Dec 11, 2016
Concept images for a children’s game called Underworld.
Tried to write with my new graphics tablet and it doesn’t look so good.
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Concept images for a children’s game called Underworld.
Tried to write with my new graphics tablet and it doesn’t look so good.
My roll-a-ball game quickly made in Unity.
Overhead view and 4 textures for a concept roll-a-ball game
A Tae Kwon Do game that you can also use for fitness and learning the linework
The completed trailer.
650 Word Summarised Report (including post-feedback action)
I elected to create a trailer for the table top card game ‘Magic: the Gathering’, produced and distributed by ‘Wizards of the Coast’.
My initial idea was to emphasise the notion of player choice, which is a strong feature of the game. The trailer would utilise as iconic symbol of choice from the game, the five-fold path, and use a slogan in the vein of “Choose your path”.
While I considered showing individuals playing the game in different ways, I believed non-enfranchised viewers would not be drawn in by this. Instead I decided to make use of the game’s extensive back story and evocative card art. I would display art of five of the game’s more prominent characters, each accompanied by their own line of dialogue.
For background music, I wanted something to evoke the feeling of an “epic trailer”, in line with the game’s grounding in High Fantasy and over-the-top action.
Once I had chosen appropriate characters from the game, I devised a script and storyboard:
The five-fold path would display while the narrator speaks for the first time, then fade to black; each character would then appear in turn, fading in from and then to black, accompanied by a line of dialogue and some sound effects summing up the philosophy of which of the five colours of the game they represent; then the official logo of the game along with the narrator saying the slogan.
I located six images, one of the five-fold path, and one for each character.
I also obtained a video clip of the game’s official logo, which appears in all official video trailers for the game.
Using Adobe Illustrator, I edited the images I had obtained so that the characters portrayed were approximately the same scale, and so that each appeared illuminated by a spotlight.
The sound effects I required were almost all generated during a group Foley session with other students taking this module.
After several hours listening to “epic” music compositions, I identified a track, ‘Aeterna’ from producer ‘Liquid Cinema’, featuring a suitable segment, opening with silence and building to a dramatic climax, and exactly thirty seconds long.
I recruited five volunteers to contribute their voices towards the characters. Unfortunately, misadventure prevented the first organised recording session from being successful, although with the assistance of my cast I was able to obtain the audio I needed for my final sound effects.
The second recording session was successful, although I was required to voice two characters due to the absence of one of the cast – however, the sound quality of the recording conditions was poorer this time.
Audacity was used to edit the character voices. I selected the best takes, trimmed each one to five seconds or less, and amplified them.
My sound effects were also created in Audacity, changing the pitch of several and layering many others together to create suitable composite sounds. These sound effects were then layered with the character voices to create my character segments.
Using Adobe Premiere, I imported all the audio, Illustrator files and logo clip. The illustrator files were arranged in the correct order for the video track and had cross-dissolve transitions added. The character audio segments were aligned with these as audio track one, and the background music was inserted as audio track two.
Character images alone made the video seem a little sparse – I located five more pieces of game art , edited them with Illustrator, and inserted them into video track two, trimmed short and aligned with the end of each track one clip so they would appear only as brief flashes on-screen, using a dip-to-white transition.
Post-Feedback:
A number of alterations were made based on feedback I received.
I increased the length of the “brief flash” images so they were visible for longer, as they appeared too briefly, preventing my audience from properly interpreting them.
The video was still too static – it was recommended I apply the Ken Burns effect to my images, to create a sense of motion while still focussing on important aspects of the images. This proved easy to implement in Premiere, by adding a pair of keyframes to each character segment between which I panned and zoomed in on key character features.
It was also initially recommended that I increase the bass level on certain voice clips to compensate for tinniness, but later feedback on the modified voice clips was that I should increase the gain of certain clips in lieu of this, which would also resolve the issue.
References:
Argyle, S. 2011. Chandra's Phoenix. [online image]. Renton, WA: Wizards of the Coast Corporate HQ. Available from: http://www.thebagofloot.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/05/Chandras-Phoenix_Buy-a-box-Promo.jpg [Accessed 24 November 2014].
Barger, R. 2013. Tarmagoyf. [online image]. Renton, WA: Wizards of the Coast Corporate HQ. Available from: http://archive.wizards.com/magic/magazine/article.aspx?x=mtg/daily/activity/1258 [Accessed 24 November 2014].
Briclot, A. 2009. Garruk Wildspeaker. [online image]. Renton, WA: Wizards of the Coast Corporate HQ. Available from: http://archive.wizards.com/Magic/magazine/article.aspx?x=mtg/daily/downloads/wallpaper/garruk [Accessed 12 November 2014].
Briclot, A. 2010. Gideon Jura. [online image]. Renton, WA: Wizards of the Coast Corporate HQ. Available from: http://archive.wizards.com/magic/magazine/article.aspx?x=mtg/daily/arcana/430 [Accessed 12 November 2014].
Briclot, A. 2009. Jace Beleren. [online image]. Renton, WA: Wizards of the Coast Corporate HQ. Available from: http://archive.wizards.com/Magic/magazine/article.aspx?x=mtg_daily_downloads_wallpaper_jace [Accessed 12 November 2014].
Briclot, A. 2009. Liliana Vess. [online image]. Renton, WA: Wizards of the Coast Corporate HQ. Available from: http://archive.wizards.com/Magic/magazine/article.aspx?x=mtg/daily/downloads/wallpaper/liliana [Accessed 12 November 2014].
Chandra Nalaar. n.d. [online image]. Available from: http://hdw.eweb4.com/wallpapers/3122/ [Accessed 12 November 2014].
DS106. 2014. Layering sounds in Audacity. [online]. Available from: http://ds106.us/handbook/tools/layering-sounds-in-audacity/ [Accessed 22 November 2014].
Felix, J. 2010. Mind Unbound. [online image]. Renton, WA: Wizards of the Coast Corporate HQ. Available from: http://archive.wizards.com/magic/magazine/article.aspx?x=mtg/daily/arcana/750 [Accessed 24 November 2014].
Planewalker Symbol. n.d. [online image]. Renton, WA: Wizards of the Coast Corporate HQ. Available from: http://archive.wizards.com/magic/magazine/article.aspx?x=mtg/daily/arcana/208 [Accessed 12 November 2014].
Premium Beat. 2014. Creating a "Ken Burns" Pan and Zoom effect in Premiere Pro. [online]. Available from: http://www.premiumbeat.com/blog/ken-burns-effect-premiere-pro/ [Accessed 26 November 2014].
Rigney, B. 2011. Visara the Dreadful. [online image]. Renton, WA: Wizards of the Coast Corporate HQ. Available from: http://cryptcrawler.deviantart.com/art/MTG-Visara-The-Dreadful-252398429 [Accessed 24 November 2014].
Staples, G. 2012. Captain's Call. [online image]. Renton, WA: Wizards of the Coast Corporate HQ. Available from:http://archive.wizards.com/magic/magazine/article.aspx?x=mtg/daily/arcana/995 [Accessed 24 November 2014].
Audio for Computer Games Assignment 1 - A video to demonstrate contrast, using visual and audio contrasts. This video depicts the life of two GDPM students, ...
This was originally posted to my Blackboard Blog, but since I have been using this as my main blog for the class I have re-posted it here for easier access.
So after 2 days of editing, I've finally finished my first video assignment which was a video on Contrast.
I had several ideas for this video, but decided to go with my initial idea, which was my view on student life thus far in terms of the social aspects. With that in mind, I decided to film an introvert/extrovert video.
The initial challenge for me was deciding how best to portray both of these contrasting personality traits, and within 15 seconds! Luckily I managed to get a lot of good footage for both (with the help from a few of my fellow students) which I was able to then edit and mix together for a reasonably made 15 second video. If given more time, I would have liked to have added more to the video, and clean it up somewhat. But I am still happy with the end result.
The most challenging part of making this video, was perhaps attempting to put the story together in my head, before realising it during editing. I believe that if I had drawn up simple story boards, I would have been able to work faster and more efficiently, and seen any potential problems that may have arose from mixing scenes together much earlier than during the final editing stage.
You will notice when the video loads, it initially says it is 16 seconds long, however when loaded reverts back to it's true running time of 15 seconds.
Coursework Assignment 1: Zombies!!! Board Game Advert - Write Up & Reflections
Zombies!!! Board Game Advert Reflections
We were tasked with creating a 30 second video advert for a board game of our choice, implementing various visual and audio sound-fx during the editing process.
I chose to film my advert on the board game Zombies!!!; I had a rough idea from the outset how I would like to film the advert. Envisioning various outdoor scenes and live action scenes to represent the game-play and players, however this proved to be a greater task than I had first imagined due to the necessary lighting, and weather conditions required, timing for actors to be available for recording and of course, the unpredictability of the public during filming.
Due to these various factors I decided it was best to film indoors to enable more control over the filming process and to have the board game more prominently shown in the video, for this change of direction I focused on filming a comical style of horror advert with the feel of a low budget B-Movie horror film, the idea came to me from watching several of these types of films and from the music videos of Rob Zombie, one of which I used intro music from for the backing track to my video.
I gave my actors direction asking them to play the game and have a good time, secondly I gave the zombie actors a free run at how they believe a zombie would act. Once filming was done, I created various zombie groans and board game sound fx using a microphone and manipulated them in Audacity.
Afterwards I gathered all my scenes and audio clips in Premiere Pro and cut all the necessary clips together into one video. I then reduced the frame rate to 12fps and increased the speed of the video to around 132%, followed by adding in black and white with a mixture of sepia tones to the video sequence, and then finally adding scratch effects to the video in order to give it the look and feel of a low budget B-Movie horror film.
There were several challenges when editing the video such as the length of which the video was to be but as I poured through the video segments it became apparent which scenes fit best with style of the advert I was going for and those that didn't.
The next problem was adding the audio to the video in time with the sequences after I had cut the video down proved to be a challenging but fun experience. Editing sound in Audacity proved to be a small learning curve but after several hours with the program I managed to get the sounds I was looking for, feedback from my lecturers indicated I was best using Adobe Audition to edit my sounds in future projects.
After the feedback session, along with using Audition for my sound editing, I was advised to increase the volume of the voice over so that it would not clash with the rest of the sounds in the video.
Once all the video aspects were complete and the audio was added to the video, I then exported the finished video into a Quicktime.mov format, followed by uploading the video to YouTube.
Ultimately I am happy with my efforts and I feel like I have learned a lot during the whole process, not only from my own experiences filming and editing, but also in the efforts of the other students in my class which has inspired me to do more and hopefully even better in my next project.
The following are links to sites/videos which helped me create my video:
For the old film look I used the following YouTube video tutorial:-
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OMfYP-6D1y4
http://rustystasiuk.deviantart.com/art/Premiere-Pro-Old-Film-Grain-299974974
This sites helped me in general areas of the editing process and finished cut:-
http://www.premiumbeat.com/blog/premiere-pro-tips/
http://www.premiumbeat.com/blog/pro-tip-exporting-a-finished-video-from-premiere-pro/
The following YouTube link is to the music video for the song Dragula by Rob Zombie which I heavily influenced my video concept and for which I used the opening sequence for the soundtrack to my video:-
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EqQuihD0hoI
The following images and links are from films which influenced my video greatly:-
Shadow of the Vampire:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uAn5uLNMmjk
Nosferatu:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rcyzubFvBsA
Night of The Living Dead (1968):
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pElSu_ECJGM
Planet Terror:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DCFQtc6BzyM