One last deed left undone

As mentioned on the front page, we have new and very talented members on our team:

Nefarious Guy, who is a Jedi Academy machinimator. He will be handling our marketing and recruitment jobs.

Drowned Fish, who is a talented 3D modeller, and he will be creating weapons and static objects for OTSS 2.

Macabre, who has done popular machinima films in the past such as NYPD Blues (one of the very few Max Payne 2 machinima out there). He will be doing some of the heavy Faceposer work for Precedent and OTSS 2, as well as sound and music if necessary.

Snipa Masta, who will be taking care of UV Mapping and skinning for OTSS 2's custom models.

The OTSS 2 script is really more of a fourth draft than a second, mostly because I've scrapped several versions before fully finishing them. I wish I could keep redoing and redoing, because with each passing day it becomes better and better. But there has to be a point where it just has to be done and you gotta accept that it's never going to be perfect. All I know is that it's much, much better than the first draft, and I'm fairly proud of it now.

A question that has been ringing in my head is whether we should release the film in 3 parts or 6. Releasing the whole film together is out of the question, although it would be my first choice. It'd take another 2 years if we did that. The total amount of custom content is depressing - right now I'm estimating around 15 different character models, and around 18 different sets. Not to mention all of the custom animations, weapon models, static objects, textures for the sets, and skins for the models.

Most people suggest 3 parts, and that is my main choice as well for the moment...

Precedent is on hold until I get my laptop back from Dell (next week).

Desmond, bitch.

We finally recorded the voiceovers for Precedent last night. We scored a really nice recording studio for a relatively cheap price. The sound quality is very professional, so I'm very happy! There was also an expert sound mixer/engineer on board, mixing our recording on the spot. We were really lucky to have him there.

When we recorded for OTSS, we didn't get to have that luxury. Ricky (gToon) was the sound expert, but he was also acting in most of the scenes as well. While most of the sound was great, one of our actors (you can probably guess which one) was too loud and caused all sorts of troubles. In the end we had to cut out most of his takes, and somehow Ricky stitched up a workable edit.

The way that I record voice acting is to have the actors in the same room at the same time. Most voice acting is done line by line if I'm not mistaken, with an actor locked in a room repeating the same line in different ways. I prefer a more dynamic approach, setting up multiple mics (or taking turns) in one room, and having the scene play out as if it were being filmed with the actors playing off each other.

One problem we ran into was the turning of scipt pages - that one month since the rehearsal turned out to be detrimental, as our actors had forgotten a lot of the lines, especially the longer ones. They had to resort to reading off the page, which not only caused problems with the acting itself, but we also had to be careful about the noise of turning our pages. The more things the actor has to think about, the worse the performance is... we had to resort to pausing after each page to turn it over. That also totally killed the pacing of the scene. The first half of the scene was great, in the second half, one actor had trouble getting through the long lines, and since we were on a time limit, we had to come up with something.

I usually do voice recording in three steps: 1) a recorded rehearsal, 2) a few run throughs of the script as it is, and 3) a completely improvised version on top of the script. We only had time to do the first two steps. The third step is my favorite, and because we were running out of time, I wanted to take the chance. Halfway into step two, we went into improv mode for the remainder of the time, and the result was great. I actually regret not having started it sooner. The freedom of not having to read words the correct way off the paper felt like a huge breath of relief. Between all of the takes from the rehearsal, the run throughs, and the short improv, we definitely got a nice little performance. :)