“Time Change” Revision and a New Video

I worked on my “Time Change” treatment, and I think I have finished a new video based on one of my writing exercises.

Time Change

I promised to revise my treatment for "Time Change" for the next script group session. I won’t be getting that done in time.

I started to make notes for the changes I want to make. Very quickly, it was obvious that the changes were more involved than I had thought. While I won't have the rewrite done, I plan to clean up my notes and share them.

There were two main problems I’ll need to resolve. The first problem is that the reason I had the protagonist going there didn't make sense. The second problem was that the reason the bad guys asked him to come had to have some link to their nefarious scheme. I had identified one scheme they had, which is the original idea behind the story, but I think they have to have something beyond that. I'm stuck for ideas.

"The Fortitude of the Adventurous Husband"

This was a writing exercise I did last November. I did a recording of it at the time but wanted to redo it as a video. I did a version of it using NAWMAL a couple weeks ago using the recording I did for the voices.

I was not happy with the woman’s voice that I did. For a while I’ve wanted to find an actor to do the female voices for my videos. A woman in the writer's group volunteered to record the woman's voice. She lives in another city, so we couldn’t meet in person to do it.

We decided to try recording her over ZOOM. That worked OK, despite some technical issues. The desktop computer I use for recording doesn’t have a video camera, so I had to look onto ZOOM with both my desktop and iPad. Being logged in on two devices was the primary challenge. I had to turn the speakers off on the desktop computer or else I got a lot of feedback. I used Audacity for the recording.

The actual recording went fairly smoothly. I had read some where that now a days when recording for voice work, they have the actor working on their own and have them do the same line several times with different readings each time. I often do this on my own recordings but is usually because I misread the lines I wrote.

One issue I was worried about was that the microphones on the computers are not the same quality as the one I use for my recording. When I listened to it afterwards, I could tell that we had recorded the two voices with different microphones. The two voices themselves are quite different, so I'm not sure if people who watch the video will notice.

I split the lines from the new recording and then replaced the recordings in the NAWMAL file. That went fairly quickly. I had to make a few timing adjustments so that the action and sound would match the older version. While I was at it, I made a few other changes in the NAWMAL file.

In NAWMAL I had 4 separate files for the four scenes in the video. I combined these using Premiere Pro. I have an old version from about 10 years ago. I added some sound effects, mostly footsteps. I also added an echo when they were in the cave. Then I added the titles and credits. I will leave it for a few days and then have another look and decide if I want to make more changes.

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

Multiple Project Update 2022 January 23

I posted a new writing exercise on SoundCloud, worked on my Random Title Generator, and had another look at “The Time Zone”.

“The Metamorphosis of the Sixth Space Traveler.”

At our writing group meeting we each did a piece based on the title “The Metamorphosis of the Sixth Space Traveler.” My story’s description was: On the country's sixth mission to space, the space traveller makes an important discovery.

You can listen to my recording at: https://soundcloud.com/dynamiclethargy/the-metamorphosis-of-the-sixth-space-traveler

Random Title Generator

I got a little more done on my random title generator upgrade. My goal is to have the page list all of the titles generated in a session. I'm still not able to get it to do that, but I've discovered a bunch of ways that don't work.

Vocal Work for My Animated Videos

I have been wanting to find someone to do the female voices for my videos. A woman has offered to try. She lives in a different city, so she asked if we could do it over the internet. I think that we could do that. The only concern for me would be the sound quality. The microphone on most computers is not as good at the one I'm using to record, and the difference in quality may be too noticeable. I will try it out though.

“The Time Zone”

This is a treatment I did back around the time when we switched to standard time last fall. It is a story about a person who travels to a different time zone. I felt discouraged about it and hadn’t worked on it any further. This week the same woman who offered to do the voices for me made some comments about it. She liked the idea. Her comments got me interested in having another go at it. I offered to revise it and share the revised version with the group in two weeks time. I haven't done anything on it yet. I don't have that much time now.

Older Filmmakers Club

We had the first session of the Older Filmmakers Club. We had a good turn out and the feedback I got was positive. I feel good about the progress of the group.

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

Progress on Two New Videos - 2022 January 16

I worked on two more videos based on my writing exercises this week; “The Sad Lady and the Hesitant Father-in-Law” and “The Fortitude of the Adventuresome Husband”.

I recorded those exercises earlier, but I want to get more experience in creating videos in NAWMAL before I embark on my big project.

·         https://soundcloud.com/dynamiclethargy/the-sad-lady-and-the-hesitant-father-in-law

·         https://soundcloud.com/dynamiclethargy/the-fortitude-of-the-adventuresome-husband

I experimented with a different approach to creating a video using NAWMAL. I didn’t keep a detailed record of how long it took me, but I certainly felt that the videos came together faster.

In the past, I built up each scene line by line. I would add a line of dialogue and then set all the actions, movements, and camera setups. I used that approach when I made “The Barrier”, but back then, I was writing the scenes as I created the video. That has some advantages in that I can change the lines as I see how they fit in the scene.

With the videos I’m doing now, I already have the dialogue written, so I lose that advantage. Most of the scenes are quite short; less than a minute each for “The Fortitude of the Adventuresome Husband”.

What I did was to enter all the dialogue text into one dialogue line, then use the split feature to break it into the individual lines. I had to go back and change who was saying each line. That made it easier to import the pre-recorded dialogue. So, very quickly I had a first cut of the scene.

I set up a single camera that showed the entire area of action. Then I added in the physical actions and facial expressions. I had to play around quite a bit with the timing of the actions so that they matched the dialogue. I had to run the animation each time I made a change to check if the timing worked.

My final step was to do the camera set ups. Which, again, involved some trial and error to get the timings right. I tried out a camera move in one scene. Back when I made “The Barrier”, I had tried that in one scene, but couldn’t get it to work. This time it worked quite well.

I’ve put the two videos to the side. After a few days I can look at them again with fresh eyes. That would allow me to see any opportunities for improvements.

The dialogue all comes from the recordings I did earlier for these writing exercises. My “female” voice just doesn’t sound right to me. I used an Audacity plug-in called Rovee to adjust my voice to sound female. It is distinct from my voice. It doesn’t sound all that female to me though.

I have talked to an actor about recording the female voices for me. She said she would like to do it, but I haven’t arranged a recording session with her yet. After I replace my voice with hers, I expect I’ll need to fiddle with the timings again.

After I have that taken care of, I still need to add sound effects and titles before I can call it a day.

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