Towel, Ashley, Acxiom
Wait, I missed another NaCreSoMo day? And a weekend day too? …Oops.
Yesterday I spent a fair amount of the day with my lead actor Mark for that music video, filming what’s hopefully the last missing scene. That means the video’s basically done, right?
Well, not quite. Last time I showed a screenshot of the Final Cut Pro project. Apart from simply cutting clips together and arranging them in the timeline, there are a few more steps of post-production: color correction, sound cleanup1, and, um, this:
One of the scenes has Mark falling backwards onto the grass. In order to not get too dirty, we brought a towel and laid it down for Mark to fall on. I promised I’d be able to edit it out later.
That’s my current task. And it actually looks okay in stills, even before really doing color-matching!
Okay, not perfect, but it’s not on-screen very long. The problem is that the camera’s not perfectly steady, and if the replacement grass doesn’t have the same jitters as the original footage, the illusion is shattered. So part of the task is making sure the replacement grass “tracks” the original motion, which I’m doing by hand.
Editing’s not a glamorous job, people.
Today I attempted to draw a character named Ashley, from the webcomic El Goonish Shive. (No relation to fellow NaCreSoMo participant Gashley, er, Ashley.)
EGS is a comic about high schoolers who live in a world where magic is real (but secret), and so the stories are a mix of magical adventures and plain old high school drama. Somehow it’s become my current favorite webcomic, partly because it’s very cute and partly because it’s very accepting of different non-default identities, often at the same time.
Unfortunately, it’s fairly story-driven, making it hard to really jump in in the middle, but isn’t so great near the beginning while the author’s still finding his voice (and art style and sense of humor). Still, like all webcomics it has the potential to become a huge time-suck as you work your way through the archives, especially once the character development begins and you start getting attached. You have been warned.
EGS is also the comic that’s gotten me to start doing these comic-style sketches. I’m not quite sure why, but it’s been fun so far, and I haven’t felt completely incompetent while doing it. As I mentioned back in the Traced Portrait Project days, I don’t consider myself a very good visual artist, so anything that goes well in that department ends up making me feel very good.
Okay, so how did I do here? Well, it doesn’t exactly look like the real character—that’s a relatively spoiler-free link to the actual comic—but I think I did okay. (Her very distinctive ponytail is a huge help.) If I were to do this again, I would make her eyes bigger (part of this style) and her face a little rounder, and also figure out something more interesting for her to be doing with her hands. Her arm got a little messed up too, and her mouth is a bit funny, and her chest isn’t really the right shape either, but HEY SHE GENERALLY LOOKS LIKE A PERSON and MAYBE EVEN THAT SPECIFIC PERSON.
I was drawing her face and pose from references, but the shirt is original. It’s actually supposed to be a particular kind of blouse I don’t like in real life, the kind with an elastic-y band just under the bust and then the bottom part just poofing out. To me, it makes it look like the wearer’s body is puffed out in the same way, a la pregnancy. (Not that actually-pregnant people have the same kind of bulge—it’s too high up. It’s more like what pregnancy could look like.) If you’re one of my friends who has this shirt…um, sorry, I don’t like it.
On Ashley I failed to make it sufficiently poofy, and again I didn’t do her chest quite right anyway, so it’s kind of just a shirt now. But with nice lacy frills, at least?
Finally, I did have that audition today. It ended up being out of my league, which honestly isn’t surprising given how little musical theater I’ve actually done. It’s still a hobby for me, so if I want to do things like this I’m going to have to start at a lower level, and start actually doing it again.
That said, here’s the second song I recorded for the audition, one of the two I actually sent in. This one’s a snippet of Vienna Teng’s “The Hymn of Acxiom”, which I’ve also sung a cappella with NaCreSoMo founder Lily and several others.2 I’ll post the third and final recording next weekend.
Part of NaCreSoMo 2015.
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One of the best things about doing a music video is that you don’t have to worry about sound. However, sometimes there are added effects, or in this case a bit of sound at the beginning before the music starts. I think I have that nailed down, though. ↩︎
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This was my own arrangement, although the original song’s all vocals anyway so there wasn’t much arranging involved. But if you’d like a copy of the sheet music, let me know! ↩︎