A good weekend for The Quiet One. I started sound design for the first short and as I’m typing this I’m doing lighting tests for the first shot of the first short.
I’m pretty comfortable with sound design. Animation is new to me, drawing is still something I struggle with, but put me in front of a digital audio workstation and I’m good. I worked with u-he’s Zebra synth today to make sound effects for room ambience (air conditioner, general futuristic drone noises) as well as “endophonic” noises like breathing, nervous system ring and blood rushing through the ears.
Zebra isn’t open-source, but with every patch you can see how someone achieved a particular sound. This is especially cool in the case of The Dark Zebra sound set – Hans Zimmer (yes, that Hans Zimmer) and Howard Scarr released a bundle of their patches from The Dark Knight and The Dark Knight Rises. Their presets were definitely for performing and made extensive use of the envelope system, making pitchbend and modwheel do unexpected but cool things, and so on. That kind of thing is awesome for sound design because it allows you to contour the sound through performance instead of having to program it all. Programming that kind of stuff can be fun – I am a tracker kid from way back – but the results are often better working in real time.
So a normal breathing sound transforms into a swooning whooshy soundscape when I turn up the mod wheel, blood rushing through the ears grows more intense.. good times, and no need to wait for ten minutes to get a result either.
The lighting tests didn’t go quite as smoothly but they’re promising. I tried a sound synchronisation test with the blood rushing noise to simulate phosphene noise but it was way too busy. Phosphenes pulse and flash.sort of gently and indistinctly. The result I got today was more like blue and red TV snow on crack. Ah well, it’s a beginning. The much more interesting job was animating the lights.
The first episode (Episode 0) features Ktish meditating in his chamber when suddenly he gets a transmission from his home planet. As he’s interrupted, the lights come on. Except instead of being normal overhead lights, they’re part of an implicit display surface that makes up his walls. The sequence of frames above shows the low-light illumination fading away; the room lights appear at first behind his head and then continue to switch on in a row around the entire room. I like it as a visual reveal: we meet the character in darkness, lights come on behind him creating a silhouette, then rear and side lighting, then surround lighting – all while he’s coming up out of meditating back to normal consciousness. (A visual metaphor! Hooray!)
And that leads me to this week’s epiphany about making movies which I wish I’d had sooner: past a certain point, words are a shackle in this process. The end goal is light and sound over time – yes there can be words in the sound and the light, but the light and sound over time are the important bit. That’s what the audience gets. So the closer to that light and sound I can work as early as possible, the better. I jam a lot of ideas through dialogue, for instance – it’s just exploring, not literal actual dialogue intended to be taken through a process of refinement. As for writing synopses, I think I spent too long doing that, partly because I wasn’t sure what I wanted, but also partly because I was clinging to good old words really tightly. Familiar arts. I mean, drawing is still a grind – I’m getting better though I’m still too impatient and self-conscious – but any given drawing is much closer to what’ll be up there on the screen than words will ever be, no matter how crappy a drawing is.
Incidentally, rendering one of these frames at good quality at full HD takes at least ten minutes a pop. Have to try to cut that down somehow. As indie as it would be to have nice fuzzy grainy renders, there’s such a thing as too indie… also I want to build some sort of rough blocking thingy for my main character soon – something other than the monkey head would be nice for once. I’m close enough to a final character design that I can at least block him out rough, surely..
So that’s about it for now. Hope you’re having, have had or will have a safe and happy Solstice, Christmas, Kwanzaa, Hanukkah and/or New Year’s.