Development : Audio, tutorial and film test

After further discussions and listening back on all our recorded material there was some conversations me and Mark had did about coping with depression and everyday things. We found our depression conversations to be usually only between ourselves since it was quite personal and something that we both share and struggle with. Our conversations ended up being also quite raw and honest with emotion when discussing the sensitive subject of mental illness.

We decided this could be the theme for our puppets audio of the skits and for them to talk about on screen. We had a open tutorial with Gair to discuss this further and he quite like the idea of our puppets being presented in this way. That the contrast of using bright fun looking characters talking about dark subject matters as well as being able to use the puppets to say and act things we may be shy or embarrassed to talk about.

We are staying open to other theme's for our short puppet episodes to also be light hearted and fun but we will have to try them out first to see how they go.

Importing the conversations into audacity I edited them down into 1½  and 2 minute tracks at most so our film's can be quite short as well. This is so we can make several different skits on the same topic as well not tire our arms out puppteering at the same time with minimal editing to do after wards. I had to listen and then cut out certain parts of the conversation to tidy them up by zooming in very closely to the wave lengths this could be such a background noise door's opening and closing, clothes rustling as well as unnecessary dialogue.

I've also reduced noise and added effects that make the puppets sound like they are in bigger rooms, behind glass and also outside with the reverb tool. Foley noises have been recorded by ourselves and also samples have been taken from https://www.freesound.org/ which is a free source sound site where people can share and upload anything sound related and share it. I would layer them up with different tracks to see how they sounded with the spoken audio or our voices before transferring them over to Mark.

The sound files were always been saved as M4A files but I found a really easy to use online audio converter that could change them into most audio formats for editing. It came in pretty handy for putting the files into Audacity as it had some trouble trying to work with the M4A files. But converting them to WAV and MP3's was easy enough when exporting them.
I also had to make sure all the tracks were at 12 DB to be imported into Premiere Pro using the amplify tool which can reduce and raise sound volume.

http://online-audio-converter.com/

We have been recording a lot of our conversations on Mark's phone which is pretty good quality but also have been using an Edirol. They pick up a lot more background sound which is a little tricky to edit but good quality. 

We think for the time being anyway we will only be using the raw sound of our conversations without any other sound effect's done in the sort of style of interview's or new's reports. We enjoyed this aspect because our conversation's quality is non scripted or fake talking about Depression and how it effect's our lives. It has made it more empathetic to the listener and we have found more engaging for an audience as well as it being the puppet's speaking the audio.

We also had not come up with the idea to use our conversations over the top of the puppets at first so our discussion's are not acting and are pretty genuine in presentation. Which is why it seems to work very successfully and we hope if we record any new material it will not effect the other performances.

To show this idea lot better been looking into creature comforts as an example which shows what were trying to achieve very successfully.

Creature Comforts is a franchise originating in a 1989 British humorous animated short film of the same name. The film describes how animals feel about living in a zoo, featuring the voices of the British public "spoken" by the animals. It was created by Nick Park and Aardman Animations. The film later became the basis of a series of television advertisements for the UK Electricity Board, and in 2003 a television series in the same style was released. An American version of the series was also made.

The original Creature Comforts short film was five minutes long and was conceived and directed by Nick Park and produced by Aardman Animations featuring the voices of British non-actors in the same vein as the "man on the street" Vox Pop interviews. It was produced as part of a series called Lip Synch for Channel 4. The film won Nick Park the Academy Award for Best Animated Short Film in 1990.

The film shows various animals in a zoo being interviewed about their living conditions. These include a depressed Gorilla, a Brazilian Puma and a young Hippopotamus who complain about the cold weather, the poor quality of their enclosures and the lack of space and freedom. By contrast, aBush-Baby and an Armadillo praise their enclosures for the comfort and security they bring, and a family of Polar Bears talk about both the advantages and disadvantages of zoos for the welfare of animals. Rather than the subject being one-sided or biased towards one view-point, there is a strong balance of opinions in the film, with some interviewees who are happy with their living situation, some who are not, and some who have a neutral opinion.

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The voices of each character were performed by residents of both a housing estate and an old people's home. Stop-Motion animation was then used to animate each character, and the answers given in the interviews were put in the context of zoo animals. The Polar Bears were voiced by a family who owned a local shop, while the Mountain Lion was voiced by a Brazilian student who was living in the UK, but missed his home country.

(I've been doing something that looks like this with the audio but not as advanced to put mouth shapes to each word or phrase and well be putting it to puppets.)

Influences

The Creature Comforts advertisements were produced in the period 1990 to 1992 and in some ways they were indicative of the shape of things to come in British television advertising. Many commentators believe that there was a fundamental shift in television advertising from the unbridled consumerism and egoism of the 1980s to what is sometimes termed a more "caring" approach in the 1990s. The Creature Comforts advertisements are cited as an early example of this phenomenon.

The format of the Creature Comforts advertisements was so successful that it was replicated in other campaigns in the following decades. In later years, however, members of the public became increasingly conscious of the potential uses of their vox pop interviews. This made it difficult to recapture the spontaneity and innocence of the early Creature Comforts advertisements. Although lookalike animations became relatively commonplace in television advertisements, they were usually scripted and rarely possessed the painstaking attention to detail of the original advertisements.

Thought this was a good example of putting raw audio to film just to show that it has been done in a sense but were going to do it in our own way.

So we booked out the sound studio one day and decided to do a test run with some audio and seeing how the puppets looked on film.

For the project I've been put in charge of all our audio and editing it while Mark is happy to edit our film footage but of course with each other's overall input. I've also been doing all the documentation through photographs throughout the project while Mark has been doing more technical aspects such as the film camera's and eventually editing.

We filmed our test with Mark's HDC-SD90 and we used the 300w Fresnels lights with filters.

It was a little tricky to set up equipment especially lighting in the recording room since it was quite small and to fit us in to perform with the puppets also. We also tried a more lowtek camera since it was just a test for performance and audio but also framing and how well we couldn't be seen off camera. To make the puppets mime to the correct audio we just played the audio on my laptop next to us and timed it right when each puppet had to speak.




We will take this further and see if we can do some more skits in this manner and also try a higher quality camera and better lighting. We also found performance to be a little tricky as well for physical limitations which we will look into.