Personal Observations/Progress
- Had my first in person meet up with LA OLP'ers! Shout out and thanks to Sarah Waintraub for organizing this meeting at Upload LA. Sarah, Jonathan and Cherryl were the first people to see my project! It was great to get their thoughts and feedback. I also really enjoyed checking out their projects and am excited to see how they progress. Very cool stuff.
- Integrating Spacial Audio is tricky! I spent much of Friday trying to figure out how to integrate the OSP Unity plugin. After reading through the documentation and picking apart the sample project, I finally figured out how to get it working in my project. The key thing I learned was is best to create a new, simple, GameObject and use it to house whatever sound effect you want to spacialize. You really need to play with the min/max settings in the Spacial audio script to get the desired effect. In some cases, the sound field was too small or the object was too far away to be heard. I also had to write an audio trigger script to play certain sounds as you approached specific areas.
Production Progress
Ongoing Task: Finalize Scenes and Animation
I spent the early part of this week trying to complete all of the scenes and address any key elements that were unfinished. At this point, my plan is to lock my build where it is and focus solely on audio integration and technical problems. So far, I'm satisfied with what I have, but there is definitely much more to do. Overall, I've ended up with four scenes (not including titles) and the piece is around 10 minutes long. Much of my animation is from Miximo, but I really wish I had an animator to breathe a bit more life into certain scenes and characters. If chosen to move forward, finding an animator will probably be my first task.
Task: Find and Integrate Audio
I spent most of Wednesday and Thursday hunting for royalty free music and sound effects. The sound effects weren't a big deal, as I have an Audioblocks account and found other stuff on Sounddogs. The real challenge has been music. Earlier in the production, I had reached out to a specific artist to inquire about licensing one of his songs. His manager responded fairly quickly and it seemed like there might be positive outcome. However, after several weeks of no response and unreturned emails, I've lost hope in this, thus the hunt was on for royalty free stuff. Thanks to Jonathan and Sarah, I checked out freemusicarchive.com and found a song that seems to work perfectly! However, it's still not the same thing I had in mind. UPDATE! Friday afternoon I got clearance to use my song for the demo submission!
