wk 12: The last legs...

Captains log, Star date 569716: Me, Matt and Amy presented our work so far on Tuesday, it was just a shame that we did not have all of our rooms rendered. We explained our storyboard and the concept of our advert which is simple and hopefully understand-abubble! It went okay but I felt that because it wasn't finished that we had to explain what was going on whereas when it is finished a good advert should speak for itself and not need explaining, that would only tell me that the creators were unclear or nervous if I was a client.

Below is a shot of my beloved characters! Matt's half of the room is not in this shot. Surprisingly 90% of my characters have unique animations, only two or three are copies. Animating them all individually makes for a very convincing crowd! I have included a couple of familiar faces fom the CAV course, see if you can spot them, (No wally isn't in there). Below are a couple of tasters for what they are getting up to in the crowd! Some are grooving some are jumping around whilst others are head banging or waving their arms.

Although it looks like I did more than half of the room, its the angle of the camera, apart from the 3 people in front of the stage the other half is very much empty and under Matt's jurisdiction.

I recorded the voice over yesterday on my home-studio which I have accumulated of a short period of my entire life! I went for the cheesy operator effect which is why I'm not posting the actual end svoice over on the blogger due to the fact that no-one needs to hear that kind of cheese. Below are a couple of shots of what I used to record my voice;

The PC on the left has all of my recording software on it (Cubase Studio 4) then my laptop has my 3D software so I was recording then moving it over to check that it all fits with the animation. On the left is my microphone which is a compressor mic, I used this to record my vocals onto the computer as the quality is exquisite.

Matt devised what was to be said as he is much better at wording things than me. So all I did was to record my vocals onto the computer, then fiddle about with a bit of reverb for effect (I ended up using Large Hard Wall Room) and experimented with a few pitch changes to see if I could make my voice sound less aweful (I failed) then export an audio mixdown and voila I'm done.

Below is my mixing desk which I used to make sure that the signal from the mic was strong, clear and free from hiss.

If your lucky I may give a short tutorial revealing my secret of ........(drum roll)..........cartoon material-ing stuff majiggy.