Last Week Before Christmas

Wow, it's going to be busy.

Just last week we were introduced to a programme called Garageband, a music/sound creation and editing programme. I have to say, I really like it, it's a lot of fun. Unfortunately though it's a Mac-only programme. What a disappointment... not only that, but after doing some research it also turned out that there's no real comparable programme for PC; the closest I could find was called Mixcraft, and though it was reasonably cheap it just doesn't quite match up to Garageband feature-wise. (Also, while Garageband has over a hundred possible digital instruments, Mixcraft only has eight).

So now I'm pondering over getting myself a new keyboard that I can use with Audacity - I have one, but it's so old that the computer doesn't recognize it.

Timetable for the Week:

Monday:
9:00am-1:00pm - Tutorials and Sketchbook annotation
1:00pm-3:00pm - Garageband, sound production
4:00pm-onwards - Adobe Photoshop; Finish tweaks to scene and character mockups
Tuesday:
9:00am-1:00pm - Adobe Photoshop, Animation artwork
1:00pm-4:00pm - Retest character mockups and scene tweaks in Cinema 4D
Wednesday:
9:00am-3:00pm - Garageband, sound production
4:00pm-onwards - Adobe Photoshop, Animation artwork

Sound Design

It's another rather sleepy and very icy Monday, and today we're due to start on sound design for our animations. While I am really excited about trying something new, I'm concerned about the state of the animation itself. I was really pining to get on Cinema 4D (I was intending to on Friday, but the college closed very early due to the weather) and start putting my main scene together, just to make sure it's all going to work the way I'm hoping it will.

While I was drawing out the frames for my Eagle and Ratatosk, I had to estimate as closely as possible where they were going to be on which branch of Yggdrasil - harder than it sounds, because they're not perched on a flat plane, so they need to be drawn in such a way that they look like they're sitting on the branch (which will actually be layered behind them) and not sort of floating around it. Said branch is also included with the tree's base trunk layer and sits behind a big clump of leaves, so I'm going to have to get creative with the camera and pan underneath the leaf layer without it feeling... weird. And I am well aware that it could turn out looking VERY weird.

I spent about a day and a half on Ratatosk's animation, and closer to three days solid on the Eagle's, but it looks acceptably decent, I hope. So if at all possible, later today after we've been let go I'll hop onto Cinema 4D and just see if I can get a feel for how things are going to work. Once that's out of the way at least I'll know exactly what I'm going for.