The Orville Sharkbiter Interview Video - Progress Report 2012 April 29

With the help of the Xtranormal support team, I got the Xtranormal Desktop program to work. Apparently, when I first installed it, the text to voice software didn’t install properly. After I reinstalled it properly, everything was hunky dory.

I completed an initial version of The Orville Sharkbiter Interview video done. As I mentioned I developed the script from my short story Book Review: Sharkbiter - The Secret to Success http://www.dynamiclethargyfilms.ca/stories/book-review-sharkbiter-the-secret-to-success/ . I still have some work to do on it.

There are some weird pronunciations for some of the words. They suggest you misspell the word to make it come out right. . I fixed problem with the word “ganged” by spelling it as “gang’d”. Several attempts with other words have been less successful. I notice that when one voice has a problem with a word, the other voice doesn’t.

In a previous job, the person in the next cubicle was responsible for an automatic radio system that used a text to speech program similar to what Xtranormal uses. She would fiddle with the spelling for hours to get the pronunciation right. After a while, she got to know the tricks that made it easier.

The software allows you to change camera angles throughout the video, but I had some difficulty with that. I think I know how to do it now. Nevertheless, I decided to stick to one camera angle through the whole thing until I was happy with the voices and acting. I’ll add in other angles later. One option I like is to output several versions of video taken from different angles, then use Premiere Pro to edit it the same way I’d do any other video.

It isn’t as if the animations are great actors, although, for the most part, they are better than I am. The program does allow you to specify some facial expressions and some gestures. I did some of those and I think it does improve the video, so I want to add some more. Many of the gestures are really over the top, which limits me a bit.

If all goes well, I should have the video wrapped up and posted next week. I have other commitments Monday and Tuesday, so it’ll be Wednesday until I can work on it again.

This post is a mirror from my main blog http://www.dynamiclethargyfilms.ca/blog

Orville Sharkbiter, Xtranormal and Animated Storyboards

A while back, I came across a program called Xtranormal (www.xtranormal.com) that allows you to create animated videos by just typing in dialog. I’ve seen a lot of short videos on YouTube that used the program. This week I decided to try it out.

I converted my short story Book Review: Sharkbiter - The Secret to Success into a script. The story is a satire of some of the get-rich-quick books that people write. I wrote it in the form of a fake book review. For the movie version, I converted it into a mock TV interview. It was relatively easy to rewrite.

I came up with the idea for the character Orville Sharkbiter when I did Line of Taxis (www.dynamiclethargyfilms.ca/filmlist/line-of-taxis). I used him as a minor character in the movie, but changed his name to Orville Stark-Leiter. He is the proverbial greedy “boss from hell”. I’ve played around with story ideas for him ever since. It only took me 14 years to get the story done.

I did a first version of the script with the on-line version of Xtranormal and I was happy with how it turned out. The desktop version is more powerful, so I want to use that. I ran into trouble with the desktop program however. The support people have been very helpful and I hope to get it to work next week.

The program is free, but you need to pay for assets, such as sets, actors, and voices. You don’t need to pay to create the video, but you can’t save the video to show or post it anywhere until you do. I bought some assets with the money in my PayPal account that I got from my on-line sales.

My long-term goal is to use the program to animated storyboards of my film scripts. I feel that my scripts are a bit too talky and I thought that animated storyboards would help me visualize how the final film will turn out. At the start of the year, one of the goals I set was to try this with my short story The Crying Woman (www.dynamiclethargyfilms.ca/stories/the-crying-woman/). It would run something like 40 minutes. The Sharkbiter video will run about 10 minutes.

If the Sharkbiter video turns out OK, I’ll do The Crying Woman next.

This post is a mirror from my main blog http://www.dynamiclethargyfilms.ca/blog