We came back to university on Monday, only to be thrown headfirst into proceedings with two full-day classes on Tuesday and Wednesday.
Tuesday’s class was a sound design workshop run by Dawn Campbell, a professional sound designer. We had to create a completely new soundtrack to a 30-second clip of the film “Megamind.” So Ross, Fraser and I set out with a Roland portable recorder and for three hours we were slamming gates, walking on Shreddies and setting off party poppers, and Fraser narrowly avoided getting arrested in a successful attempt to record some police car sirens (the last part was a joke… sort of).
I have to admit that I was a little complacent going into the editing stage, having used Pro Tools before, but as I found out there is a big difference between using a program and using it properly. In the end we only got eight seconds done, but I think we got it done very well. New things learned: how to “normalise” tracks (seemingly a form of compression), and also numerous keyboard shortcuts.
Yesterday’s class was run by Dawn’s sister, Sharon Campbell, and was about reflectiing on practice. I have to say that having suffered a few setbacks on my personal project recently it was extremely useful in that I learned to look at these setbacks more constructively.
Which brings me on to my personal project… I have found in recent meetings that the storyboard perhaps is not quite sufficient to communicate all the camera moves, particularly as there are some complex ones involved. Therefore I have started work on a pre-visualisation animatic, which will also help me with dynamics and animation tests. Here’s the story so far:
Cell Shading 