From doing so I got the following great advice that I could perhaps use in the project...
- Page 21: Smile when you're talking happy, this is a technique that actually works.
- Page 31: If me and my partner decide to record our lines together in order to make the dialogue sound natural then we should avoid the urge to make eye contact. This may seem odd, but it can distract your partner and stop you from following what is being said.
- Page 69: "It is your job to maintain consistency and specificity in the way your characters speak, feel and emote. Nothing will upset a voice director more than altering the way your character speaks and acts from one session to another. The integrity of your character must stay true to the writer's intentions, just as in any storyline you would see in a film, television program, or play."
- Page 70: As an exercise it advised that I draw some characters and then try and come up with at least three possible voices for them. From doing so you are more able to "zero in on the correct vocal qualities, pitch, tone, and rhythm for your character.".
- Page 71: As I have been doing already, I should continue to make a list of voices I feel that I am comfortable with. I should also continue to develop the number of voices I can do by trying to mimic a number of existing voices. I can do all this within my own space, thus allowing me to play with what I have and use my whole body to engage as the character physically. This last technique can be used to help break the gender barrier as animation is the only genre where you can do this apparently. If I come across one however, that feels as if it is damaging my throat then I should drop it, otherwise it can end any potential career quickly.
* When I finally got into college, I spoke to my partner about our ideas.
- My partner really liked the 2nd idea I came up with which involved the characters searching for a lost alien faction/civilization. He further liked this idea as he was interested in doing something involving a crew of some sort on board a spaceship.
- We wanted the ship to be as much a character as the rest of the crew as seen in most sci-fi such as the Millennium Falcon from 'Star Wars' and Moya from 'Farscape'.
- Ed bought up the idea of a group of mercenaries that I really liked, thus they are a dysfunctional family that take on odd jobs and "get rich quick schemes" to earn enough credits to fuel the ship and keep them fed (if barely even that). However, they never try and kill anyone (just like 'The A-Team').
- To make our crew as much of a dysfunctional family as possible we decided to think of around 5-6 characters that wouldn't normally not be seen together. We also decided to focus mainly on personalities and work out the species later. Currently we have the following male characters as we didn't want to distract our listeners with female characters who sound nothing like their gender...
- An adventurous captain who is always trying to get rich quickly and doesn't think ahead. These may be bad qualities but, the crew are loyal to him as he's really a nice guy who took them in.
- A tough character who is overly aggressive.
- The likeable dick who is over confident, arrogant and boastful. He will always run away from a fight unless it involves feeding his greed. However, he is an excellent charmer and hacker.
- The recluse religious sniper who is a tall slender character that speaks in harmonic chants and sign language.
- A dwarf.
- A lazy almost stonner mechanic who would act as the audiences' conduit as he will always miss hear or not listen to things. Thus he asks the questions the audience would ask.
- The ship itself is also a character who is gun-ho and cocky. Thus the crew always have to tell the ship to calm down and do what they tell it to do.
* With ideas in mind, we then established the flow of the story itself. We wanted to make sure that it would be a cutscene that would open to the first section of gameplay for the player whilst not making them feel as if they are watching something cool rather than doing something cool which a lot of cutscenes in games make the mistake of.
You can read the current story below...
- Establishing shot of the ship in orbit of a planet.
- Cut inside to the crew. One of whom asks why they are there again to which the crew talk about the possibility of discovering a lost ancient city.
- Ship flies through the atmosphere in which numerous other bigger ones can be seen flying past.
- Shot of the snow covered city harbor surrounded by frozen water and mountains.
- Then cuts to ground level where the ship lands inside a dock.
- Crew splits up and leaves the player character to leave by himself.
- Cut to white from the sun's rays.
* We then tried to think about what environment the city should be in. We decided from the start not to have it be a desert or completely city surface as we wanted to escape from the fan favourite planets of Tatooine and Coruscant from 'Star Wars' that include these.
We managed to come up with the following...
- A snow covered city with frozen harbor.
- A completely sea covered surface similar to Caribbean islands where a harbor floats on top and a city underneath. These would look like a number of tubes that are underwater.
- City covered in jungle.
* Afterwards we did further research on storyboards and story reels, looking at examples from both 'Shrek' and 'The Lord of the Rings' movies in order to see how they would draw and show progression in their stories.
* We finally decided that we would refer to our project as a story reel with audio as a story board is static, therefore a story reel continues to play all of its frames of drawings. This would be made so that the animation department could make a cutscene out of it.
We further felt that we could put the images onto a program such as 'Aftereffects' as that way we can make a video that includes all our audio on top of the story board/story reel.
* Ed also recommended that I watch the 'Halo' video below which goes behind the scenes of voice acting, so I did. Overall, whilst it was short, it did give some insight into the job of voice acting as it showed actors recording their lines together in the same booth and underlined the sort of work conditions they were under. Thus, if me and Ed wanted to do this we could.
Over the weekend I will come up with some more characters we could include in our project, thus providing us with a whole range of characters to pick from and then decide what voices would suit each one best.
Harvard Referencing:
- Unknown (2008) Shrek - Deleted Storyboard - Deal+. [Online Video] Available at: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mqAIiVS5JAk (Accessed: 16/1/2014).
- Unknown (2009) Halo 3 ODST BEHIND THE SCENES (VOICE ACTORS). [Online Video] Available at: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QcyAk-pFF6M (Accessed: 16/1/2014).
- Unknown (2012) Lord of the Rings - Storyboard to Film Comparison - Nazgul Attack at Bree. [Online Video] Available at: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vYjA8xQHK7Q (Accessed: 16/1/2014).
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