Voice Act #01: Simply Necessary

ARTISTIC THOUGHTS
First of all kodus to my two actors:

Opal Aurora as »The Doll«
Loksley as »The Elf«

The picture you see is an old one: I made it in the Christmas time of the year 2012 and added some dialog. In February we got the idea to make an audio recording of the dialog and put all together in some sort of a short »audio book«.

Hope you enjoy this file as much as we had doing it. And if you like go over to my two voice artists and give them credit as well!


VERY IMPORTANT
If you like what you hear please please please give me a note. I have two other audio recordings waiting to make it into two other short novels. But making that is very time consuming and I like to spend that time on other projects. But if there is the need to make more ... well ... no problem!


TECHNICAL
You wouldn't believe how complicated it can be when making an audio recording where you, the artist/director, can not attend the actual audio recording. In this case my two actors are hosted in the USA and in New Zealand while I reside in good old Germany. From idea to finished product it took us around 3 month of nerve eating recording and re-recording and re-re-recording - many many kudos to Opal Aurora for taking the time and going through that process again and again - before I had some usable audio files on my PC. I of course do not blame anyone: An artist does not necessary need to get used to technical details. And I am so happy both did the recording. But when attending a recording everything can be set up in an hour and problems can be eliminated in minutes. Unfortunately in this case I had to wait until my actors had enough time to record a new take. And in the end it took around 2 month. An other month was needed before I had time to put all things together.

In addition making a useable Flash file was an adventure on it's own. I don't have the original »Flash Creator« from Adobe just because I usually don't need it. But since deviantArt does not allow movies - as a normal user, taking aside you are a member of the »film community« - and does not allow HTML5 audio/video content I have to stay with Flash. I searched through the web and found dozens of free Flash-utilities ... nearly all either old and outdated or with bugs or with limitations in the free versions or everything together or not functioning at all on XP/Vista/Win7.

Then I remembered: »Man, you bought MotionArtist 4.0 from e-frontier some years ago!« It's a software where you easily create animations and it has some Flash support. Said, done, and after an hour to get used to the interface of the software I had a working sheet with my audio and the picture in the background. Very very simple and easy to make.

Now I'd liked to add a button to replay that thing again from the beginning. And there problems again arises. Why? Simply because »MotionArtist 4.0« just comes with a small Help-file which is more or less a reference of the available functionality. But it can by no means been called as a tutorial. That has been put onto the website of e-frontier ... which does not exist anymore because everything has been bought by SmithMicro some years ago. And SmithMicro does not have any hint about any in-depth tutorials about MotionArtist on their website. Yes, yes, there are tons of tutorials which present the surface of MotionArtist. But if you have detailed question: nada! Thank you so much for that continued support. Thank you! So the only way was to explore the shipped examples - thank god there are some - especially the »Slot Machine« game.

In case anyone is interested: I had to set up several »pages« and »link« to a page when clicking on a button. I've also learned you can not include any »ActionScript« with MotionArtist. Everything is controlled with setting variables under certain conditions, jumping to pages and using the vast amount of motion controls for objects. For menus and banners that's great but I would never ever try to build even a simple game with MotionArtist.


TOOLS USED
Picture: Poser 9, modo 601, Carrara 7.20
Audio: Audacity 2.03
Sound snippets: freesound.org
Flash: Motion Artist 4.0