Friday 29 February 2008

Not quite panic, but nearly

Self Negotiated
After one more day in the puppet room, I am quite happy with the results I have achieved and decided to pack up and concentrate on the other ares of the project which need quite alot of work (animatic, finish storyboard and he 30 second feature) I also need to spend time with the other 2 projects as time is rapidly running out. All in all the return to stop-motion was initially very frustrating and a nightmare, what with the first puppet breaking and my crap timing and lack of patience -but in the end I really enjoyed it, wanting to achieve lots more with this medium. The second puppet I made was far superior to the first (both structurally and visually) The results gained are incredibly rewarding and well worth the massive effort involved.

Web Design
Once again had to seek advice from Ella as I'm still not getting it with adding movies to the site. In between I have polished up the design and as I look back (even though i isn't yet finished) I can see how the site has grown both in design and function as I understand the program a bit better. There are more pages than earlier anticipated and I'm really having to put the brakes on and not add any more pages as I fell I have spent more time with this than I thought I would and time management is of the essence with deadlines less than 2 weeks away. All (!?) I have left to do is... build an Mp3 player, add the Mp3s and add the movies. I am, also encountering problems with getting links buttons to work. I so far have spent the most time with the discography section, had to alter the design countless times so it would all fit on the page- at points I am cursing myself for undertaking a band website due to the enormous content, but am very pleased with the results and glad I bothered! It has been handy too liaising with the other members of the band to get their opinions on the design and function; also group decisions regarding the songs for inclusion on the site. Hopefully I can badger one (or all of them) to write an evaluation of the site. 

Sound Design
So after gaining access to an incredibly booked up resource, I 'got down to business' with adding my recorded Foley sounds and finding sound effects for 'The Wooden Leg'. Logic to me has the most ironic name of any computer program I have had the pleasure to work with and anyone even vaguely familiar with its working will know what I'm talking about. I know that with my senior shriveled brain it's going to take me a while to get the hang of new technology, but this has been a right mission! As programs go, it's incredibly intimidating for me (scared of the digital?) Things happens when you least expect it with this and once you have got a tiny grasp, the bloody computer crashes! These have been my problems with the project so far - hard to get access to the 'MA' sound room, lack of knowledge with the program, the mixing desk changed (it took a while to get used to the old one) computer crashing regularly - and once I had synched together sound and image meticulously, the bloody film timeline had moved (or the computer is running slowly?) the technological problems have been taking up more time than the actual process of editing and processing the soundtrack. Hopefully a tutorial with Barnaby Templar will help me with some of these problems. However all of this aside, we had a a group tutorial yesterday and the group agreed that the sounds I had used and the soundtrack all worked well together giving my chosen clip new depth. Tom initially advised me against a soundtrack, but I tried it anyway and I'm glad that it works with the image. My thoughts for the choice of track (Herb Alpert) was to start the film with the viewer in high spirits, then changing the soundtrack completely to mirror the tragic elements on screen. I want to also add more humour (sound effects) as obvious or cheesy as it may be, but it's always nice for something to be entertaining and not so much puzzling for the viewer (even though saying that I am also drawn to the latter) My initial idea for the sound design for this clip was to add a new dimension to it, as in its original state it's very flat and two dimensional, the soundtrack itself doesn't do the animation justice and my first impression was that more could be added to hopefully add depth to it. I also saw that 'The Wooden Leg' had lots of opportunity for Foley and sound effects which I wanted to practice as for my final film I will be using both of these. 

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