Peasant Wedding: Finished

I finally finished the sound project!

After feedback I added more levels to the piece. With more background sounds (voice and kitchen) added it became easier to add focal points of sound and suggest the size of the room.

I also added people speaking Dutch for accuracy, more of my dog and raised the overall volume. I needed to create a crowd in the background but still ensure the room and people size was small. By raising the volume of the music it helped shrink the environment to the size reflected in the painting.

having actual Renaissance/Baroque music also really helps date the period. I made sure to include two music pieces as it not only helped establish the crowd and setting but also included even more historical context without being too obvious about it.

For a first attempt at a long sound piece I’m overall impressed by what I made. I think there were lots of ways I could’ve attempted to respond to the painting but I like the way I did.

By creating a story following the people carrying the table around the room, I was able to explore a lot of the wedding sounds in an understandable way. I managed to incorporate moving to different rooms, cheering, the start of a speech, a glass breaking, the dog, casual conversation, kitchen staff, wedding bells, applause and musicians all in two minutes.

FINAL SOUND

Other blog posts about the sound here 

Audition file-

Poem: Finished

I finally finished the poem project. Here is the finished animation-

Youtube version- (watch on 720p)

Vimeo- (crisper quality)

I really enjoyed this project and I feel like I’ve learnt and improved a lot.

It was fun giving voice acting directions and spending more time on sound editing. I ended up with lots of layers for the soundtrack, particularly in the flame scene. I also got permission to use this song-

-as the background music.

I edited it to follow the emotions of the animation and I think it works really well. I chose House of The Rising sun because a cover by The Animals came out the year before the poem was published and would of been very popular in America at the time. I was also really impressed by the piano cover, and there is no copyright on the song.

By using a sketchier pencil style I was able to experiment more and spend less time worrying about the consistency of the lines, like I did with the brush project last year. The grain style also worked well when blending shading and mixing colours.

I like comparing the flats to the final rendered style-

I was told to push the rendering style more and in doing this I spent more time focusing on consistency between frames and where the shadows and light were.

I also enjoyed the historical research involved in the hair, make up, costumes, staging and even the materials the house would be built from and the garden. To add a little for realness I based some of the kitchen on a fifties kitchen as it’s unlikely the average 1960’s house would’ve completely remodelled at the start of the decade.

Overall I’m impressed with my development on this project and I believe it is a good response to the prompt. Although I would maybe change a few things if I were to do it again, I feel personally more confident in this piece than i have in previous projects.

Rest of the Poem Blog posts here