Studio Practice: Weekly Production Diary- Applied Animation Week 9

Recording temp Audio
In order to put together an animatic, we need to know where certain audio cues in the animation are, so we recorded some temporary audio in the sound-booth, voicing the characters ourselves, in order to get a feel for the timings when editing our rough animatic. Tess portrayed Keith, as well as directing the dialogue and I was tasked with playing the narrator. For this I put on a more neutral sounding BBC accent, the sort of voice you'd hear from a radio announcer or somebody presenting the one show. I had never voice acted before, so even putting on a more neutral version of my own voice proved challenging, as one must take into account intonation and emphasis on certain words. Tess was impressed by my performance as the narrator and asked me to provide the voices for the final animation, as I had the right kind of voice, on the condition that I re-record some of my lines for the final cut, as I did trail off at the end of a couple of sentences.

For the final scene, where Keith's character is revealed to be the product of various internet commenters, me and Tess both recorded takes of us as Keith which we could intercut between in order to illustrate the breaking of the fabric of reality in the animation. We wanted to sound bland and distant in order to reflect the commenters, however after listening to the takes back again when editing our animatic, we're probably going to have to find another solution for the final animation.

Rough Animatic/Tests
Having finalised our storyboards, next we arranged them into a rough animatic in Adobe Premier in order to get a good feeling for the timings before starting on our animatic. I was tasked with arranging the scenes I had storyboarded, mostly the latter third of the animation in which Keith rants at a crowd of onlookers, into a rough animatic with the temporary audio we recorded in the sound booth.

While editing I realised that the scene was running a bit too long, pushing the animation as a whole past the four minute mark. I thought this may be a problem, as it is important we keep certain timings in order to achieve the desired comedic effect, but the scene I was working on was looking more and more like it was going to be be upwards of a minute and a half long, which for a brief for which we are expected to produce a 1-2 minute animation, may prove difficult to finish on time. After consulting the group, we agreed a rework parts of the script to make the animation shorter, which would involve cutting out some of the unneeded transition shots we used to pad out the narration.