Voodoo Vids - #2 The RecommendationE

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Second short for Voodoo Vids! slowly introducing new characters, here we meet Paul!

In the first episode, Paul was a background reaction character for a single appearance... but I like how he looked so much that I decided maybe he is another regular. Of course, he is now a regular. Expect to see him haunting the shop more often.

Some behind the scenes.

I use blender for all the animation. I designed and made all the characters, painted their textures, rigged them... that has taken the longest to do. But now that I have them, essentially it's all about writing, animating and editing the final episode in premiere pro.

You have to wear many hats with indie animation, often you do a bit of everything in the production pipeline. And to every animator that has had sleepless nights doing "one more shot" or "one more frame" to make their production happen. Well done. This stuff is HARD.

Audio

A lot of audio I gather from freesound.org Or i'll record some bits of foley myself. In this episode I sat in front of a microphone shaking a real VHS tape around to get the sound of it in the characters hands.

The sound is something I try to spend a lot of time on. Panning the voices through different shots to make the characters feel like they are in the world, adding a subtle room ambient reverb, panning the voice audio when the character turns their head... Such a small thing, but it's the difference between audio that feels "in world" and audio that feels "stuck on top"

Time Scales

Episode 1 took around 2 weeks to do (not including building all the props and the sets etc) , but Episode 2 I managed in 4 days. The context of the episode matters too, If i need to make a bunch of unique props for the story that can take more time. but I could factor in an extra day to just model all the scene specific props.

The exterior of Paul's house in this episode for example was a last minute addition. I had time to quickly model it. and light it. so was happy to get it in.

Cinematography

getting those nice cinematic shots is important to me, so I spent a lot of time studying the rule of thirds, and other techniques like the golden ratio. If you want to up your game on camera shots. look into this stuff, it'll take you from a bad framing loser to a Hollywood champ in no time! Simple rules to follow and they yield good results. (knowing when to break them is important too)

I'm enjoying discovering what kind of show this is turning out to be, I don't have a plan or massive future goal, I just want to explore, introduce new ideas, experiment with different skill sets and channel them all into this video shop.

I've got a lot of ideas about more scenarios and characters to make. I'm always open to ideas too so if you want to add something to Voodoo Vids in some way get in touch, let's talk.

If you've read this far then thank you, Some people aren't interested in this stuff, but I'd like to include it for those that do enjoy some more content to read after they (hopefully) enjoyed the short. Love to hear your feedback, thoughts in general. drop a comment even if its just to say Hi :)

Bren.