Author: Jiachen Ding

This week, I started looking for voice-overs and sound effects for the animation ahead of schedule. The first reason was that the Point Blank Music School students had spoken to us online and we had learned that the project would run until June, so there would be no soundtrack until the deadline of our collaboration on March 15th, so I, as a compositor, would need to take care of that as well.

The second reason is that half of our main animation work has only started this week for various reasons (such as a second revision of the light and shadow in the cave to achieve better results). I have to take some responsibility for this as I am the most responsible time planner for the whole project, although I don’t want to put any more pressure on the team. Because of this, I had to plan the soundtrack ahead of time and not wait until the animators had finished the animation to do the soundtrack and compositing.

I searched for relevant sounds on various sound websites, such as Audio Library (https://www.audiolibrary.com.co/), and the Free Music Archive (https://freemusicarchive.org/search). I also compiled a number of sound effects that I had collected in internet storage when I was at university. I searched for sounds related to the content of the animation, including wind, footsteps, coins, horns, swords, and monster roars (I searched for many monster roars and decided that the troll’s roar was the best match for Chenyang’s monster design in the animation). Although this is a very crude version of the sound effects, they do make the whole animation more complete.

This week was the most important week for our group work, we had to finish everything before the final compositing, as well as rendering tests. On Tuesday of this week I spoke to the head animator for Scene 1 – Yuanjie Lei – and I decided that the shots for Scene 1 were preliminary shots that could not be used in the final production, which required a lot of communication and discussion between me and the animator. But now we had no more time to discuss it, so I suggested that Lei and I meet offline to decide on the shots and animation content.

After Wednesday’s discussion, we split the one-shot scene 1 into two shots and edited them together in a montage. This ensured a coherent story and reduced the workload for the animators. I also added a lot of movement detail and adjustments to the camera to follow the coin and the character, and also used a binding relationship to ensure the camera followed.

We tried to use the school’s render farm to render the scenes, but it failed. After trying it out we were able to render the scenes locally on the school’s computer very quickly (about 20 minutes to render a scene), which was an acceptable amount of time. We also ended up synchronising the rendering video with the group responsible for the painting part of the animation which I think will give them a better grasp of the painting colours.