Friday, May 29, 2009

My website is online!

Finally, after leaving the domain lying around unused for over a year, I managed to put up my own website!

On Creative Voice, you'll find informations on all of the things I love doing, with pictures, voice-over demo and songs and some movies.

Hope you enjoy the visit! You'll also find a link to it on the top of this page!
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Saturday, May 23, 2009

A mistake I won't make again

Ever wanted to smack yourself real hard? I do right now....

The Afflicted could be nearly finished right now. But it isn't, and it's entirely my fault, for thinking too much of my ability to clean vo's and get them to sound just right.

Having made a lot of machinima films, I'm used to working with different quality vo's. Everyone has a different set-up, different quality mic, room sounds etc. etc. etc.
So from the start, I tried to learn as much about quality and sound enhancement as I could, experimenting a lot - and though it often wasn't easy, I was able to get good results.

Now this time, I overestimated myself. And the worst part is, I only realised it now -when every scene is filmed, composited, ready.... at the stage when I add the original vo's and the sounds to the finished product. It just doesn't work. I do owe an apology to Goofparade, who told me from the start he thought I should ask for retakes after listening to a sample of my cleaning efforts.
I cleaned again instead, and thought this time I got it.

Apparently not - I have to admit that I made a mistake, asked for help (thank you, Ricky, for your time and efforts!) - and now re-takes it is. Which means I'll have to re-film all the scenes for which the new takes will be made, and go back to compositing and snippets-exporting...

Thankfully, the actor in question will do the vo's again - and by no means I want to lay any blame there - this is entirely my mistake, and one I will make never again.

And of course it means you'll have to wait a little longer for the movie...
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Saturday, May 2, 2009

Production update on "The Afflicted" or how I learn patience...

Work on The Afflicted is in full swing again - or should I rather say, crawling progress? Since my clever idea of combing the .veg files doesn't work, I'm back to rendering scenes in bits and snippets again, and spent the better part of yesterday and today evening..... waiting.

As much as I love movie making, I could do very well - very well! - without the long waiting-on-something-to-render pauses. Very, very well. I'm not an impatient person at all - I spent hours fiddling on scenes to get them just so - but snippets rendering drives me crazy. Especially as I'm hardly able to watch what I put together beforehand - filming in 1280x720 has it's drawbacks, as my computer isn't even able to show me a preview even when the settings are set to lowest quality - well, it shows a preview, but skips a lot of frames.

Which means that I see imperfections after I have rendered... go back, fix them... render again... wait again.... rinse and repeat.

Sigh.

Nonetheless, I've made a lot of progress. Here's another screenie, with the great city MikeDBoing modded for me... minus one very cool detail I want to keep secret until the film is finally released. :)


More updates soon to come.... if (and that's a big if) I haven't fallen to lunacy while waiting...
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