Writings From Willie, or: Birone's Blog

End result for the animated gif project. This project is an exploration to find the silly in the seriousness. Having Lady Justice swap the sword and scales for cartoon props felt the most succinct way of depicting this.

Overall, I am delighted with the end result and far, far happier than how I felt with the previous design. It has polish with the cel shading and looks cleaner overall. If I can maintain this standard in using Toon Boom (or even just animating in general) I will be more than satisfied.

Rough animations done in Toon Boom.

For the sake of simplicity (and sanity) the way I’m approaching this is having the head and body static and animating the arms. I just hope they don’t come across as too rubberhose-y.

Looking for a simpler solution for the gif and looking to Lady Justice for ideas. The design I’ll settle on in based off the monument in the Criminal Courts of Justice in Dublin. It’s a metalwork piece showing half the figure. I flipped the design and added an arm for the sword to make it my own.

This was the first idea for the story board, initially scribbled on postit notes, then clean up proper afterwards: a criminal lying on his tax form, gets caught and chucked into jail, all in a comic fashion.

It came about when trying to think of how to make the gif loop and I was on to something with the idea with the prison bars rotating to appear as lined pates on a form.

Crossposted from my google+ post:

Years ago I sketched out parody posters of fictional animal-themed bands.

So here I go at it again, picking up where I left off.

Ghosts and Vodka, You Slut!, Gang of Four

Near home there are flagpoles and on blustery days the flagpole rings can be heard pinging. It has a lovely sound and I was hoping to use it for the Paradise Lost project. Here is an excerpt of that foley recording.

When the guitar runs through the delay pedal with a high repeat setting, the sound feeds back in the most phenominal way. Soundwaves cascade on eachother, and twisting the timing knob also affects the pitch in radical ways. I have included an excerpt of this here.

The idea of having three people narrate in unison may sound daunting but you shouldn't be intimidated by the idea once you know how to plan it. Our group reexamined the poem and gutted any and every unnecessary lines, whittling it down to five, six chunks.

We narrated each chunk turn by turn until all were done. Dannii was the first to be recorded and had the advantage of setting the pacing and tempo. Tracy and I followed to match up. Once you see the waveforms, the visual cue is enough to know when to speak and when to pause. Overall it was a fairly easy process.

The vocals were grouped by paragraph and the effects were added as seen previously. Each narrator was panned Left 75%, Centre and Right 75% channels. They are keyframed so that each speaker meanders between left and right at different times. Vocals are mixed so that one voice begins, is joined by a second. The third joins in whilst the first fades out, and so on. Each narrator is given time where they are the only voice heard. This comes to a head when all three voices join in unison for the finish.

This is the first pass at the Paradise Lost audio, taking previous recordings and compiling them together. Whilst I'm pleased with atmosphere, the build up and the powering down effect at the end, the biggest downfall was the vocals. This is not from the effect, but rather my performance: I rush through the lines and hear no cadence. Overall I deem it as a test to see if the sound design is heading in the right direction, which I believe is true.

For the vocals I recorded myself narrating the poem to test the timing and what effects I could use. I took the original layer and duplicated it. To create the vocal effect was a four step process:

1. Reverse the sound clip. Now it sounds like speaking in tongues. 2. Add reverb. A high setting worked well, giving it an etherial quality. 3. Reverse the clip again. The reverb comes before the speech, and the vocals can now be understood again. 4. Pitch down the vocal effect.

When connecting my laptop to my bass amp using a 3.5mm lead it creates this static effect, even when the laptop is on a low volume or mute. I sat the microphone down to record the random results. This is a short excerpt from it.

The musical bed is made of two loops recorded on guitar. The strings are picked behind the guitar bridge and nut, making high pitched, atonal notes chime.