Month: October 2015

Sound Project.

Posted on by trick1979

Tutor: Danny Kaye                                 Start/End date: 20/10/15 to 27/10/15

Brief:

Two people in a room and one reveals a secret to the other. This is a sound only project with no visual reference. The composition should contain a minimum of 3 tracks, be no longer than 3 minutes and should include Foley and sound Fx.

The Team:

For the sound project we were once again asked to get into groups. This time around i teamed up with Jamie Fox, Clare Mephan and Edward Bennett. I have previously worked with both Clare and Jamie on my Foundation degree but working with Ed would be new to me. As it turned out Ed was a fantastic team player and asset and the whole team really enjoyed working together.

Initial ideas:

We all sat down and discussed a number of scenarios for the project. These included a couple (possibly married) arguing over a secret, an office/corporate business scenario and a gangster interrogation that ended with an execution.

We felt that the idea of a couple seemed far to obvious and we were worried other groups might also go with this, the corporate business/office scenario lacked scope for sounds and would have consisted mainly Phones ringing,  voices mumbling and would generally have been uninteresting. So we decided to pursue the Gangster Scenario.

We discussed the possibility of comedy and a much lighter approach but unanimously decided to keep the scenario dark and serious. We felt by doing this the emphasis would be on the sounds as well as the characters and not just the latter. We also wanted to make the composition haunting and chilling and felt this would be more fun to create.

The decision to go with an Italian Gangster theme was made simply because the accents were the easiest to try and imitate.

Research:

That evening I went away and looked at some Videos on YouTube for research purposes. I emailed the first of the two to the rest of the team for inspiration.

Email pic

WatchMojo.com., 2014. Top 10 Serious Movie Interrogation Scenes [online]. YouTube. Available: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-bo5F0GBfAE. [Accessed 29 October 2015].

Paul ClipMaster, 2014. The Sopranos – Tony gets in everyone’s face [online]. YouTube. Available: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g0YwfPNXUjQ. [Accessed 29 october 2015].

Scripting:

We all met at the Boots library and created a script. It centered around a captive gangster being questioned by a rival gang member about where to find his Boss. The end secret would be that the prisoner is in fact the boss and was playing his enemies all along, at which point the interrogator would realize all too late and be killed by one of the prisoners henchmen sneaking into the room. The setting for the scene would be an old abandoned warehouse on a dock.

Creating the sounds:

We booked one of the sound booths at the Waverley building and over a couple of 3 hour sessions used Adobe Audition to record everything. I did the voice for the interrogator and Ed the prisoner. we all took great care in composing and editing the project.

Foley sounds included Jamie creating a dripping water noise by flicking his cheek, me falling and crumpling to the floor to create the effect of being struck and killed and slapping noises which would later be replaced by royalty free punch effects from the website Freesound.org. We combined our own grunting noises with these punch effects to get a more realistic sound. We created a radio tuning effect and used one of my bands recorded songs to have a radio playing in the background. We focused heavily on panning to give the impression a character was moving from one side of the room to the other. Background noises also included harsh winds, distant thunder, the sea and seagulls, all of which had their volumes raised when doors to the warehouse were heard to be opening.

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Cricket Challenge.

Posted on by trick1979

Tutor: Julius Ayodeji                                     Start/End date: 6/10/15 to 14/10/15

The task of creating a digital product that somehow explained what a wicket is to a target audience of young children was challenging to say the least. One of the main reasons for this was my lack of knowledge when it came to cricket.

This was a group project and so the first thing we did was establish each others specialisms so we could decide on the best way to attack the brief. We immediately came up with the idea of a small sketched stick man character that would chat to a narrator about the rules of cricket. He would sit on a crumpled paper background and would be animated to bat and bowl whilst receiving instructions from the narrator. I am primarily a 3D modeler and artist, however because of what little time we had, Modelling and rendering out animations in Maya seemed to be a little ambitious and so the group asked if id be willing to create animations and page transitions in Adobe After Effects.

We all went away that evening and collated research to add to a group page we had set up on Facebook in order to get a better understanding of cricket and the rules of the game. Whilst researching, it suddenly dawned on me that my eldest child used to play Kwik Cricket, a simplified version of the game that encourages younger children to play and is also recognized by the England and Whales Cricket Board. This was extremely relevant to the target audience.

kwik 2 kwik

ECB, Not noted. Kwik Cricket [online]. ECB. Available at: http://www.ecb.co.uk/development/education/kwik-cricket. [accessed 06 October 2015].

I also went on to post a link to the below YouTube video for inspiration on how to create a character using layers in either Illustrator or Photoshop so that it could be animated in Adobe After effects.

vid

Ross Plaskow, 2013. How To Make a Cartoon | For Beginners – After Effects Tutorial | Ross Plaskow [online]. YouTube: Available at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MX7lW8t4Jxc. [Accessed 06 October 2015].

I put together a presentation in prezi using all of the research that we had collated so that we were ready to show the other groups our findings and pitch our idea to them.

The group sat down the next day and we created a storyboard for the video to ensure we all knew the exactly how we wanted ti to unfold. Lewis created the character in Photoshop and sent me the separate layers so that I could import them into After Effects and then animate them.

I obtained a free to use crinkled paper background for video as agreed by the group and I started to animate the character as per the storyboard.

I looked at a number of videos online of children playing Kwik Cricket and monitored how they batted and bowled . Most of these showed the children were learning and that their form wasn’t great. I wanted to add a sense of this into the character’s animations as he would effectively be learning and tutored by the narrator in the video.

Castellerpaese, 2014. cricketcasteller KWIK CRICKET FEST PostiomaTv 2014 [online] YouTube. Available at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gE1ulAJImcI. [accessed 09 October 2015].

animation shot

Above: Although I have used After Effects in the past, creating character animation through the use of different layers was very new to me, but was a huge confidence builder and very rewarding.

Unfortunately our group like many others made a critical error in not reading the brief correctly. We were supposed to have a 95% complete prototype of the video to show the other groups in order to gain valuable feedback. Our video was probably around 50% complete as we read the dates wrong.

Feedback was mixed and despite receiving some positive reactions most people said that there just wasn’t enough color in the video. We took the advice on board by adding ink splodges to the paper background behind the character, this worked extremely well. It did mean however that I had to re-render the animations without a background so they could be added to the new one by Damien when he put everything together and edited the final video. Also the page turning effect i added to some of the animations was discarded in the final cut but the video worked better for it.

Colour

The finished product was well received when we presented it to the other groups, and i feel that was partially due to the fact we took all feedback on board and acted on it.