Infiltrate Exploit Spread: Soundscape Search

    When I made my animatic I came across some music that while interesting was probably not the most appropriate. As was suggested I should probably see what is preferred as the last two attempts at choosing an appropriate soundscape have been less than perfect. Not one to shy from delving deeper I loooked into the creator's profile to see what she had and found a few tracks of note, although there were less than I thought that switched the beat dramatically at the one-minute mark.

My preferences are leaning towards "Road Trip Through Installation 04", "Invading a Submarine" and "Waypoint A", with the former two being my personal strongest favourites for the soundscape.

Soundscape: First Creations

    The first drafts for my Soundscape audio are complete. It was interesting tweaking sound files to make new sounds but I am unsure about the final feel. I suppose partially because this project was quite brief - 3 30-second videos that portray some kind of ambient or active sound. So overall the outcomes were not that complicated. I probably had the most fun making 1 and 3. I had to compress the renders a lot in order to upload them to the blog as at full resolution (1440 x 1080 pixels) the video files measured 1GB in size on my hard drive. I made half a dozen test renders in order to find out what settings I could compress my videos down to although I wonder if I could have simply reduced the number of frames as I learned from mu Maya classes that the 1GB file at 25 frames per second contains 750 instances of the same image repeated over the video.

    Presumably since the images are there for visual association I might be able to escape with cutting down the mumber of frames. Experiences with framerate lulls in video games have taught me that sound and visuals can potentially run separate to each other; for example I have noticed when framerates hit 20 or 15fps for a game designed to run on at least 30, animation and sound for in-engine cutscenes would desync, leading to characters mouthing silently for a second or two after they should have finished speaking as even when framerates drop t oas low as ten per second, the span of the sound file being played does not change..

    I think what I loved about the work on the audio for picture 1 was the vividness I had in my head, so it was one of the easiest to visualise. The moment I saw it I instantly imagined this underwater world. So my head was swimming with bloops, churns and that general echoing ambience you have whenever you submerge yourself in water. It was very fun to make. I was pleasantly surprised with myself that the echoing noise heard thoughout came from recording the overhead ventilation on the lower 3rd floor. Admittedly I didn't exactly go too far out with this one; the "gloop"ing and the sloshing heartbeat came from me messing about with a water bottle.

    As I mentioned in a previous post, this one was made bu trying out various bristling noises. I got an interesting sound from sorting dried spaghetti and I also tried rubbing the bristles of a toothbrush. with my finger to see what sound came out. Perhaps this one could do a bit of improvement with the scratchign being more gradual.

    The final soundscape was another interesting creation. I recognised these as viruses so I had no idea what sound could be associated with them. I had thought about pollen so I considered brushing noises. The ambient hum was acquired from another ventilation system, this time an extractor fan behind a door. I thought it gave a nice spacey echo as at the scale of viruses water and space become less distinguishable (if that makes any sense, viruses are measured in nanometres and can be as small as being only twice the width of a single DNA sequence). It was drowned out by the hum but I had also managed to include a stationary bus engine as an initial ambient noise before including the louder hum.

    Overall, despite a few hiccups I have enjoyed this project. But there must be more to do as it feels very brief. Perhaps trying to improve these soundtracks.

First Work With Animation and Audition

    First lesson in animation was an interesting one. Before starting the car animation we were guided though the process of animation through parenting objects and moving them into key frames though linking up a robotic arm. While I only got as far as parenting up the segements of the arms, the subsequent tutorials have solidified my knowledge of how to set up key frames.

     So far thought the tutorials I have done (the car and the rocket) have been done using a premade control node that I didn't put in myself, so I am eager to learn how to do that but I am also a little nervous as my understanding of coding is still pretty basic and the process is still a little intimidating to me. Then again I was a little worried at the animation side but the animation processes I have done so far - despite being baby steps in comparison to what I see in movies and video games al lthe time - has boosed my confidence with animation.

    I  made only one slight error with setting up the animation process for the rocket ride - not setting the right framerate before animating - I decided to look into the batch rendering tutorial after doing the rocket ride tutorial and the tutorial called for a framerate of 25 frames per second when I had done the rocket ride on 24fps.

     The other issue I encountered was that while I did successfully batch render the animation, I think it could have done with an anbient, directional light or an ambient occlusion node as the rocket came out pitch-black on the frames with only some highlighting visible (I batch rendered as a tif file). I cannot confirm but one attempt may have included visual artifacts as a white checkerboard may or may not have appeared in one of the frames, I cannot recall which one however.

    Below are the two movies made - one showing the track and the other with the track hidden in the layer options menu. I might still use this tutorial for the batch rendering process to make a refined view as these are quite low-res.

    Before all this I had my first lesson of Adobe Audition in the morning and managed to make this using modifications from what I thin kwere a slide whistle, popcorn being cooked and one of those toy lawnmowers for infants. I surprised myself when I was able to make (what I hear as) a fighter plane getting into trouble out of these sources.

   I'll still have to investigate the best formats because despite the sound file only being 207kb (as an MP3) and 2mb (as a wave file), it is takeing forever to upload as a video file.