Day: January 18, 2020

Siberia, 30,000 years ago . . .

Siberia

For my Rhubarb Festival animation, I’m going right back to the beginning, to ‘Southern Siberia, 30,000 years ago . . .’

My first little sequence, A Brief History of Rhubarb, goes back to the last ice age, when rhubarb thrived in the cold winters and in rich, moist soil. It’ll be an epic production, I’ve already got my mammoth poised to stroll across the vast open spaces of the tundra.

I’ve redrawn this illustration from my Walks in the Rhubarb Triangle booklet in HD format and in several layers, so that I can animate the mammoth’s trunk appearing from the top left of the screen and plucking what looks like a luscious leaf. Spoiler alert: that mammoth is going to be disappointed.

Character Animator

Lesson one, in Adobe Character Animator is to edit and lip-sync a simple face. The built-in microphone on my iMac seemed a bit distant. Once I’d exported the animation to Adobe Premiere Pro, I deleted the original track and re-recorded the voice using a microphone. I used a filter on the vocal track to make it sound more close-up and tried a special effect that aims to ‘thicken’ my voice.

My attempts to add a music track were, predictably, dreadful but just to try out the process of adding a backing track, I tapped on an empty treacle tin.

Hopefully having learnt some of the principles, I can now get on and produce something more intriguing.