This is it, our final week before our project is due, and we feel pretty confident that we’ve met most of our project milestones so far (great work, Al!).
Since we’re all busy presenting our various Building Virtual Worlds projects Tuesday morning, we don’t meet again until Tuesday afternoon, at which point we decide we need to begin voice-recording right away.
But before we do that, we need another look at the script to ensure our characters are saying what we need them to when we need them to. Meanwhile, Shahrzad gets more than 3/4 of our photos edited and rendered for final display (they look fantastic!), while Anshul reconfigures our Flash skeleton in ActionScript 2 so our photos can properly fit in them.
On Wednesday afternoon after class, we get a crash course on how to use the sound lab with Patrick Pennefather, and despite all the daunting software and hardware in the room, he shows us how to quickly and easily get the results we need via Ableton Live.
Anshul, Al, Nick and Milim all work in the sound lab Wednesday afternoon for about four-and-a-half hours, while Shahrzad works in Classroom 1 touching up our photos. Anshul sits at the mixing deck while Al (Mike), Milim (Mia) and Nick (Dave) begin recording their dialogue, moving away from the script to voice whatever sounds natural to them and their characters. It takes a while to find the right tone and volume for each soundclip, so we manage to get halfway through our checklist of scenes before we have to break away for Classic Game and Film night in Classroom 1. By the end of that night, we’re too tired to return, and we’re confident we can wrap up the next day.
Tell me we're almost done..
On Thursday – yay! – despite still feeling run-down from the flu, Jeff makes it in, and after class, comes into the sound booth and records his clip as Dave’s boss. Then from 5 to 9 p.m., Milim, Anshul, Nick and Al stay back and finish up all their dialogue, including the all-important fight scene. It’s pretty tough to keep a straight face in the midst of all this tension (especially with Mike’s screaming as he falls off the balcony), but we get what we need and call it a night. Meanwhile, Shahrzad has completed touching up all our photos for the film and moves onto the task of finding the right fonts and look for our credits and time markers for our flashback scenes.
On Friday, Nick gets the majority of the blog finished, and Al begins hosting our game on his web site. The site to visit if you’d like to view the finished product is right here
Al cleans up our PDF flow chart and hosts a better version of it here
Anshul then spends most of the evening working on the look and feel of our main web page. Al, meanwhile, splices together all our voice clips from the booth and our sound files onto FLV files, so our stack of images begins finally feeling like a photofilm. Shahrzad continues adding text to the film where needed, while Jeff “proofreads” all our clips and ensures the sounds all sync up with the images. We also take profile shots of the three main characters to use as icons in our flashbacks, and Anshul and Jeff work to resize these to use in Flash. Here’s what they look like:
Dave
Mia
Mike
We work until 8 p.m., and then all take a much-needed break after a long work week.
We meet again Saturday at noon and finish up the cosmetics of what’s needed. Our film works and fits into the framework, it’s just a matter of polishing up what we already have. Shahrzad starts Photoshopping an image of Mike and Mia’s gift for Dave for us to use as a background for our main web site (on Anshul’s site).
We work most of the day with the intent of finishing the project by the end of the day, just so everyone can enjoy their Sunday off.
We return Sunday at noon and discover Al had been working late into the night to affix our dialogue and sound to our FLVs. The photofilm project at this point is about 96 per cent done, we figure, so we spend an hour doing QA work – looking for any troubleshooting and instances that need polishing.
We discover that we need to increase the amount of ambient sound because the silence between dialogue in some scenes is deafening. We find a few more royalty free ambient sounds online and plug them in a few different places. We also decide to add a couple of shots here and there in the interest of pacing, and so Shahrzad begins touching up a few of the shots from the cutting room floor. Anshul meanwhile tries to find a way to better render our film for online play – it seems there’s a bit of lag time because of the size of the file.
And so we each take time to render our 23 .MOV files into FLV files via Adobe Media Encoder, and it’s a tedious process that keeps us here till 9:30 p.m. on Sunday, despite each of us trying to split the queue on our respective laptops.
But after it’s done, we stitch the film to our Flash frame on Anshul’s web site, and sit back and watch the movie. By this point, we’ve watched each scene so many times we’ve grown tired of it, but we do a final run-through. Everything looks good (enough!), and so we give each other a group high-five, call it a night, and go home to get some much-needed sleep.
Everything done, with 11 hours to spare! Now we just have to worry about our class presentation on Tuesday, but we’re quite confident in our product.
