4/17/2025
Welcome Back, Friends.
So for this next week I am going to be taking a bit of a step back on the art for this project. It's a difficult decision to do that considering how much art I have to polish in such a short time frame, but one thing in particular I'd really started to notice with my work was that the voice acting and timing weren't cutting it anymore.
To make a successful animatic you need good timing, and unfortunately that was lacking. The scratch dialogue I did as well, while always meant to be scratch, also plays a little too flat, and needs some massive adjustments.
I also needed sounds for Mushie. The problem is Mushie is supposed to be unintelligible to the audience, only Nancy can hear them because they're imaginary. For a long time I struggled to figure out how I was going to accomplish that, before it hit me.
I have an otamatone. If anyone doesn't know an otamatone is a japanese electronic instrument that makes weird human esque wahs and ahs. It also looks incredibly silly. This is what they look like.
The noises they make sound very cartoon-like, and I had just recently gotten one for my birthday, so what better time to use it, right?
Now that the Mushie conundrum was fixed I started my week doing something I am terrible at, voice acting.
I began by downloading Adobe Audition. I have never used this particular program before, but it was pretty quick and easy to pick up. There came an issue I learned rather quickly, however.
My apartment is too noisy. I live in a small studio apartment above a noisey convenience store (that I will not name for safety purposes) and which constantly has loud annoying folks standing outside of it. That means no matter what time of day it is, my apartment is loud.
That meant that in order to get these sounds done I would have to go to the sound studio on campus. That's not a massive issue. I'm a 15 minute walk from campus. I can make it in and out of campus in a day, and they have special sound studios that I can work in silence. This should go fine! At least that's what I thought on Monday. Turns out the sounds studios were going through massive issues in which most of their programs were non-functional. This meant that I had to cobble together whatever programs I could to make it work.
It took three days to finally cobble together the sound footage and clip it together, and afterwards I found any additional sounds on Freesound.Org (which was also experiencing massive website delays and crashes this week, but that's a problem I won't get into)
Next came editing and timing. Out of all the principles found with animation & storyboarding, timing is something I struggle with most. Something about timing is off to me, I either always think something is going slightly too fast or slow, and I struggle to find that middle ground of perfection. I know perfection doesn't exist, but its hard to think that when you're working 20 hours a week on what is supposed to be a fun project.
Nonetheless I have been pushing myself to get better and better with timing, and I believe in this instance, I believe I have found a decent pace on things.
There is one scene that I will probably adjust the timing for and that is the intro run- in. I believe the ball running in scene is too slow, and needs to be much faster to fit the pace of the rest of the film.
From here I now need to push myself to work hard on the art portion of this project. The art is still way too messy and disorganized. It needs that coat of polish that allows you to understand what, exactly the characters are doing.
That's next weeks problem, however. For now, Adios friends!
See you next week!/