Telling Tales: Finished?!

Emma has finally got all of her scenes rendered and she has done a great job at adding in her character's  pupils in after effects. She gave me her USB containing all of her exported videos and from there I was able to put all of our scenes together in order. The final length comes to around 1 minute and 5 seconds, because we claimed seconds at the beginning of our animation as titles, but rather than add in text in post for our title scene, we just assigned more focus to the cover of the book to act as our title scene. We have still both animated and rendered 30 seconds of animation so we're fine in that aspect.

From here we were able to revisit our sound.

Added Sound

In order to do the sound, I imported the new movie file and lined it up with my existing project/sounds from my testing. I then extended the first sound clip to the beginning of the composition, and the second clip to the end of the composition...

Editing the Sound

… but I found that I was still left with the little gap in-between the two different sections of the song. I didn't want to simply extend the 'montage sound clip' (top audio clips) to the beginning, because I liked how the other sound clip lined up with the walk and fall in the previous scene. To try and get the two sound clips to blend together, I extended them to make them overlap, and then made one fade into the other. When I played it back it seemed to work quite well but because I had been listening to the clips over and over again I could hear when the clips changed and to me it stood out like a sore thumb. I beckoned Emma over to have a look without explaining what I thought the issue was, and once she had finished watching I explained the dilemma and she said that she didn't even notice anything. 

We discussed how the sound fit with the animation and we were really happy with it, the only thing Emma suggested to do was to make the sound at the end gradually fade out as it suddenly cuts to silence. I added in the fade out and you can still hear that it cuts to silence but it isn't as abrupt because it slowly gets there. 

I asked Emma if she was happy with the sound or if she wanted to experiment with different clips, but we both agreed that we really liked how well this song complimented the animation. We both feel that it is light-hearted with moments that are more upbeat and intense (for the montage scene) without being overly dramatic. I like that the song is also quite repetitive which reflects the repetitive nature of trying to teach your child to walk. 

We also discussed whether we wanted to experiment with further sound effects, but we no longer saw any need. The music works really well as it is and somewhat almost provides the sound effects of the child falling due to how well the montage scene lines up. We thought that any further sounds would either detract from this synergy, or they would simply get lost in the soundtrack. 

A couple of fellow classmates asked if they could watch our animation once they heard that we had been able to put it all together and add sound, and all that watched said that they really like how fitting the music was and not one person picked up on where the different clips taken from different times in the song blend into one, which is a great. We also asked these students whether they would bother with further sound effects (such as the parent sighing like we had originally planned) but they had the same idea as us in that we didn't need them.

The only thing that is left to do now is final housekeeping. For some reason - even though she has rendered the scene out a second time - Emma's character still looks like it is hovering. She is going to have a look what she can do about this in after effects using 3D layers, considering I took over sound. If when she is done the final product looks worse than the hovering character, or for some reason we don't like the 'correction', then we are simply just going to deem this version to be our final version, and just make sure that in the future we leave enough time to re-render scenes if we encounter problems like this one. It's not a massive issue and it doesn't detract from the animated movements, but it would have been nice for the shadow to be as uniform as the other shadows in the scene.