PRODUCTION DIARY 007
Yesterday I decided to wrap my mind around Soundtrack, the audio program that comes with Final Cut. Today I am going through LiveType, which is primarily for doing titles and effects, but it has potential to be so much more than that. So I want to talk about these tools for a bit and cover a few other things I learned as I continue to create. I am finding out quite a bit more about how much things have really changed since the days when I started this, and how the new tools I am using bring so many more possibilities, and with them, some potential drawbacks.
Concerning LiveType, I've really only begun going through this program and that's why I am so excited about it. As you know, I am a big fan of templates, especially if they're good templates and don't limit you to just what you see, but can be altered to a great extent. This program comes with more than one might expect. It actually comes with two DVD's full of content to be exact. I think at least one of them is a DVD-9. Needless to say there's a lot fo stuff.
Just going through some of the textures, effects and templates in there, I see incredible potential. Not just for doing great professional looking titles, but beyond that. Some of the effects can stand on their own for some great uses. For example, Some of the volumetric and smoke effects could easily make for good composite layers to use in a shot. Imagine being able to quickly throw some slow moving, smoky, volumetric light rays over a shot to add a bit of spice to it. One of the coolest things that comes to mind though, is if you had a science fiction scene in which you needed to populate a number of monitors with cool graphics and text, moving grids, lines, numbers, scroll bars, and the like, this is the program. You could quickly create any manner of computer monitor screen full of data, pulsatings lines, bars, grids, graphs and other staples of that genre in no time. It is too easy. And everything is keyframable. You could move, slide or place any effect, anywhere and at any speed. I remember spending a lot of time creating these types of effects from scratch for Anigen and previous shows and now some of those exact effects are just sitting in this new program. That's just cool.
As for Sountrack, one of the first things I noticed is that it is not a replacement for Garage Band in the sense that Final Cut surely replaces iMovie. Soundtrack is not the program to which you will plug in your music keyboard and start jamming. It is very much meant to be a part of Final Cut and be used to do sound for your show. It can do some pretty complex loop based music, and it actually handles loops better than Garage Band, but that is more of a bonus than the focus of the app. The thing it does far beyond Garage Band, is working with sound for video. Your dialogue editing, sound effects, audio processing and more are now all on the professional level. Everything is more precise. Something that was a simple little slider in Garage Band is now a bar with 0 - 2400 ticks which can be entered numerically. Some filters bring up incredibly detailed panels that are far beyond what I normally get into. A professional audio editor who has spent a lot of time playing with such panels, on the front of practical audio gear in the real world, would be very much at home here. This doesn't mean that there is a barrier to the editor who doesn't want to deal with it, though. As usual, there are plenty of aptly named templates to get you started.
So all the programs are amazing and I am sure I could spend many more days learning them and playing with them, but I want to get back to creating. The drawback to fishing out eery little possibility in these programs is that when you gain the power to do anything, it becomes difficult to focus on what you really want to do, or do right now. I am not going to go any further with learning them now. I am sure I can continue to learn as I go, working on the actual project. Speaking of that project, I was working on a character earlier today and the thought occured to me, "Do you like your character?" I hadn't really thought of this before. If you're doing 2D, do you enjoy drawing your character? Enough to draw that character over and over, day in and day out over the course of a long project? If you're doing 3D, how much do you like your character? Do you like just loading it up and rotating it, posing it, rendering it and looking at it. Does that get you motivated to see it in scenes?
I did an episode of Anigen that was specifically about the importance of character. In it I talked about Naruto, from Masashi Kishimoto. Imagine what it must be like for a manga artist like this, who does 16 to 25 pages per week revolving primarily around this character. You have to really like that character to keep that going! Imagine doing it for ten years like Toriyama did with DragonBall. It surprised me when it really dawned on me. I often create characters based on types. A certain "type" of bad guy would fit here, so to speak. I never really thought about how much I actually liked the character. Enjoying drawing is one thing, but how much do you enjoy drawing this particular character? This really got me thinking. I could go back through my previous works and there are characters I didn't really care for to be found there. So now I want to do things differently. I want to make sure I really like my characters, so much so that I can't wait to get up and work wit them!
Concerning LiveType, I've really only begun going through this program and that's why I am so excited about it. As you know, I am a big fan of templates, especially if they're good templates and don't limit you to just what you see, but can be altered to a great extent. This program comes with more than one might expect. It actually comes with two DVD's full of content to be exact. I think at least one of them is a DVD-9. Needless to say there's a lot fo stuff.
Just going through some of the textures, effects and templates in there, I see incredible potential. Not just for doing great professional looking titles, but beyond that. Some of the effects can stand on their own for some great uses. For example, Some of the volumetric and smoke effects could easily make for good composite layers to use in a shot. Imagine being able to quickly throw some slow moving, smoky, volumetric light rays over a shot to add a bit of spice to it. One of the coolest things that comes to mind though, is if you had a science fiction scene in which you needed to populate a number of monitors with cool graphics and text, moving grids, lines, numbers, scroll bars, and the like, this is the program. You could quickly create any manner of computer monitor screen full of data, pulsatings lines, bars, grids, graphs and other staples of that genre in no time. It is too easy. And everything is keyframable. You could move, slide or place any effect, anywhere and at any speed. I remember spending a lot of time creating these types of effects from scratch for Anigen and previous shows and now some of those exact effects are just sitting in this new program. That's just cool.
As for Sountrack, one of the first things I noticed is that it is not a replacement for Garage Band in the sense that Final Cut surely replaces iMovie. Soundtrack is not the program to which you will plug in your music keyboard and start jamming. It is very much meant to be a part of Final Cut and be used to do sound for your show. It can do some pretty complex loop based music, and it actually handles loops better than Garage Band, but that is more of a bonus than the focus of the app. The thing it does far beyond Garage Band, is working with sound for video. Your dialogue editing, sound effects, audio processing and more are now all on the professional level. Everything is more precise. Something that was a simple little slider in Garage Band is now a bar with 0 - 2400 ticks which can be entered numerically. Some filters bring up incredibly detailed panels that are far beyond what I normally get into. A professional audio editor who has spent a lot of time playing with such panels, on the front of practical audio gear in the real world, would be very much at home here. This doesn't mean that there is a barrier to the editor who doesn't want to deal with it, though. As usual, there are plenty of aptly named templates to get you started.
So all the programs are amazing and I am sure I could spend many more days learning them and playing with them, but I want to get back to creating. The drawback to fishing out eery little possibility in these programs is that when you gain the power to do anything, it becomes difficult to focus on what you really want to do, or do right now. I am not going to go any further with learning them now. I am sure I can continue to learn as I go, working on the actual project. Speaking of that project, I was working on a character earlier today and the thought occured to me, "Do you like your character?" I hadn't really thought of this before. If you're doing 2D, do you enjoy drawing your character? Enough to draw that character over and over, day in and day out over the course of a long project? If you're doing 3D, how much do you like your character? Do you like just loading it up and rotating it, posing it, rendering it and looking at it. Does that get you motivated to see it in scenes?
I did an episode of Anigen that was specifically about the importance of character. In it I talked about Naruto, from Masashi Kishimoto. Imagine what it must be like for a manga artist like this, who does 16 to 25 pages per week revolving primarily around this character. You have to really like that character to keep that going! Imagine doing it for ten years like Toriyama did with DragonBall. It surprised me when it really dawned on me. I often create characters based on types. A certain "type" of bad guy would fit here, so to speak. I never really thought about how much I actually liked the character. Enjoying drawing is one thing, but how much do you enjoy drawing this particular character? This really got me thinking. I could go back through my previous works and there are characters I didn't really care for to be found there. So now I want to do things differently. I want to make sure I really like my characters, so much so that I can't wait to get up and work wit them!
1 Comments:
Great topic! I think if you are a lone animator you either have to love your characters or love your story. No matter how you slice it, animation (2D especially) is tedious, repetitive work and unless there is some form of passion involved, on the part of the animator, all would be lost. Tomek Baginski, creator of Academy Award Nominated “The Cathedral,” said that as the weeks and months passed he found himself loathing his main character because he struggled to get him to move the way he really wanted. His main passion was engaged with the overall project itself.
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