Studio 3 Cross Discipline: Post Mortem
- Sara Eriksson
- Dec 11, 2018
- 6 min read
Updated: Dec 11, 2018
AUDIO FROM CALLUM
INTRO
When I first started thinking about cross discipline, I looked at our Studio Slack Channel and saw that an Audio student was looking for a cross discipline where he wanted to create music for people. I had a listen to his demo tracks and really liked what I heard, so I sent him an email inquiring if he was able to create me something. He Messaged back saying Yes and that he prefers to use Facebook messenger rather than Email, which was fine.
I sent through to him some information regarding what kind of sound I wanted for my show-reel and gave him a mood-board and mock-up show-reel to give him an idea on the 'style' of assets I was making to give him a sense of style of music and a sense of timing.
After this, Callum got back to me very quickly with a demo sound, which I really liked. I asked him to change a few small things like easing in the intro and outro sections and again very quickly got back to me with the changes which was great. A few weeks later he messaged me again wondering of everything was still working with the sound that he had produced, and I asked him if he could create a longer track in case my show-reel ended up being longer, which he produced a couple days later which was great.
The final Audio:
How I used it in my show-reel:
WHAT WENT WELL IN THE PROJECT AND WHY
I think the best part of this project was how quickly Callum responded to me, and how efficient he was in terms of explaining everything he did or changed and putting my vision into motion. I really enjoyed working with Callum overall, and found that this was a successful cross discipline Project.
WHAT DIDN'T GO WELL AND WHY
I cant think of anything specifically that 'didn't go well', but if I had to be nit picky I would say that using Facebook I felt was a unprofessional platform to use even if it was convenient in some ways, Everything I needed to converse with him I felt embarrassed or ashamed of having the Facebook browser open at University, and so I felt like I couldn't really communicate with him while I was at Uni. Also it would have been nice to actually meet Callum and talk to him face to face.
WHAT WOULD YOU DIFFERENTLY NEXT TIME
If I hadn't felt too awkward about it, I would have asked him to make me a second track just to give me another option, but I didn't want to overload him in case making tracks was actually something hard to do. Again maybe this would have been easier if we had actually met and I could have judged this by his personality.
WHAT DID YOU LEARN ABOUT OTHER DISCIPLINE'S WORKFLOWS
Overall I felt i didn't really learn much about Callum or his workflow unfortunately, except that he was fast at producing something, but to be honest I don't know if this sound was something he had already worked on before, or if it was something actually new.
MUSIC VIDEO FOR CALLUM
INTRO
After the last cross discipline project, I realised I needed another and had intentions on creating game assets for a games studio, however they never got back to me. Then I tried to teem up with another games project but it was incredibly unorganised so I didn't go for that either. As a back up, I was thinking of maybe creating some audio visualizers for some of Callum's demo tracks, but when he messaged me asking if there were any tweaks that needed to be done to the audio track, I asked if I could create anything for him, which he asked if I could. I mentioned the audio visualizer idea and he asked if I could create an animation for him. At first reading this I got a bit worried due to time and not being a confident person in animating things, however after he showed me an example of what he was wanting I felt allot more comfortable:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=luQSQuCHtcI&fbclid=IwAR3sQPSczbvMXr3tQCxqQa1VQEhFoY3anmHIQuZBYy1zo2b5bxvQwB5MSZA
So from there I actually got quite excited for the project, and I began concepting straight away. I took inspiration from Beeple and photo-bashed and designed 2 versions for Callum:
I drew these pyramids in Photoshop and grabbed an image off the internet for the background to give a sense of depth.
I then looked a Beeple and took inspiration of one of his works and drew this circle thing and again grabbed an image from the internet for the background.
After this I sent them through to him and he said he liked the circle one with the pyramid background. I now realised I had to create a city scene as I obviously couldn't use the internet image, so I created a grey box in Maya.
After this step was done, I began to create a 3D paint-over in Photoshop to use as the background, but after creating the base colours I realised that maybe it would be easier to just create the whole background in Maya and just render out an image and use that directly.
So I researched how to create a triangulated stylized look in Maya and came across a few tutorials (with help from my lecturer). It was a pretty simple process where I had to triangulate a high poly mesh, then reduce the polygons. As my objects were boxes essentially you couldn't see the stylized look, so i took vertexes and moved then forwards and backwards to create shadows which gave the models their stylized look:
After a little editing with lights and rendering it out I tweaked it a little in Photoshop and brought it into After effects. I drew some boxes and created building light sets for the skyscrapers and imported them into AE as well. I duplicated and placed the light sets accordingly which took some time and added a glow effect to make them look like they were actually lights. I also added in some gradient effects to make the lights in the background look darker. After I had done this I got some help from my lecturer to learn how to animate 'flying cars', which ended up being a very simple process. I added these cars into my scene and looped them so that the cars infinitely fly. To create the centerpiece object, I researched how to create a 3D object in After effects which again was a very simple process (just took a while to get used to): I firstly made a shape in Illustrator and imported it into After Effects. Then I turned this file into a shape layer and made it 3D accessible. I then extruded the shade and adjusted the pivot point to the centre of the object and animated it rotating. This took a little while to understand at first with a bit of trial and error but I could confidently do this again without any drama now.
A few more effects later and adding another flying car scene, this was the final product which I was very happy with:
I sent Callum tests through this whole process to make sure I was going in the right direction, and although there were some changes he wanted here and there it wasn't too much of a problem. The overall video took a very long time to edit correctly and it was so hard to manage all the layers in After effects, but I did it, and it turned out.
WHAT WENT WELL IN THE PROJECT AND WHY
Learning after effects was a HUGE positive to this project which I didn't expect to learn. I really enjoyed the collaborative process and although this project was completely out of my comfort zone it turned out well. Again the communication went really well, although not quite as well as with the last cross discipline project, as he was a little slower to reply (but he was probably busy with finishing his own assignments).
WHAT DIDN'T GO WELL AND WHY
I would have liked to do more sound cues but Callum wanted the video to be simpler, which was a little disappointing, but I think I wouldn't really have had time to create anything more complicated anyway, as already I think I had gone over the scope and spent more time than was originally needed.
WHAT WOULD YOU DIFFERENTLY NEXT TIME
Next time I would have allowed myself more time for the project, and probably created more than one video clip as this was actually quite fun to do. I also would have animated lights changing and flickering more, and maybe played with other colour keys.
WHAT DID YOU LEARN ABOUT OTHER DISCIPLINE'S WORKFLOWS
I learnt that at least in this particular case working with Callum that he didn't want anything too over powering to take away from the music, which is understandable. I also learnt that Keeping Callum updated was incredibly important so that I could avoid doing too much work and having to go back to change it if he didn't like it.
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