Bible Animations

 - Again re-rendering
   Of course no one likes to have to do something over and over again, and the same shot had to be rendered twice again this week! This time for the speed at which the river was being transformed and again for the color. You could say it's 4 times if you include the conversion and adding of the action background stuff as well (thankfully configured, just needed to run again), hahaha.

 - A new shot
   Thankfully, this week, GOD did have me to make a new shot and that is Moses' looking to Pharaoh for an answer or response. And it contains a few options:
1) Quick zoom like old kung fu movies
2) Defocus to have focus on Moses
3) Defocus to have focus on the transformed river
And of course quite a bit of meat in-between. I believe GOD told me that (after the zoom was taken out) that the shot will only contain the first part (focus on Moses) before switching to Pharaoh. I am very happy with that! I don't want to waste render time, but I'd rather waste it than bore the audience to tears with super long shots just because I was precious over the footage, hahaha.
   Kinda reminds me of what Walt Disney did with Snow White. In the movie they had animated a whole sequence called the soup song or something, but they cut it, because it didn't add anything to the story. Well, the same applies. Just because I like the shot or spent hours on the zoom, doesn't mean it fits. If it has to go, it has to go. Being precious about things will ruin the final result... GOD is so awesome in letting me not be over-precious about footage.

   And of course, along with these shots (re-rendered and new), I also got to do some sound work for them!
   For the strike, I added some different strikes to make sure that the sound is consistent (strike and water), but varied (works for replay at slower motion). And one more change, which we'll get to in a bit.

 - More real sound
   Last week I got to open with some cool thunder sounds. Unfortunately, they were very muddied by a meter that kept buzzing (I had never heard it like that until the day I got to record the thunder). Of course, this week I had another opportunity (or shall I say quite a few opportunities) to get real sound.
Thunder:
   Thunder is difficult to get for many reasons. The biggest is that you have to wait for a storm and if you get one, you have to make sure that no one is talking, because you only have a single take. There is asking GOD to make a strike again, but I know from experience that HE does not always do so, but HE did help this week with a few really nice ones that you heard in the video!
Fire:
   Of course, I am so thankful that GOD helped me re-create the fire crackle for the opening and I am shocked at how much a fire can crackle! Now, the magician that has the whole hand movement has some fire sound to go with it! GOD is so awesome!
Water:
   I did attempt to record a stream this week, but to be honest, I was waaaaaaay too far away to record it well, so that was a horrible failure, hahaha.

 - A stunning plug-in
   While the Samsung S4's stereo mic is probably one of the best mics I've ever had the pleasure of owning, I do have to warn of some issues with it. This week, an old pest resurfaced: hissing. I tried to noise remove it with Audacity, but that just degraded my thunder sounds. I tried to use the equalizer and classic filters to remove the hissing, but still too much degradation.
   Finally, I felt led to go check out what plug-ins I have installed in Audacity, to see which can help. One was called Floor Fish. You can think of it as an advanced noise gate. With it, GOD helped me clean up the thunder audio quite a lot, but I would luv to redo most of the thunder sounds to see if I can't get clearer audio. The lower the volume of something, the more the phone tries to make up for it by recording louder.