MED1451_Editing

This week, we've been asked to build upon what we did back in Llandudno (or in my case, at my house since I chose not to go) by turning the storyboards we did into an animatic.

What Is An Animatic?

To paraphrase myself on this one, "the is basically where you create a moving image version of the storyboards you (hopefully) created before hand, this part is important because it lets you have a rough idea as to how you want to time all the movements, dialogue, music, sound effects, ext. Animatics also tend to use much cleaner drawings that are much closer to what the final visuals will look like since the voice actors will need to do their best to sync up with what's happening so you can't afford to be as sloppy with the artwork as you would with a storyboard."

Video uploaded by Nickelodeon Cartoon Universe

This phase usually comes around after the storyboards are finished so that the crew making the animation (whether it be a cartoon, film or even a game cinematic) can get a good idea as to how the entire project will be timed out so that the animation team can work from said animatics in order to make sure the final animation plays out correctly.

With this in mind, it's time for me to get started on the editing task.

The Editing Task

Before we begin however, I should probably grab a couple of extra sound effects using Audacity real quick:

The reason I'm stealing the sound effects from Pixar's Cars and Nintendo's Super Mario 64 despite not owning the rights to said sounds is because this is being used for educational purposes, so therefore I should be fine. (The cars video was uploaded by StomMOtionMan Junior while the Super Mario 64 video was uploaded by Cirquet)

Now that I've got the sounds, it's time to get started on the actual editing task:

Ok, so first things first, we've got to get all the media that'll be used into our editing software (In this case, Shotcut)

The reason we need to import all the media into this playlist first is so that adding them into the timeline will be quick and easy

Next I'm going to add in an audio track

The reason I'm doing this is so that I can continue working on the video without having to worry about constantly moving or overwriting the audio by mistake (I can add as many of these layers as I want here, so I'll be doing that again real soon)

Next, I'm going to make a copy of the first video in order to try and make it so that the first frame of animation lasts for a good while

That way, it'll seem like the bird takes some time to come onto the screen despite the fact we can see it's beak due to the way I animated this shot two weeks ago

To pull this off, I'm using the speed tool to slow down the video as much as I possibly can so that the first frame will last significantly longer than a single frame, allowing me to effectively get an entire background shot out of one single frame.

Next, I'm going to use keyframes in order to pan the camera down and zoom in

This will help me make the transition between the bird animation and the storyboard of the guy crossing the street and getting revenge on a guy that nearly runs him over a bit less jarring in the long run

And after looking up a tutorial because I couldn't figure out how to do it on my own, it's time to add said transition

And then I decided to use transitions to make the sound changes a little bit less jarring

I felt this would be the easiest way to recreate the doppler effect through editing.

It's keyframe time buckos

Now I'm going to add in a little bit of camera shake via keyframes to give the scene a little bit of extra pizazz, since then it'll make it seem like the protagonist is extra mad.

And now that I've finished the whole video, it's time to export this whole thing out and wait for submissions to open

I didn't think this video would end up taking me two days to edit together but hey, I managed to get there in the end.

So How Was The Editing Task?

Well I will say, I did find this task ever so slightly harder than I anticipated. The main reason for this was because I ended up needing to stretch my two Llandudno projects into a time span of 45 seconds, which proved to be quite difficult near the end as I had to go and put in a little bit of filler and I ended up needing to steal the jump sound from Sonic Adventure 2 and even the stock explosion sound made by Hollywood Edge just so that I had sounds for when the protagonist throws his case at the antagonist's car to blow it up, but I was able to make it work out in the end.

With that being said, it was nice getting the chance to use Shotcut once again to pull this one off. (although now I wonder whether or not it'll even be shafted at this point)

With this in mind however, I will admit that because I'm still somewhat new to using Shotcut (which again, I'm unsure how much longer I'll even be able to use it), the editing itself does end up leaving a lot to be desired, as the transition I wanted to have from the bird animation to the man crossing the street did end up getting removed by accident so now there's a cut where the fade was supposed to be.

With all that being said however, I'm actually quite glad I decided to re-use my Llandudno work in the end because it ended up forcing me to apply a little bit of creativity as to how to re-purpose the existing assets into new contexts (I.E: taking a shot where the main protagonist throws a brief case and turning it into a close up by zooming the camera in) in a way that was a spiritual successor to how back in Dreams PS4, I could turn one thing into another at a moments notice.