Feedback Evaluation

This blog post contains views that were expressed today when I showed my trailer of Donkey Kong, I had very mixed reviews from a small group of 5 people, there were others but there results were not recorded. The initial preview was not expected to be very good however it managed to pull through when the reviews came through and I had many good feedback but also quite a few bad reviews too and ways of improving too.

Sound

One of the comments that was said about the sound in my trailer was that it worked well to immerssevely draw the audience in and get them interested in what they were watching, this comment helps me understand how my inclusion of sound was good and fitted the theme of the trailer, however not all of the reviews were good as I had a few comments on how the sound was poorly edited in the beginning, people were saying that they noticed the “go” bit at the beginning, this was made apparent after I had uploaded the video and is a completely fair comment as I know how to improve and get why it was raised as an issue.

Motion Graphics

The motion graphics had mainly positive feedback especially when it came to the quality and timing of them, one review stated that the graphics were “clever and unique” lots of people liked the 1 UP graphics when Mario hit the barrel and when the little explosion appeared too, however one review stated that the motion graphics had “no style” but when I questioned said person about what they meant they were unable to give me a reason or any sort of improvement that could be performed on the animation to make the motion graphics include some sort of “style.” That is an example of one of the many unhelpful comments I received but one that did help was about how the graphics could have been slowed down so people could see it for longer “graphics were too fast” this comment is one that quite simply describes how I can improve on it so I am happy with altering the animation for this comment due to it informing me of the issue.

Animation

The animation part of the trailer was given plenty of good and bad feedback which is good because most of it is useful and states how I can improve it, the best comment was about how the animation was smooth and fitted perfectly with the live action aspect of the trailer, the overall thoughts on the animation were mainly positive but obviously there were a few errors and some comments indicate how these errors can be fixed such as “make the barrels move at a consistent speed throughout” I completely agree with this statement and it is a great detail that was spotted by this person, this can easily be solved and has a clear reason as to why they thought this. To fix it, all I need to do is speed up the barrels’ movement towards the end of their path on the map.

Improvements

Most of the comments were very useful in the way that they showed me exactly how I should improve my trailer, the main points were focused on how the beginning featured me saying “go” so to rectify this mistake I only need to crop the beginning part of the video and make sure there is no white noise in the background, another way I could improve the animation is by editing the speed and timing of both the barrels and the movement of Donkey Kong’s arms, I can just tweak the key frames and positioning to accomplish this, I am quite happy to apply these changes if the opportunity is given, one final improvement that I could apply is I could edit the time it takes for the actor to reach the door because he currently slides towards the door so if I made it so in his few steps he made it to the door that would make it much better and give a much more professional look and feel to it.

The overall animation was rated somewhat highly with an average score of 7/10 there was one anomaly of 5/10 but that was 1/5 reviews so the overall majority seemed to enjoy it. Many people also considered this to be industry standard, excluding the mistakes, and the unique use of live action and animation together made the whole animation work very well, the reviews said “live action + animation were a good combination” so I am very pleased with my trailer and with the reviews it received from my peers and tutors.

 

2D Animation

This is my animation for the live action and 2D animation part of the course, I put lots of time and effort into it, even though it may not seem like it. Still I hope you enjoy!

This video is slightly edited but is arguably a better version of the other video.

Sound Evaluation.

Collecting the sounds was quite simple and didn’t result in too much difficulty, I used my phone which is a Samsung Galaxy S2 which has a sound recorder part on it, this was good as I could easily just get my phone out of my pocket whenever I saw a sound that I thought was worth recording or was necessary, the only issue I had with this was that my phone’s sound quality wasn’t superb so I had to make do and try to improve it in the net stage which involved using Audition and editing the sounds that I will be using, another limitation of using my phone is that I had difficulty transferring the sound files from the phone’s memory over to the mac that I was using for editing, but I found a way around this by simply emailing myself the file and opening it on the mac.

Once the files were on the mac I took them over to audition, this software has many features including the ability to crop and quieten any background noise, these were the main tools I used while using this software and this allowed me to successfully create somewhat good quality sounds from a poor quality recorder. Audition also has cool features that allows you to simply change the format of the file to suit whichever file format is needed and since Soundcloud is flexible with it’s formats I could use a nice .aiff format which I am familiar with, I liked this feature and it allowed me to keep the quality consistently good thanks to it’s uncompressed file type. The only downside to using audition was that I am not very familiar with the UI and layout of the software but fortunately it is quite simple to pick up.

Finally, to create the soundtrack score I used a software called garageband, this software was good for uploading midi file formats into it and then simply editing over that, this is one reason why I liked it and how it helped me. I originally didn’t know how to stat the score or what I would need so I downloaded a midi file of the song I wanted to create (or a midi similar to the particular one I want) just like a template or a trace around the original to try and create my own. This software was one that I liked due to it’s wide variety of options and how I could quite easily edit and create my own soundtrack. One downside is that I didn’t quite understand how to make my won from scratch as it wasn’t very clear but I improvised and managed to still create a good soundtrack that was suitable to the game/trailer that I was making.

 

Sound Production

This image is proof of my files on Soundcloud the actual sounds that I put into this playlist are below, I simply went onto Soundcloud and made an account then uploaded all of the necessary sounds into the file this allows me to keep track of all of my sounds much easier.

These next few images and videos are the evidence of me creating and editing the score/soundtrack for the trailer.

 

 

I originally went for a midi soundtrack of the Diddy Kong country soundtrack as that was the closest thing I could find to Donkey Kong’s soundtrack, however I decided that the soundtrack wasn’t suitable and I had to quickly change it, this caused me to remove some parts, for example in this video you can see that I started highlighting each instrument to try and find out which one sounded good, I then cropped out the bad ones and edited the actual notes in some of the final instruments. This was a much better result as it had more of a drumming, jungle sort of feel to it which is perfect for Donkey Kong since he is a Gorilla.

This is a screenshot of me using Audition to crop out some background noise and shorten down the noise this software was very useful as my sounds had to be very specific and I could go into lots of detail in the waveform of the sound clip, also it has many format file types and that makes it very versatile when uploading it to certain sites like Soundcloud.

 

 

Sound paperwork

Equipment_Needed

Sound Map

Recording Schedule

 

Sound Proposal

South Devon College

Interactive Media

Sound Proposal

 

Synopsis. My retro game animation is going to be donkey kong and will feature sound effects that will give the illusion of the character jumping and smashing barrels.

Objective. I hope to draw the audience in straight away and make them want to play the game just by watching the trailer.

Structure. I will be making my sounds myself by simply recreating the actions and recording the noise it makes.

Constraints If I needed to I could use sounds from the internet but I would need to be careful not to break any copyright laws. Making my own sounds may not be as easy as I first thought due to weather issues and finding a way to make the perfect noise may be difficult.

Visual Design. It would look like the setting of donkey kong but it would have me or someone else jumping and dodging in a real setting, the DK scene will be completely animated and it will be aimed at everyone due to it’s friendly and not gory atmosphere, the sound will be used in movement parts of the trailer, for example whenever the character finds a hammer there will be a charging up sort of noise.

Technical Specifications. To record the sound I will most probably be using my phone, or possibly a microphone but the file will be compressed down into a FACC file as that type is a loseless file type meaning the file doesn’t lose quality with compression. It will be recorded at 40kHZ so humans can hear it at a comfortable pitch.

Delivery. Around about ester time is when the project is due to be finished. And I am hoping to record everything hopefully a month or so beforehand.

Sound Assignment 1

Sound is created when vibrations in the air reach your eardrums and turn the vibrations into noise or sound.

Sound waveforms are like the graphical version of sound that appears on a chart that is made up of amplitude, frequency and wavelength.

The frequency is how often the wave peak appears or it can mean the pitch in which the sound is played at, so higher frequency=higher tone of sound and vice versa, for example the frequency can be really high meaning that only dogs can hear it or it can be really low so humans can hear it, Amplitude is the peak or the highest point in the chart, for example having a high amplitude would mean that the highest point is a very loud spike in the chart, the wave length is how long the wave is and is usually measured in Hz/Hertz.

Film is one of many ways that sound is used , if sound wasn’t used properly in films then it would make the audience focus on the lack of sound or bad sound editing, therefore they are not drawn to the film and it makes the film bad. Games is another example because if the music in a game is bad then it makes the player feel less immersed in the gameplay and will get bored and leave the game. My third example is in TV, tis one is basically the same as film however TV is watched a lot more meaning that if sounds are bad in all TV shows then

Decibels are the units that sound is measured in for example, if a sound is very loud then it may be said to be 80 decibels.

The range humans can hear is 20Hz to 20kHz but they are most sensitive to around 1500-3500 Hz, A shotgun blast would be around about 140 Hz a baby’s cry is around about 90 Hz.

Analogue recording is sounds or videos that are saved to a modern storage device like the cloud or dropbox for example, however digital is a form of recording that is pre recorded and edited in some software and is converted into numbers, which is then saved to a disc or cassette (a physical object with limited memory).

Analogue distortion is when the file is corrupted or if the server goes down then the media file may be affected. Digital distortion is sort of the same thing but it mainly involves actual physical damage to the save device, such as a scratch on the disc or the media file being messed with and becomes broken.

Sound can be recorded in multiple ways for example; you could go outside and actually record the sounds like birds tweeting but that would not be very effective as  you can’t control when they would tweet or when sounds may happen, however the alternative is digitally making the sounds, this means that you would have to either find a sound file and make it yourself or you could try making it from scratch, this way would be more effective but getting the sound file from somewhere else may cause some copyright issues with the owner of that file and it may result in you not being able to finish production, therefore creating/recording your own sounds would be much better in the long run and way less risky.

Mono sound is perceived to be coming from one channel for example if you were listening to music on mono then the sound would come straight at you from one side, however stereo sound is better as it uses 2 sound channels and can come from either left or right for example, it’s better because it can make the audience feel more immersed in what they are hearing; whether it is a game, music or just watching TV.

A few examples of analogue sound recording media; cassettes are a way of storing sound, also you could use a vinyl to store it but they may only store one song and the last example is VHS videotapes which are just like cassettes but for videos instead but you can store songs on it too.

Mobile phones, microphones and sound cards are all examples of digital recording media as they are more modern and the size of them is a lot smaller but still has a better processing power.

Digital is much better than analogue as it can store more data on it and ius smaller so easier to carry around, also includes better processing power, however they can be quite expensive. Analogue on the other hand is mucgh larger and most probably cheaper as the processing power is far less capable than modern digital versions.

There are issues with digitalising analogue recordings for example, digitalising would require you to obtain the original waveforms and distort it which will make the final quality seem a lot worse than it is.

Wav, aiff and au are all forms of raw recording formats that are used when making an original composure of music, for example if you recorded some noises on a microphone the file may be recorded in the wav format. MP3, FLAC and WMA are all forms of audio compression file formats, MP3 and WMA types are called lossy formats because they lose quality and data when compressed down from the original file, but there are also lossless types of compressed file formats that don’t lose quality or data when compressed an example of this format would include FLACC, the others are lossy and are not as effective in compressing sound files.

Sound is very important to a meia project as it can cause emotions in the target audience or can make trailers and clips from the project appeal to more people. Also the use of music can help to allow the audience to feel more immersed in a game project for example. films also require a plentiful amount of sound otherwise the audience watching it may become focused on the bad sound or lack of sound instead of focusing on the storyline or visuals, for example if Fast and Furious had bad sound in it’s films then you wouldn’t be able to know the backstory of the characters and you wouldn’t be able to hear the revving of engines or the screeching of tires, therefore sound is very important in media projects.