Music Video
Skills Audit
Demo Work
Demo Work
Demo Work
Contents
Demo Work
Contents
> Theoretical exploration of the purpose
and application of research
> Secondary research into
music video genres, codes, conventions,
techniques, and theories
> Primary research with the
client to inform ideas development
> Focus group presentation of ideas for
feedback and review via questionnaire
survey
Moving Demo
This page shows my progress of my actual production of the animation coupled with the recording and editing of all the dialogue, soundscapes and Foley which was needed to create the final product.
I started with animation. This was a completely new medium for me and so getting used to it was a little difficult. However, I think through this page, it's observable that the more I did it, the better I got at it. And by the end of my production I was a lot more confident in my animation skills.
My sound recording was a little more rocky than my animating. But through my post production, I feel overall I'm fairly proud of my audio production. This was my first time really concentrating on Audio techniques and I believe even if it's a little rough in this project, I've learnt a lot of transferrable skills which I will be able to take forward.
Monday 14th February
Today was my first day of animating. I made sure to try and stick to my production schedule, because as long as I follow the schedule, I should have my project completed in a comfortable time, with time to spare in case of any errors. I had brought my drawing tablet from home today, in order to use it at College. However, I didn’t realise that to use it, you had to download a couple of features so that it would sync up properly, this was a problem as I did not remember how to do this. So unfortunately I had to resort to using a mouse for today, so that when I got home, I could figure out how to sync up the tablet. But using a smoother brush with a mouse looks just as good, so there were no major problems.
I began my animation, with shots 3,4,5 as these were the first ones on my production schedule. Thanks to all my practice animations, I was able to use my methods of drawing in photoshop and then exporting to adobe premiere and this ran pretty smoothly.
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I ran into a couple minor problems, where some of my layers didn’t go over one another as I would have liked, but in order to get my desired look, I had to split my character into pieces on different layers, so that the effect of the World Traveller coming out of the bag would work. However, this was only a minor problem and just meant certain frames of the animation took a little bit longer to create.
By the end of the lesson, I had drawn and exported shots 3 and 4 into premiere, and had drawn the frames for shot 5. This was good progress as this is basically what I had planned on my production schedule.
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When I returned home, I made sure to finish shot 5 straight away so that I kept up with my production schedule. As I had time spare, I started on shot 7. This was quite a hard shot and took me a lot of time. I wanted the background to move in time with the character, and I really had to experiment with premiere and photoshop to get my desired effect. In the end, I put my character and backgrounds on different layers and used keyframes to move them at a similar rate. This looked good and I believe gave me my desired effect. Additionally shot 7 had the character landing and then walking in the human world. Doing this entirely in one static shot felt too long for me, so I added in an extra shot of a close up of Wallace between the two as I felt that helped the pacing of the shot.
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To finish off my day, I did a very short thing on my project 2. Updating my drop down menu for my WIX website. This now leaves only my about page and to finish off my bug testing before I have completed project 2. I am trying to do project 2 in my spare time between animating so hopefully I should have it completed before half term, which allows me time to double check everything before the deadline.
Tuesday 15th February
I have completed quite a lot of work today. My production schedule informed me that today I’d be working on shots 8-12. These are relatively short shorts, focusing more on the cuts between shots than lots of movements, unlike many of the shots I did yesterday. This meant, they were relatively fast to make as they required less frames. So by my first deadline by 1pm I had completed shots 8-11. This was a lot faster than I expected, so I double checked them, and I was still happy with how they looked so I did not need to change anything for now.
One part of my research came in very helpful today, for my shot 11. In one of my references I had found for research, I had learned for certain movements to look normal, using an arc to keep the object the same length is a useful tactic. And in shot 11, Wallace’s arm moves up. To ensure that the arm would look normal and the same length, I used this arc trick, placing a circle around where his arm movement starts and stops. This was a really useful trick and knowing it saved me a lot of time.
One thing I’ve realised, is I was incorrect when I planned to draw shot 12 today. As, shot 12 requires the rotoscoping video reference, which is not being filmed until Thursday. I have now re-adjusted my production schedule so that I can draw shot 12 on Friday, when I will have the footage. Due to this error, I went over the rest of my production schedule to make sure no other rotoscope footage was placed incorrectly, and thankfully shot 12 was the only error.
To make sure that I didn’t fall behind on my production schedule, and as I had more time due to finishing early, I also animated shots 13 and 14, which I had originally planned to animate tomorrow. However, getting them done early is a good thing. They were relatively harder than the shots I did this morning as they required more movement, but I was able to complete them and was happy with the result, especially shot 13 where I thought the movement looked quite smooth.
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One last thing that I’m noticing with my animating as I’m compiling it in premiere, is that the durations I had put down for each shots are quite off. So far, the length of my animation is about double the time then I had planned. This is not great as it means my animation will be longer, but as long as I stick to the production schedule, even if it does turn out longer, I should still be able to get it completed in time. One possibility I think could be the cause of it being longer is that there’s currently no sound. Without the sounds and especially dialogue, I’m leaving some extra time for shots to last so that there's enough space for the Foley and dialogue when I add it in. Hopefully, once I look at editing in all the sound, the durations will get closer to how I initially planned them out.
Wednesday 16th February
Due to the fact that I was ahead of schedule, I continued with further shots. Today at College I animated shots 15 and 16. Both of these shots took quite a while. With shot 15, Wallace enters the new portal and the scene moves to the next world. The reason this shot took so long was due to the fact that multiple things are happening at the same time. This included, the portal, Wallace jumping and the sign falling off in the background.
In order to do this, I made sure that each of the different components were on a different layer. This allowed me to edit each one of them individually without needing to worry about what else was happening in the scene. This became especially important when I needed the sign to fall at the same time as Wallace jumped. Having them in separate layers meant I could draw them both in their own scene and then line them up in premiere to make sure they were at the same time with each other.
The hardest part about shot 16 was using a mask. To make it appear as though Wallace is emerging out of the portals, I planned to use a mask to cover him before he was revealed. I had used this for shot 15 for when he was jumping in, so I presumed it would also work for shot 16. However, what I hadn’t realised is because I had used keyframes to move Wallace out of the portal, this meant that the crop was also moving with these keyframes. This was very annoying as it meant the crop wouldn’t reveal Wallace it would keep him covered up while following. I tried several things to fix this error, and tried to find videos on how to keep the crop stationary, but nothing was helping. In the end, I had to go frame by frame and animate the crop so that it stayed in the same position it would be if it was stationary. This was quite annoying and took a long time which could’ve been used on other shots but it had to be done, and I think the outcome that it produces was worth the time it took to do it.
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I unfortunately then had a driving lesson, which lessened the amount of work I would’ve liked to do today. But when I had been working in College, I realised, similarly to when Wallace lands in the human world, the scene needed a close up linking shots between shots 16 and 17. This new shot which I’ve named shot 16.5 is a close up of Wallace’s hands as he grabs the lamp. It’s unfortunate that I’m only realising these shots are required now as realistically, I should’ve realised in the pre-production stage, but when the animation is moving in front of you, it really shows what’s needed and what isn’t, so adding these scenes in now is definitely better than if they weren’t there at all. I made sure to animate this shot in the evening when I got home, so that I could stay ahead of my production schedule. Luckily, it wasn’t too long of a shot so I was able to get it done relatively fast.
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I’m recording my audio tomorrow, so in preparation I collected the majority of my objects for my foley as well as cleaning the room I am recording dialogue in, so that it is safer as I stated on my risk assessment.
Thursday 17th February
I had a little time in the morning before I started recording audio today, so I used it to continue animating. I worked on shot 17. This was a relatively short shot as it was simply Wallace jumping into another portal, based over the should of the alive sofa. And by now I’ve had quite a lot of practise with making Wallace jump into a portal so I was able to complete this shot successfully.
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I then moved onto shot 18, however I did not have enough time to finish the shot, and so I will continue from this shot on tomorrow.
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I then went to collect my equipment. Ash had informed me that even though the boom mic wasn’t able to be booked on the system, I would still be able to book one out on the day. However, this didn’t seem to be the case as I ended up with one of the shotgun mics instead. This is not too big of a hindrance and I can still get all the audio recordings I need with this mic, however I have more experience with the boom mic and so I had hoped to use that. The actual recording of the dialogue went very smoothly and I was shocked by how quickly I got it done. All and all it took me about an hour. I knew I didn’t have much dialogue but I was still surprised by this. I made sure to get many different takes for each line and additionally got some emotional noises to Wallace such as shock or scared just in case I wanted to implement additional sounds throughout the piece.
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Unfortunately, about 3/4 of the way through, it did start to rain a little bit. This was unlucky as it meant the conservatory amplified the noise and it could be heard with the mic. Luckily, I had prepared for this and had my back up location ready, so was able to transfer the equipment and actor to the new location, and soon the rain cleared up and we were able to return to the original location. I made sure to get background noise of both different locations as they differed ever so slightly.
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I then did record my base for the rotoscoped shots. However, I am unsure if I still want to include this much rotoscoped animation within the piece. By animating it frame by frame so far, I have improved my skill and I feel as though having fully rotoscoped characters would draw the audience out of the reality of the world. Although this had initially been a reason for using it, to show a clear difference between Wallace and other characters. I’m now thinking that it will be too much of a difference which won’t look normal. Instead what I think I will do is, I will take new videos of my own mouth mouthing the audio that I recorded for the human shopkeeper, kings and alive sofa and use that as a base for rotoscoping the mouth, as those characters are the only ones who mouths move. That way the talking will look normal and I’ll still be able to practice my rotoscoping skills as I had planned initially.
Finally, I ended my day by logging my audio recordings. This was a little awkward as I only had audio visual logging form and there is no visual for these as it is animated. However I filled in all the parts I needed to and I will check with the first lecturer I see and ask them if there is another specific piece of information I need to fill out.
I will be recording my foley and soundscapes tomorrow morning.
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Friday 18th February
The weather has been absolutely dreadful today, which meant that college was shut for the day. Today is the last day before half term and I was supposed to return the equipment that I had been using for audio recording today. However, due to the horrible weather, it means I couldn’t get into College to return the equipment. However, this is kind of a blessing in disguise as it means I now have access to the equipment until the 28th of February. Which means I have a lot more time if I want to add and record more audio.
I did do my audio recordings today and I was fairly happy with how they went. Due to the weather and rain once again making my primary location unusable I once again had to use my secondary location. This wasn’t a tragedy and I was still able to get my recordings done successfully. I listened over them as I was doing my logging and on the majority, I was pretty pleased with them. However, I think I will re-record a few as in a couple of them you can hear the faint weather in the background. However, this is not too bad as I now have quite a long time to re-record stuff if I need to.
For the rest of the day I returned to animation. I started with shots 18 and 12 which were the shots that I still needed to complete for my production schedule. Shot 18 was fairly easy to do as it was largely just the alive sofa ever so slightly moving around. However shot 12 was fairly more complicated as it involved the human shopkeepers arm coming up from behind the desk and placing the bed onto it. I had to redraw the frames a couple of times as I did not immediately grasp the movement of the arm. As the arm raises the bed is in the front of the hand but at the end it is under the hand. In the end, I needed to add a transition frame, a frame where the bed switches from onto to underneath the hand and once I’d figured that out the sequence looked a lot nicer and cleaner. Now that I’ve done these two shots, I’m officially over halfway through my animation.
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As I had a little spare time, I moved onto shot 19 as to keep ahead of my production schedule. This is a fairly complex shot and so I wasn’t able to finish it today, however, I’ve been able to align enough pieces of the shot so that tomorrow I only need to finish animating the king before the shot is complete. I’m really enjoying this project so far and I’m fairly confident with how I’m progressing with my work.
Saturday 19th February
I was able to complete shot 20 which brings me back in sync with my production schedule. This was a relatively easy shot to do, especially as I could repeat king 1’s movements that I had drawn yesterday. Aside from that all I had to do create new arm movements for king 2 and I was done. After adding It to the premiere file, I’m ready to continue with production tomorrow.
The last thing I did today was upload my final essay for project 4 onto my WIX website. This pretty much finishes the project 4 for me.
Sunday 20th February
I’ve done quite a lot of work today. I began with shot 21 and 22 which were quite complex. Within this shot I had a lot of components all happening at once. The king needed to be moving, luckily, I could repeat the movements I had used for him in shot 19. This thankfully saved me a little bit of time. But I also needed, Wallace moving as well as the table and plates on the table. To achieve this I created three different layers. On the first layer was Wallace, where I draw 6 different frames for him, which could then be played normally, placed the shots backwards and then repeated, to make it look as though Wallace was pulling something into his bag.
For the table and plates, I then used a technique I had used previously with Wallace jumping into the portal. This technique included using keyframes to move the object and creating a crop so that the object disappears. This took quite a while as the time it took for the table to move meant controlling the crop frame by frame, this process took me quite a while to keep the crop consistent between each frames.
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The actual drawing and editing of shots 23 and 24 were actually quite easy as they are quite short shots and not much movement happens. However, I ran into quite a big problem in the editing process of them. When trying to render the whole piece, an error kept popping up saying that the movie was unable to be compiled. This was extremely worrying as this premiere folder had all my work in it. Before I did anything else I first exported the piece so far, as well as uploading the premiere folder onto google drive, just in case anything went wrong while I was trying to fix the problem. I first tried restarting my computer to fix the problem but it was not working. I then watched a video to try to help me and the video told me to look for which part of the video wasn't rendering. This helped me discover that the problem was one of the portal clips not being able to render. After more experimenting I realised it was only the latter half of the clip that wasn’t rendering. To fix the problem, I cut the clip where it wasn’t rendering and moved the cut second half onto a different layer. This helped to clear up the problem and thankfully the premiere was now able to be rendered properly.
Monday 21st February
Thankfully, the weather had cleared itself up today, so I was finally able to finish my audio recording. Today, I recorded the natural outdoor sound as well as the sofa and furniture falling sounds that I couldn’t record on Friday. This now technically means that all my audio recording is complete. However, I was listening over some of the audio recordings I had done on Friday and I realised a lot of them were much quieter than the sounded while recording. I think this is due to the microphone I am using as I think the mic is more lenient towards dialogue recording. However, I will not let this hinder me. I’m planning to re-record some of the foley over the coming days. But additionally I may practice with some and see if turning the volume up in post production is enough to make them sound good.
Tuesday 22nd February
I continued with following my production schedule today, which meant I was drawing shots 25-28. This wasn’t too hard as the majority of these shots were close ups which meant less was happening in the background of the scenes. I was able to complete these shots in plenty of time and didn’t run into any problems. Once again a portal scene occurred in shot 28, which meant I could use my past experience with these scenes. Luckily, the problem with rendering didn’t happen again, so I’m hoping that was a one off situation.
If all goes according to plan and I follow my production schedule, then my animated part should be completed by tomorrow. This is excluding the rotoscoped mouths which I will still need to do, but the rest of the scenes will all have been completed.
Wednesday 23rd February
I’ve officially finished my animation, with each of my scenes being animated. The only last thing I need to create are the rotoscoped mouths which I will animate over the next two days and import before starting on audio editing next week.
So, today I animated shots 29, 30 and 31. Shot 29 was not too hard as it was mainly just Wallace falling out of the portal. I have done this several times before already and so have quite a lot of experience with it. All I needed to do for this shot draw a new pose for Wallace and then construct the movement. I also added in slight movements in Wallace’s arms after he landed just to add more liveliness to the shot.
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Now, shot 30 took me absolutely ages. The shot starts with Wallace’s bag ripping and then the furniture spilling out. I started with animating the furniture. For each piece of furniture I gave them 10 frames to fly out of the bag, as I felt as though they should fly quite quick to show the power they’re flying out of the bag. This part was not too hard as I simply copied the drawing 10 times and adjusted the positioning and angling to show how the furniture was moving throughout the air. The next bit, showing the bag ripping was the part that took me quite a long time. I started with the part where the bag actually breaks open. I chose 6 frames for this, similarly to the furniture I wanted to show the speed. This part took quite a while as I needed to draw the different stages of the bag ripping in each frame. Then for 12 frames before the full rip, I animated slow thin rips throughout the bag to show the progression to the big rip. This took quite a while as I had to slowly animate each line getting slightly bigger with each frame. However, I’m extremely happy with how this shot turned out and the time I put into it was definitely worth it.
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I finished animating with shot 31. Initially Wallace was supposed to shrug while looking at the camera, however I changed it to him waving as I felt this fit Wallace’s personality better. To achieve the look of the camera pulling out, I had to put the frames into a separate premiere folder and then export them as a whole so that I could control the keyframes with its scale. I had previously done a similar thing to get the look of Wallace walking in the human world so I knew what I was doing. Additionally, doing it this way also helped in achieving the fade to black which I simply used the opacity keyframes, which I have used in many other projects.
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Finally, I ended with constructing a page for the credits. To do this I simply made the credits on photoshop using the text tool and then used opacity and movement keyframes to animate the credits moving up the screen and then fading to black. This was a simple thing to do, but I feel it adds a lot to the piece and I really like the effect and look it creates.
Friday 25th February
I completed all 4 of my rotoscoped mouths today. It feels really good to get this done as it now means all of my animating for options project is complete. This will now allow me to move onto audio editing next week. Rotoscoping the mouths took me quite a while as the mouth shape would change subtly each frame. However, this effort is definitely worth it as having rotoscoped features is really good in the piece as it shows a wider range of variation and helps with showing the dialogue.
I ran into a little problem when implementing the mouths into the premiere folder as for the king’s line the mouth was filmed straightforward but the character was actually too the side. I really should have considered this before filming the rotoscope base. But unfortunately I did not realise this error until after I had rotoscoped the mouth. However, I figured out a solution to this problem after a bit of experimenting in premiere. In the end I decided to use the crop tool and remove half of the mouth. This allowed me to place the right half onto the side of the king’s face and that made it look a lot better and made a lot more sense.
I finished with creating logging sheets for my animated segments. I do not know if this is necessary as it is an animation as opposed to a live action where you would have a shoot but I feel it’s best to be better safe than sorry.
Overall I’m incredibly happy with my animation and I believe the effort I’ve put in has really paid off.
Options Project
Post- Production
Dialogue Logging
Thursday 17th February
Finally, I ended my day by logging my audio recordings. This was a little awkward as I only had audio visual logging form and there is no visual for these as it is animated. However I filled in all the parts I needed to and I will check with the first lecturer I see and ask them if there is another specific piece of information I need to fill out.
I will be recording my foley and soundscapes tomorrow morning.
Foley Logging
Monday 21st February
Thankfully, the weather had cleared itself up today, so I was finally able to finish my audio recording. Today, I recorded the natural outdoor sound as well as the sofa and furniture falling sounds that I couldn’t record on Friday. This now technically means that all my audio recording is complete. However, I was listening over some of the audio recordings I had done on Friday and I realised a lot of them were much quieter than the sounded while recording. I think this is due to the microphone I am using as I think the mic is more lenient towards dialogue recording. However, I will not let this hinder me. I’m planning to re-record some of the foley over the coming days. But additionally I may practice with some and see if turning the volume up in post production is enough to make them sound good.
Animation Logging
25th February 2022
I finished with creating logging sheets for my animated segments. I do not know if this is necessary as it is an animation as opposed to a live action where you would have a shoot but I feel it’s best to be better safe than sorry.
Sound Editing
Monday 28th February
I then moved onto my options project once again. Now that I have completed all the animation segments I moved onto sound editing. I began by adding in all my dialogue. I chose to do this in premiere, as I knew there was a possibility that I would have to either extend or shorten certain shots in order to have them be in time with the visuals. There were two places where I needed to extend the visuals, being Wallace’s first line and when Wallace is in the alien store. This was not too hard to do as I could just repeat frames so that Wallace’s mouth continues to change.
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However it was at the King’s dialogue where I had a little struggle. At first once I put their dialogue in, I felt there was an uncomfortable gap between their arguments and the space between the dialogue was too long. However shortening the visuals is not as easy as extending as The movements of the kings arms would come out of sync if I just deleted the frames I didn’t need. What I was able to do was delete some of the frames and make it so the king doesn’t move his arm up as much before lowering it. This left me with only a slight gap between the lines and the conversation between the two flowed a lot better.
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Once I finished putting all the main dialogue in I moved onto the extra dialogue such as Wallace’s crying or the king’s muffled arguing. The majority of this was pretty easy thanks to my planning but once again the king’s gave me a little trouble. I had originally planned to just have my actors do muffled speech while recording and then play it on a low volume. However, once I put this in it didn’t sound as good as I thought it would. So instead I did some research and found the audio effect Lowpass which gave the audio a more muffled echoed sound which was more like what I had originally intended. I used that on both of the sections and thankfully it worked well.
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Once I had finished on dialogue I moved onto foley, although I was nearing the end of the lesson so I couldn’t do much. I was able to add in my sounds for both the portal and Wallace’s Thuds. For both of these I used the technique of layering that I had discovered in my initial research. For the portal I used the same audio twice but with one pitched up and one down layered over one another. This sound layered like this gave it a robotic artificial sound, which I actually believed worked quite well. Then for the thuds, I mixed my two different thud sounds, with the hard and the soft thuds and slightly altered their volume to create one thud which sounded like it had more impact. I was pretty pleased with my audio editing today and plan to move onto my soundscapes tomorrow.
Tuesday 1st March
I continued with my sound editing on my options project today. Today, I focused on adding in my soundscapes as these act as basically backing tracks for the whole of the piece. I was able to get them all in today, however a couple of them are still rough. Particularly Wallace’s apartment and the alien world soundscapes I felt I still needed to improved.
I was fairly happy for the medieval and object soundscapes. For both of these, I used a mix of natural outside for objects and indoor sound for medieval. As well as combining each with one other feature to make it significant. For medieval I used the chair pull which was in my original plan and for the object world I used the item drops I had recorded to give it the right sound effects.
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I was particularly happy with the human world effect where I mixed my natural outside road recordings together. I cut it up so that the car noises going past were closer together to make the effect more impressive. I also removed parts where the wind was heavy on the mic as it ruined the quality. However, I decided to add these back in, but only very quietly and behind the other sound. This gave a very quiet wind noise and improved the realism of the soundscape without it being obvious mic noise.
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I had a little bit more time so I added in the music for both of my shop scenes. This was fairly simple as I could get the music online, considering I cannot write music myself. I put each piece quietly in the background of each scene and to the end of each I keyframed the volume going down slowly. This allows for a smoother audio transition into the next soundscape rather than an abrupt halt. However, I left the abrupt change in the beginning as it creates a nice contrast to show that Wallace has entered the shop. Additionally, in the human world this sudden change to shop music is quite comedic when seen with the shopkeeper simply staring at the camera, and I actually really liked that comedic effect.
Wednesday 2nd March
I then continued with options project audio editing. Today, I was focused on adding in the foley and sound effects. The majority of this audio editing went well, and there was only really one piece of significance. While I was editing the whoosh sound for when the world traveller comes out his bag. I was experimenting with using a repetitive sound mixed with pitch editing to create a more alien whoosh sound. The final sound I ended up with was something that I didn’t think fit well with the whoosh I was going for. However, while listening to it, I thought using the sound for the portal would actually work pretty well. So now I’ve replaced all the old portal sounds with this new portal sound as I much preferred this new sound and I think it fits a lot more of a sci-fi vibe whereas the old one was more robotic in nature.
Thursday 3rd March
For the second half of today I went back to audio editing for my options project. Today I finished off adding in all my sound effects. The majority of these went quite smoothly.
The only one I had a little trouble with was the bag splitting and the furniture crashing right at the end of the piece. I ended up using a lot of layering, which I had previously used and knew about thanks to my research. So for these sounds I used layering of the multiple sounds that I had recorded during my production. I did like the final sounds that I created with this technique although I still think it needs a little work until its completely finished.
Aside from the sound effects I did a little more work on my apartment and human world soundscapes. For the apartment soundscape I simply adjusted some of the volumes a little bit as well as adding in a gradual increase in volume at the very beginning. This helped the soundscape fit in slightly better.
With the human soundscape, I had to cut up the first layer a little bit and re-organise it as on the top layer there was some unwanted wind noise that I needed to get rid of. Finally, after adding in all my effects, I’ve realised that the end bit where Wallace waves at the viewer seems quite weird. I am going to look at fixing this tomorrow but I feel I will want to add some sort of music at the end, as I think this will send the piece off with the right tone.
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The last thing I did in lesson was to just clear up the audition page. To do this I simply changed the order of the layers so that they were in chronological order. This will make editing a lot easier.
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Friday 4th March
Today was originally supposed to be the last day for project 2 and options project. But as I said yesterday we have been given an extra week to work on these projects. But since I still wanted to finish today, I continued with this goal.
I started by finishing off the sound editing on my options project. This didn’t take too long as I only needed to add a couple of things. I began by fixing the furniture crashing. This was quite simple as all I did was duplicate what I’d already done and add it on re-positioned slightly. This have the sound the final impact that it needed to sell the realism.
Then I added in the music for the ending as I had said it sounded a bit too quiet. Originally, I looked for some other music online, but I couldn’t find anything good. But then I realised the music I used for the shops would also work well for the ending. So, I took that shop music and listened to the very end of that piece of music, and it worked perfectly. All I had to do was arrange it so it lines up with the ending visuals, and I was very happy with how it sounded.
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Aside from those two adjustments all I did was ever so slightly adjust some sound volumes and my final piece was done. However, I’m going to show the lecturers it next week, so it is possible that it could change before the new final deadline.
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Tuesday 8th March
I got John to watch my work today as I felt it was important to get some feedback from my lecturers before the deadline at the end of the week. He said overall he really enjoyed it and that the visuals were really good. The only thing he felt I could add to it was a bit more sound to the whole piece, as he felt there were points where more sound would help to keep the piece alive. He recommended adding things such as medieval trumpets to the medieval sector as well as whooshes to the transitions.
I felt this was really good constructive criticism as it probably wouldn’t have been something I’d have realised on my own as I’d been listening to it for so long.
So, I started on improving using John’s advice as guidance. I only started things today so a lot of it is still rough, but I added some of the fanfare music for the medieval as well as adding the whooshes. At the moment some of the volume’s need to be adapted to make the whole piece work together, but I aim to preferably have finished it tomorrow or Thursday as I feel that should be enough time, and if I constantly work on it I worry I may end up doing more damage than improvement.
Wednesday 9th March
I finished off Worlds of Wallace for the final time today. Using what John had advised me yesterday, I already had a good idea of what I needed to add in and as I said yesterday, I didn't want to spend too much more time on this otherwise I felt I may do more harm than good. So today, I started with improving the bits of audio I had added in yesterday. This began with the trumpets for the medieval section I added in yesterday. Originally, I had them throughout that whole section, with their volume changing so as not to drown out the dialogue within that scene. However, when re listening to it today, I felt having them throughout the whole scene was a bit distracting. So instead, I used the end of the trumpet piece that I had edited yesterday and moved it to the front of the scene. This made it seem like Wallace was coming in halfway through the king's meal and the trumpets had just ended. I feel this fits the scene much better and is also less distracting.
I then listened to the whole piece again and added some slight adjustments. This included slightly altering the positioning of the transition sounds I added in yesterday. This was simply to get them slightly more in line with the visuals of the transitions so that the two parts happened at the same time. Finally, I then turned up the volume of some of the thuds so that they felt more impactful to the audience. Then I could start on adding more things.
John had said that occasionally the piece felt a bit quiet so I added a couple of additional sounds where I felt it could benefit from a bit more atmosphere. The first time I felt could benefit from this was the soundscape for the human world where I decided to add in some car horns. I synchronised these sounds so they aligned with the sound of cars going past, and I felt it added more personality to the scene and made it seem more realistic.
The final thing I added before finishing off my piece was the sounds of plates smashing when Wallace is pulling the table into his bag and the plates slide down into the bag. Once again this just helped to add a bit more sound into the more quieter scenes and added a bit more realism into this specific scene. I felt this audio effect was definitely an improvement as before they didn't have a sound which I now realise was probably a bit odd as the audience would expect them to make a noise.
Overall, I'm fairly confident I have now finished my options project and I'm very happy with my final outcome.
