- Whether you have met your production goals so far?
- Overall I am relatively pleased with my own and teams production goals. I feel I have attempted things that put me out of my comfort zone, for instance we were concerned with the amount of voice acting needed at the start of the unit, and originally intended to use professional voice actors. Yet due to past experiences in acting and drama I thought I’d just give it a try and speed up the process. I’m very glad I did this because the recording process became quite an entertaining experience where me, Yusuf and James experimented with our voices to some extreme levels. These sessions in the foley room also helped bring the group together as a whole and we began to discuss roles and what each person wanted to get out of the unit, as well as learning more about each other. Yusuf and James are both extremely talented producers and sound artists and my skills in production do not really compare, therefore it made sense for each of them to focus more on the sound elements such as field recording and ambiences. I wished to score the opening theme and help overcome my own concerns about my production skills. Having only scored the opening theme I do wish I attempted to score a theme for the forest environment but I had to be considerate of others goals as well. As a whole I’m proud of the groups production, we have all contributed sounds and music that work well with the video game and I feel everyone stepped into the unknown.
- What aspects will you address in post-production?
- In terms of my contributions, I will try and add more ambience to the menu screen and push the music into the background. I feel the music is way too prominent and takes away from the 3D space the user occupies, thus making the environment appear relatively flat and lifeless.
- The mixing for the voices need to be more prominent, especially in the laboratory scenes where the Masters voice becomes lost in the sea of ambiences.
- Add Footsteps in the forest scenes so it grounds the user, without them the users looses the augmented contact with the surroundings. I will use the woodland footsteps I recorded in the foley room sessions we had at the start of the unit.
- What was useful from the Crit?
- Firstly listening to the mix on the genelec speakers gave me a much better idea as to how all the individual components sound. For example the sub bubble sound for the floating orbs in the menu or the selection of plants is extremely loud in comparison to the ambience. I think a change in sound will also be needed to signify a change plant/object. This goes for the voices as noted in the previous answer.
- The feedback from classmates was positive and has helped settle some of my fears in terms of the production and has given me the confidence to make necessary changes I feel are needed.
- The final segment of the video appears lifeless and rushed. I will need to add spaceship and destruction sounds to match the visuals.
- To replace the forest soundtrack by adding Yusuf’s new score, using his older score in the final segment to signify the change in mood and ending of the game.
- What has changed through problem solving?
- The biggest change would be from not using Unity to scoring a video. Initially we wished to explore unity and VR completely but due to poor time management in this department and a sheer lack of know how, we have had to adjust. I don’t see this as a negative because neither of us are video game designers and Unity can barely run on any of our laptops. Therefore scoring for a video gives us more time to focus on the quality of our sounds and music.
COLLAB: Final Crit Review
8th June 2022 | 0 comments