Welcome to the sixth edition of the gaierhei Weekly Newsletter! I decided to take a break from animating for the first half of the week to focus on schoolwork and rest. When I came back to work more on lip sync, I realized that my animation became more expressive and higher quality because of the increase in energy. I will remember this result in the future when I burn myself out again.
This past week, I continued creating keyframes for the parts of the film with dialogue, focusing on making the emotion in the dialogue believable. I think that taking a small break and coming back with more expressive animation actually paid off really nicely, as some parts of the film look intentionally stiffer than others to convey a contrast between fake emotion and genuine emotion.
I am very happy with how the longest shot in the film (Shot 21) is looking so far; about one third of the shot has the main poses all drawn, and I am beginning to work on creating breakdowns.
The dialogue continues to be the part of the film I am the least happy with. Knowing my own limitations as someone who has absolutely zero experience voice acting, it's not terrible, but I think it at least partially retracts from what the film is actually trying to say. Unfortunately, since I was very hasty animating a bunch of lip sync parts, it would be very difficult to rerecord. I am disappointed by this, but I will keep this in mind the next time I decide to make a short film with dialogue.
You may recall from earlier newsletter editions that I am manipulating my own voice to sound more masculine by artificially pitching it down and preserving the original formants. My opinion on how this sounds overall has gone back and forth over the past few weeks. At times I feel that it sounds great, and at other times I feel that it sounds very robotic. Thus far, I have decided to leave it as is and simply move on (else I would probably keep messing with it forever), but recently I decided to try out some other methods to get it to sound a little better.
Recently, I decided to get a free trial of a bunch of Antares vocal processing plug-ins just to have some fun messing around with them. One of the tools included in this trial is Throat, which modifies audio by emulating an actual human throat which you can create a custom shape for. I decided to try using it on the voice lines I recorded to see if I could make a more believable sound.
Unfortunately, Throat comes with a lot of unnatural artifacts that I found unsatisfactory. The plug-in comes with a slider to change the pitch of the audio, but I found it to sound even more robotic than Ableton's built in pitch shifting tools. I think that Throat's pitch shifting slider works best within a smaller range, and Ableton's is better when you are transposing a sound by many semitones. In my case, I am pitching my own voice down by seven semitones, and Ableton's Complex Pro pitch shifting tool works better.
Besides that, I found many of the capabilities of Throat to be very interesting and useful. I made a few small changes to the length and shape of the emulated throat to make the final audio a bit clearer. The great thing about modifying the original vocal lines is that all of the pacing remains the same, meaning I won't have to redo any of the lip sync animation I have already done. The overall change in the final audio is very small, but I think it is at least marginally better than the original one. I will probably mess around with this a bit more in the future before my free trial runs out because I think it is very fun.
That concludes the updates for this week! I apologize for the lack of previews and updates in this post. Hopefully I will have more to report next time (I have said this many times before).