Bible Animations

  - Sound work
    Last week I talked about a few issues with the sound. I forgot about these in the vlog, but no matter - it saves drastically on data and honestly, you won't notice much of a difference anyway (a reflection on how small the adjustments are), hahaha.

 - Fire sound adjustment
   I mentioned last week that the fire sounds were too loud - especially on head phones and so I reduced them this week. I do notice that they don't really have the right ambience. Fire has more of a rumble to it as well that seems to be on the very very far low end of the spectrum and so I want to see if reducing the pitch of brown noise will do the trick (I can also add the low end part of the opening sound to those sections as well).

 - Addition clothing sound
   For Moses when he turns around to speak to Aaron, he does have more sound (just layered the same sound with an offset to double up) and of course there is a lot still to do with the stick swaps and the hieroglyphics section. I do feel that the hieroglyphics part will be mostly music. Plaster doesn't really animate or move naturally, hahaha.

 - A quiet space
   Something that we often don't think about is ambient noise. For any sound work, ambient noise means that your "sound floor" is not where it needs to be. It messes with your recordings and consequently the quality. Whenever editing takes place, it has to take place in a quiet space - as in as quiet as you can get it. I have been struggling for weeks with the sounds that are so low in volume, because:
 - I can't boost the volume too much (it's inconsiderate of the other people around me)
 - I have to have a fan on in my room (it's extremely humid and stuffy)
 - I need to be patient and wait for a cool and quiet time to do it, so I can leave the fan off and turn the sound up a bit.
   Just beware turning the sound up too much when you are editing. The movie studios make the mistake of mixing in a theater for a theater (which often overdoes the bass anyway) and not for the DVD or Blu-ray or whatever you use. It means that all too often the music is so loud that to hear the voices you have to crank the sound up and then suddenly the music is upon you and you have to turn it down again. Use a good sound system, but don't go for a theater setup. Mix something awesome and balanced that will sound amazing everywhere! (^^,)
   The lecturers I had at university were very serious about this issue. They said that when you are finally happy with the music volume, cut it in half! hahaha.

 - Plaster tutorial
   In the video, I included a very short plaster effect tutorial. Do note that this effect is not dynamic. It is purely to texture a video. If you want it to be more dynamic, you need to animate every thing including distortion of the video itself and it's colors so that it's not the same with every passing frame. If you have to re-plaster a wall for every frame, I can promise you it will be different every single time. Similar but very different when you play it back. The video will get you started. I do caution though - the effect, imo, works best at 50% HD, because then the relief is quite thick, but you may try to increase the value beyond 1 to see if it helps (haven't tried that yet, but you're welcome to).

 - Picking up things
   Now wasn't this quite the challenge, hahaha. Thankfully, GOD is always with me and helped me through this one as well. I wasn't sure I was going to be able to pull it off, but wow! GOD is so awesome!

In the vlog, I did get to explain how it worked, but to help you guys further, here you can find the method GOD taught me as well as another method, very similar, that BornCG was given. I encourage you to check out both! You will gain something from each that will better equip you for your own projects and unique challenges.