: - V

Hey ya'll. It is... 5AM.
Me and the roommate are going to celebrate with lattes tomorrow. This project has taken up all my free time I'M SO HAPPY TO BE DONE (though I'm sure I'll tweak some things here and there).

I forget if I said this in my last post but I wouldn't mind saying it again; I've learned SO much from this project. Organization is so important. And making sure you've got your pre-planning DOWN is so so very important too. Working with Liv was awesome. I'm happy to have gotten the chance to work with someone so talented :-) I think we both learned a lot from this project.

Anyways, I'm going to bed.

Dang Dog Dang Diggity Dog Dang Dang Dang Diggity Dog

So I had to scrap most of my work (so long tea cups and cakes!) but the new stuff looks pretty superb. 

I can't believe how much I've learned from this project. Not just in my field (which I've kept you all updated on) but in other people and other artists. You'd think artists would understand each other but the languages between each profession are vastly different. Composition to Liv means an entirely different thing to me. I think our miscommunication was the key thing that stopped me and Liv from being on the same page most the time. 

I also learned (and this is incredibly silly for me not to have known beforehand) that making a mixdown is hard and requires time and a lot of talent. One thing Liv realized is that people outside of the music profession think mixes can just be pulled out of thin air. No one ever sees the layers upon layers upon layers of sound they have to weave together. No one even thinks about WHERE they get their sound. They just assume the musician know what they're doing and just produce it. It's like making sketches and thumbnails. Testing things out, brushing things up, making sure the placement is right before you go in and make it final. Visually, if you work in programs like Photoshop, you can understand a person having a hundred layers for one illustration. Same with musicians. They can have a hundred layers of different sounds for a song. I need to take up an instrument.

THERE'S HOPE!

With my newfound knowledge of cross dissolves and my limited time, I think I'm going to tackle the rest of this project a little differently. For the parts that I can get away with, I will use cross dissolves between illustrated keyframes. Other scenes like the one that represent the music abstractly will be animated since they are so simple. If there's time at the end I will spruce up the other scenes and see if I can add some animation between them.

Small Update

Technical Questions:

- Cross dissolves in After Effects

- Tweening in Flash or After Effects

Mellowing

Cool news, cool news. My friend Haley Monsoon will be interviewing Liv Rand and I on our collaborative piece! So that will be a fun thing to look forward to.

I think I've somewhat mellowed down from last week's freak out. Most of the anxiety was due to miscommunication. Weeks ago I had asked Liv if she could "speed up" her version of the song and "add beats" when I should have asked her to re-record her version at the same tempo as the original track and to make sure to keep true to the cords heard in the beginning of the song. I should brush up on my musical jargon or take up an instrument or something. I want to continue working with musicians in the future so it would be good for me to learn how to speak their language! I'm still awaiting Liv's final final version of her cover. Not knowing what that sounds like is the only thing keeping me on edge. I'm sure everything will be fine though. Liv seems to be a very organized person and her teacher tells me she's very reliable. Once I get that I'll post it on here.

Anywho. In terms of what I've been up to, I've found out that SWF files can be imported into After Effects. Maybe that was a no brainer for some but to me it was a revelation! I've had been converting my Flash projects as Animated GIFS, which then would totally lose their original colour in After Effects.

This is from the Animated GIF exported from Flash. Notice how the colours got more yellow?

This is from the SWF with the original colours.

Plus the GIFs weren't transparent so I couldn't make simple colour corrections to match up the shots without messing up the background.

After all this is done I think I'm going to take some crash courses on Linda.com for Flash and After Effects. I could have been much further ahead in this project if I knew all the stuff I'm finding out now. There's a lot of useful stuff out there that I'm not aware of.