Showreel

For my showreel, I started with the idea of wanting to do something than a mere slideshow of artwork as I really don’t think my style is suited to it at all. I ended up deciding, with approval from my tutor, that I would have a cartoon version of myself talking the viewer through my work. Firstly, I wrote a script for the showreel and recording myself speaking the lines in the sound studio. I found a stock song in Logic Pro that I thought fit really well with the theme of my showreel, so I chose to stick with that rather than spending time trying to create my own. Then, I drew up a storyboard of how I wanted my showreel to play out. I figured a theatre setting would be the most fitting for the theme, so I made another horrifically rough storyboard in Flash…:

…before cleaning everything up nicely and animating a few small gestures…:

…then, as with the trailer, taking it into Premier Pro to cut it all together and add the trailer, images and sound clips into their appropriate places and take it into After Effects to add the fancy transitions before calling it done!

Sound Production

Firstly, I needed to create some music for my trailer. I was hoping to team up with the ‘Access to Music’ students to have my music made, but unfortunately the programme wasn’t running this year according to my tutors, so I had to take matters into my own hands!

Using LogicPro and the skills I’d picked up during my weekly sound inductions, I managed to use quickly grasp how to use the MIDI keyboard…:

…in tangent with the programme to customise my own array of notes using the built-in instruments. I knew my music had to have some sort of Mexican flavour to it, so I started off by using the Mariachi horns to create the melody. I used some of the ready-made note arrangements for this and edited some of my own to create a fun melody. I also added in a shaker to give it a little extra spice! Since this was an action game, I figured I’d need something quite ‘punchy’ to emphasise that and fit with the footage. I chose to go with some House beats and synth bass to really give the song some power. Overall I was pretty happy with how the track turned out. The trailer also needed a crowd, however! On top of the stock crowd sounds, I asked some of my fellow students to cheer and jeer in the sound recording room so that I could layer these sounds on top of one another to create the effect of a huge audience. Here’s Paul, cheering to his heart’s content…or singing opera. Either way, here he is in the sound room:

Here’s an image of me editing away in Logic:

When the music was complete, I just needed to match it all up with the trailer (also easy to do in Logic Pro) and add in some more sound effects before calling the trailer done! It was a long road for something I never even initially set out to do, but I think it paid off!

Next up is the Showreel! We’ll be back in the sound room sooner than expected…

Presentation

During another critique, I was asked how I was going to present my work at our end-of-year show. I hadn’t given this much thought past a 2D character animation reel. My tutors suggested I use something like Stencyl or Game Maker to make my character interactive. I thought this would be a great idea and relatively easy to do, so I began researching into both programs. The overall consensus seemed to suggest that, out of the two, Game Maker was the one that would be most suited to my purpose. After downloading the program, I went through and made the tutorial game (a game about a clown bouncing off of the walls – intricate stuff, right?) to get a feel for the program and started to look at how I could build my character:

It seemed that I’d have to create a sprite sheet of each of my characters animations so they could be inserted into the Game Maker engine. Luckily, I managed to find out that Flash can do this at the press of a button…:

The sprite sheet came out as well as could be expected…:

…but at this point I started to wonder if this was really the best way to represent my idea at the end-of-year show. It’s all well and good having an interactive character, but to have them interact with another, computer-controlled opponent would a) take a whole new level of coding and b) still have to be kept quite basic. Rather than perform a technical exercise, I decided I wanted to do something a little more artistic…

In a tutorial with one of my tutors, Kim, I brought up the idea of perhaps creating a trailer instead of an interactive character and she loved the idea. She agreed that it would get across the idea of the game a lot more clearly than a simple interactive character ever could. I began looking at other trailers for similar games such as ‘Rayman Jungle Run’ (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zqCVbaklOzo) and ‘Jetpack Joyride’ (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Jzxi8nid9BQ) and came to the conclusion that I should include a decent amount of gameplay with some selling points and other animations surrounding said clips. I’ve also had an induction into the sound production facilities recently, so I can record some voice samples and create some music for my trailer where I might need to.

I started by making a very rough storyboard (as in so rough I’m pretty sure I’m the only one who would be able to tell what’s going on) and transferred it into Flash so that I could get the timing exactly where I needed it to be. Once I had the entire thing ‘blocked out’, I started to go in and create some of the extra assets for the trailer.

Here’s another time lapse video of me creating the first scene of the trailer! Head over to the ‘Misc.’ folder again and watch ‘trailerTimeLapse’!

Here’s where I had to have some of the game scenes completely ‘built’ so I could include some emulated gameplay in the trailer. Since I’d already made the environmental pieces in 3DS Max, this was an easy case of just tracing over them in Flash to make them fit in with the aesthetic of the characters. I also created and animated a crowd at this point to give the game a more ‘populated arena’ feel:

Once I had all of the scenes animated, I decided to present them all inside an iPhone device to really get the feeling that this could be an actual product across:

Using Photoshop’s 3D text tools made for some very interesting ways of displaying the phrasing and title logo, too! Luckily they are very easy to pick up, especially with any basic knowledge of 3D terminology.

With the visuals for the trailer complete, I took them into Adobe Premiere Pro to cut them all together and get the timing right. After that was done, it needed to go into Adobe After Effects so the flashy transitions could be added in to really give it a professional look. There was almost as much post-processing as there was animating the trailer in the first place!

Now it was time to move onto the sound. Get those ears ready!