Vincent Puleo
5-9-2013
Sound Story Reflection
I decided to at first
write a story with dialogue, but after I had transferred the file, I was told
that no dialogue was to be present in our sound stories, & a tad too late
at that point, so I then I made the decision to start from scratch with my
sound script. I came up with a story about one of the background characters of
the animated series, “My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic”, named ‘Bon-Bon’
respectively. The rest just clipped into my mind like adhesive sand paper. It
was indeed, not only difficult, but almost impossible to find the right sound
for my particular story. That is the majority of the reason why I could not
finish my original .asnd file. For example, there were absolutely no sound
effects for uttering “What?” curiously, when that should be a necessity, at
least in my opinion. One difficulty I encountered when animating with images
was actually finding a majority of the images I required, so I created a
variety of my own images, utilizing open source animation software known as
“Source Filmmaker” to create animations & export the video. I then utilized
conversion software known as “Gif App” to convert that video to a .gif file,
& then separated that .gif file into .jpeg files via the usual “Photoshop”,
even adding cutouts to said images. As you can obviously imagine, it was a long
& tedious process, but I firmly believe that it all paid off in the long
run. With all that time paid off, I believe everything was quite well put
together from start to finish. For example, the scene at the very end has
plenty of comedic pay-off, due to the stellar comedic timing I had implemented
into that very scene. If I had to do this project again, I would have politely
pled, along with the rest of the class, to the teacher to let myself & the
rest of the student in said class to amend the use of custom sound effects in
the sound story until he would comply. The very few default sound effect Sound
Booth provides is quite limiting in my honest opinion, which would justify my
statement along with everyone else’s. I would like to thank you for taking the
precious time to read this reflection.
First of all, the no dialog was told when the assignment was announced. I knew that it would be impossible for students to find audio for the wors they might write, so that was done for a reason.
ReplyDeleteI'm sorry you didn't enjoy this lesson. You didn't really tell me the difficulties about the project, just the problems you had with my guidelines. Aside from saying you were limited in the sound effects, the rest just seems like a complaint. I had a reason for why I wanted you to do this assignment the way it was, and pleading for me to use custom sound effects was not part of the original assignment. I did however allow you to do that for the animated part, so that should have satiated your needs at that point.
Suggestions for improving your video.
I liked most of your images & cutouts. I think you chose images that go along with the audio very well. The story is short and to the point, right inside the 1:00 – 1:30 guides. Here are some things I think you could work on before the deadline:
1. Your pictures of Bon Bon walking aren’t the same thing as animating someone walking. As I said on Jupiter grades: “I don't want to see a picture of what the sound is (if I hear boots walking, I don't want to see a pictures of someone walking, I want to SEE someone walking on screen - cutouts).” The other ponies dancing around is exactly what I DO want to see.
2. The doors are on a black background, and it’s supposed to be an office building (from your script). Where is the building?
3. Why is Bon Bon in the darkness? It was supposed to be abandoned, according to your script – not black. If you wanted to show the inside of the office is dark, then show the office building and when the doors open the inside is dark. Right now everything is dark including where the doors are. I have no idea Bon Bon went into an office building.
4. Why do you have a sound and a title screen that says two minutes later? This wasn’t in your script. This is the part in the script where we hear her open the box, the sound of sytrofoam and an utterance of “What?” – how come there are no pictures for this?
5. Why do you have a plug for “created by source filmmaker” in the middle of your project? That needs to be removed.
6. Nice job with the game system and shocked look. I would want to see the pony playing with the controller rather than a picture of them playing with it. Maybe have an animated screen shot of the game she’s playing? In your story it had her being tied up and forced to play, but that doesn’t come across in either the sound or the images.
7. Tears are falling but I don’t understand why – I don’t hear any sound for them? We hear her crying later.