"The Barrier" Makes Noise

I made some good progress on "The Barrier" this week. Mostly I added sound effects to the sound track. I've added ambient sound to about half the movie now. I added some specific sounds, such as foot steps. That isn't easy to do, but fortunately most of sets look like they have carpet, so I can get away with out the footsteps most of the time.

In scenes where people talk on the phone, I processed the dialogue to sound like it came over the phone. I did a little research on-line to find out how to do that. It wasn't as complicated as I thought.

I tightened up some of the scenes. Usually it was just cutting out some pauses in the dialogue. I did some dialogue overlap in a couple places to make it seem that characters were interrupting each other.

In one place a character says "that looks impressive" while she watches a simulation of a microsimulation model on a computer scene. Unfortunately, the animation I produced wasn't very impressive, so I cut out that line.

Some of dialogue is a little hard to understand. There isn't much I can do about that because it has to do with the artificial voices, which I no longer have access to. One thought I had was to add captions to the movie. That will be a lot of work though.

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

"The Barrier" - On to Version 0.3

Last Sunday after I posted to my blog, my wife and I watched "The Barrier". She said she liked it, but thought it was a little slow in places. She said that the main character reminded her of me. Most of the characters are based on me.

I took that as the sign to go ahead, so I began to work on the next version 0.3. The first step was to make a list of changes I want to make. There were still some video issues I wanted to fix, but the bulk of the changes involve sound effects.

I fixed a small video glitch that I missed earlier. I only noticed one while we watched. some video problems I'd noticed. I also spotted a scene where I forgot to composite in some computer screens. I got that done.

I did a couple of experiments to speed up the pace of the movie a bit.

In the first experiment, I sped up some shots of people walking. I can only do that in shots where no one talks, which means there are only a few places I can do it. I found that I could speed it up a bit without it looking comical.

In the second experiment, I trimmed some of the pauses between speakers. I did this in a scene where one character repeatedly interrupts another. I overlapped the dialogue there. I thought that turned out OK, but I will have another look at it before I do it elsewhere.

The main thing I want to do in version 0.3 is add sound effects. To start, I created a back ground ambiance sound file to use in the office scenes. I have phones ringing, people talking, Xerox machines, doors opening and closing, and I added in a couple of coughs. I did the coughs myself. When I recorded them, Myreil got worried about me and asked if I was OK.

I plan to post the full length video to YouTube. Normally you have a 15 minute limit, but I thought they had raised mine. I checked that and I don't have a limit to the length of my videos.

There are some other problems I'd like to fix, but I can't make them unless I redo the whole movie in another system. Mostly they are problems with the technical details of the work the transportation planners do. Transportation planners would pick up on them, but others wouldn't. They are really a Mcguffin, so I'm not too concerned about it now

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