So. I have a dialogue-only audio montage containing all the dialogue in the short in preliminary recordings, and spoken in the fictional language too. Whew.
It’s four minutes long. I feel like I cut the titting thing to the bone and it’s still four minutes long. I had it down to three and a quarter minutes long before I recorded the dialogue in this new language.. crazy.
Still, it’s a fairly packed four minutes, and there’s now a few interesting pauses for dramatic effect just to let the moments sink in. I’ve learnt a couple of useful things about voice direction – making sure a character is emotionally believable from moment to moment in the recording, making sure their words, emotions and reactions are consistent with the character you know, and making sure furthermore that it’s all interesting enough to hold the attention of an audience. Is that directing or acting? Both, I guess.
And the character I’ve honed out of the dialogue is reserved. Reserved characters are.. hard. But that’s the kind of character I want to make: a merry introvert.
Recording dialogue in a tongue-twisting constructed language sucks.. until after twenty rehearsals you nail the take from muscle memory alone. Then it is the best. I’ll post a couple of tricks later when I go through and record the final version.
As for how it sounds? Kind of great. It feels like a real language being spoken here and there and that’s what I wanted. Tick box.
This scene is going to be great to animate, that for sure. Lots of quiet thinky character animation. Nothing broad. I love that stuff.
Anyway, next comes a bit of art direction – characters and the set. The set’s coming to me in bits and pieces. As for the characters, more vizdev and definitely more drawing are in my future.
But my self-imposed exile from dicking around in Blender is now over because there’s enough soundtrack to storyboard off. That was the deal. 🙂
