Tuesday, December 19, 2006

Thumb-O-Matic

Once I got all the little thumbnails sketched out, I strung them together with a temporary soundtrack to get a rough idea of shot durations and timing. The soundtrack consists of music that I chose to suit the mood of each scene, ranging from Wagner to Henri Mancini to Slayer. I brought the volume way down and added another audio track of metronome clicks derived from each piece of music, so I have a really prominent click track playing over top muted musical tracks. I cut the thumbnail sequence to this click track. Then I rendered each scene out as a quicktime movie to be used as a template in Flash. More on that in another post.

3 comments:

Marc Deckter said...

This is cool, Greg. Say, what program are you using here? And how did you make the click tracks?

greg said...

Hey Marc. I made the animatic in Vegas, which is now a Sony product. The click tracks were done in Acid, also from Sony. Acid is made for people who make loop-based music, so when you first open a file, it asks if you want to determine the BPM, and you go through this whole rigamarole to help it find the tempo. The stupid thing is you can't export just the click track, so I had to plug my headphone jack into the microphone jack and record it to a new track. Stupid, but effective. By the way, you can download 30 day trials of these programs, so if you work quickly, they're actually useful.

Marc Deckter said...

Ah ha - I'll have to try the free download. I've never used Vegas or Acid, but it would be great to animate to a click track. Thanks for the info.