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