 hrs with the other software took only 15 minutes with ScreenFlow. Good job I found out now and not at the end of the process!

Saturday, March 6, 2010

Sound

OK, just gone the 'whole hog' and purchased some 'lower end' recording equipment for dialogue, foley and SFX. What amazed me was the RRP/list price for all this equipment. A recorder and microphone for over $1300. What further amazed me, thankfully because my boss at work is a musician, is just how much the equipment prices are marked up. In the end I got $700 off the list price..... Yes, I paid less than 1/2 the list price (that's also the manufacturers RRP/MRP).

So what did I buy? Well I have a Zoom H4n recorder and a Rode M3 Microphone.

Zoom H4n: http://www.zoom.co.jp/english/products/h4n/
Rode M3: http://usa.rodemic.com/microphone.php?product=M3

Originally I thought I would capture my sound via the iTouch. The iTouch is a digital recorder and my tests were promising but when you compare it to the 'proper' gear it is chalk and cheese. I test recorded my dog barking indoors in a noisy lounge room with TV on, A/C and noisy water pump going and human voices coaxing the dog to bark. All that I could hear in the playback was the dog barking - even between barks the recording was quiet and at 24bit/96khz, the playback freaked out the dog :)