See Hear Part 1 - Producing Final Result

Having used up my 30-day trials, it's time to sell my soul to Adobe...

For my final section, I ended up using a few different software programs for creating it - I should say then that I haven't had much experience on them (so what I've created may seem rather tame but I feel it fits with the sound design).

Storyboard in my sketchbook for planning what I was going to create digitally

I began by working on my black-and-white line linking sequence that would introduce the 'normal' sound; in my case, this was a microwave. I created this on Flash.

Key Frames

Tweened

Tweened w/ sound

I was (and still am) quite pleased with how I synced the animation to the sound. If there was anything I would change it would probably be the shape of its window when the door doesn't quite shut the first time and pauses. The door and its handle change accordingly to its perspective but the window doesn't change enough so it makes the door look slightly odd and static. However this is a pretty minor thing.

After the microwave was finished, I moved on to After Effects, a software package that I have not had a huge amount of experience with before this project.

Masking test - applied to microwave window (but microwave doesn't fade away completely!)

Circle shape layer - proportions key-framed w/ glow effect added
(This time, microwave is gone but white box in the shape of door's window is apparent)

I liked the idea of several 'wisps' shooting out from the glowing orb. I played around with the speed at which the 'wisp' shoots out as well how quickly (or, I should say, how slowly) it rotates around the orb.

'Wisp' created on Photoshop with the Brush tool

'Wisp' appears using mask tool w/ its path key-framed;
Glow effect applied to Wisp & rotation tweened


For the other 'wisps', I copied the attributes of the first one I created since it was the same sound being used. However, I did change their colours so that they were a collection of warm colours like a triad of three harmonising notes. This then reflected the chord humming in the background as well as representing the short gestural noise.

Three 'wisps' w/ colour changes

After I had created my 'wisps', I created what I had named as the 'watery' sound in my section. This was when the skills I had learnt from the radial audio spectrum tutorial I watched came into play. I wanted it to appear only briefly as that's what I feel the sound portrayed. Much like the 'wisps', I repeated the same footage but with it in a different rotated position around the orb.

'Watery' created w/ Radial Audio spectrum w/ glow & blur applied;

its overall opacity & scale then tweened afterwards.

I was happy with this but it seemed that the 'watery' layer appeared rather jerky. This was easily rectified once Toby pointed out to me that I didn't need to have everything set at 12.5fps. I changed it to 25fps (except the microwave layer) and it was a lot smoother and much nicer to watch.

To finish, I increased the rotation of the wisps around the central glowing orb before it enlargens and explodes into white heat and slowly fades out.

Final HD render of my section

Our 'Indoors' group final See Hear Part 1 film

Overall, I'm really happy with my section as well as our whole film. It was good to have the chance to digitally experiment with software packages, having not had much experience with them before. I see our film as a collection or a suite of animations strung together to reflect our sound design. Our sound design has four recognisable sections that could be played standalone so I think that is why we felt we could approach in a similar way as we did for the animation: each person experimenting as they wished in their section before bringing it all together. It is then maybe not the best of films as a whole as it could be seen as loosely stitched together. This then could have be improved if we maintained a more strict aesthetic style (visual elements, colour palette) in each section. However we didn't want it to be restricted for us to experiment so I am with happy with how it is.