10.06.03

Well, time flys when you're procrastinating. The animatic for File 2 (mentioned in the last journal entry) is now complete, and only three weeks later than scheduled. But don't take my word for it -- click above to take a peek. And if you like that, there's nine minutes and thirty more seconds where that came from...

When I scripted and storyboarded the animation, I had a ten minute running time as my target (round numbers are always comforting, eh?), but you can't be quite sure if you hit that mark until you assemble the animatic (well, I can't, anyways). Imagine my surprise when I put it all together and it came out to the exact time! I'm still in shock.

Aside from actually sequencing my storyboards in Flash, I also had to "cast" and record voices for all of the speaking parts in File 2, which really forms the backbone for the timing of the scenes. To be honest, that was the aspect I had been dreading most, and the reason I took so long to finally get it all together. All of the voices are generated by the speech application included with the Mac OS. Of course, it only offers a handful of voices to start with, and the majority are mostly dreadful for delivering straight dialogue, so creating the voices requires recording from the few acceptable options and tediously tweaking them out in a sound editing application to create a small variety of recognizably different character voices. And with all due respect to the technology, there are just some things you can't get the computer to pronounce correctly. For instance, the word "Ma'am" completely befuddles the poor speech app. So, there go my dreams of creating a robot epic set in the deep South...

For the voice of the character in the segment above, I had a particular problem, because I wanted an accent, and the Mac just didn't have anything suitable. However, one of my friends pointed me to the Natural Voices page on the AT&T website, where you can create demo samples in British English. The voices there were quite nice and were pretty much what I had in mind, but presented me with another problem... they sound much better than the native Mac voices they're supposed to be "acting" alongside. This is very apparent when you hear the characters exchanging lines with each other in other parts of the animatic. So, at some point, I'll have to find a way to degrade the sound quality on these clips to match the original voices. Afterall, it wouldn't do to have the new characters upstaging the main stars! (I'll get into proper introductions of these new characters in future journal entries.)

At any rate, all of the rough elements are in place and now it's time to turn my attention to the job of actually animating the real thing. Don't hold your breathe on this one, as it takes more than a little time to make that happen. Check back in a few weeks, when I'll either have some early samples to show or have gone completely mad in the effort. Either way, it'll make for interesting reading.

[k]