Turnabout Sisters Theme, Behind the Scenes, and Preview of Witchy World

Hello, long time no see!  Sorry for the lack of content lately.  I was working on a Dark World collaboration, but unfortunately that fell through, and then I got discouraged from making videos for a while after that.  But I’ve decided that the new year is a good time to get things back on track, so I’ve reorganized a few things, and hopefully I’ll be able to get Dark World finished within the next month or two.   For now I hope you enjoy the Turnabout Sisters Theme from Ace Attorney, as well as the preview for Witchy World down at the bottom, which was an entry from the Suggestion Box.  But first, here’s some behind the scenes snippets from the Turnabout Sisters video.

Audio Trickery

I just noticed that I rarely write about behind the scenes stuff on the audio production side of things, so here’s a little tidbit from the Turnabout Sisters Theme.  Most of the project was fairly straight forward, but I was unhappy with how resonant the steel drum was, especially compared to the steel drum sound in the original recording.  In order to have more control over the steel drum hits, I decided to just record each note on a separate track and put them in a group:

It took a while, but recording it this way allowed me to control the sustain and pitch of the individual notes of the steel drum passages by using gating and pitch shifting VSTs, and then I was able to simply add equalization and compression to the entire group as though it were recorded on one track to begin with.  Anyway, just thought you’d be interested in one of the methods I use to get everything sounding the way I want.  Maybe I’ll try to post some more about my audio production tricks in the future.

PPF’s First Green Screen

In general I strongly prefer practical effects, but for the video for the Turnabout Sisters Theme, I had envisioned a sequence that involved the actual in-game background art.  Since I don’t normally use a green screen, and since I couldn’t imagine that I would have use for one again in the near future, I was hesitant to spend a lot of money, but I also didn’t want to buy something really cheap that was going to be difficult to work with.  After considering all of my options, I decided to go with a middle of the road foldable green screen that looked like it would suit my needs without breaking the bank.  Here’s a picture of the green screen in its folded state and in its natural habitat:

It might look small in the picture, but this thing is MASSIVE when it’s unfolded, which is why I chose not to unfold it just to take a picture.  I’m really glad that I settled on this green screen, though, as it ended up being the perfect size for what I was filming, and the self-standing design made it very easy to work with.  I’ve never done green screen lighting before, but I was surprised at the end result I was able to achieve after watching a few tutorials on YouTube.  Here was the initial in-camera shot that I was able to get without any additional processing:

Not bad for a first attempt!  The next step was to redraw the background art from the game.  My main objective in redrawing the art was to get a clean background that was free of characters and overlays, but I also wanted to upgrade the background art to 4k so that the resolution would match the rest of my footage.  Redrawing everything was fairly straight forward since most of the shading in the original art was achieved using simple gradients, but I had to redraw the rope barrier and the column in the background by hand, which took a while since I didn’t really know what I was doing.  But eventually I was able to get everything drawn out to my liking:

All that was left to do was to combine everything in DaVinci Resolve.  I was really amazed at how easy it was to key out the green screen and how clean the edges of my suit turned out.  Here’s the end result!

The whole process was pretty fun, and although I still have a preference for practical effects, I’ve found myself brainstorming how I might be able to use my green screen for future videos.

Witchy World Preview (Work in Progress)

Here’s a preview of Witchy World, which was a track from the Suggestion Box!  I bought a plastic trombone for this one, which actually sounded a lot less bad than I thought it would, but I still need to work on that part a little for the final release.  The toy glockenspiel that I normally use was a few notes short on the high end, so I bought a cheap glockenspiel on eBay so that I could have access to all of the high notes that I needed.  As for the percussion section, I was having a really hard time finding a marching band bass drum to rent, so I’m using a placeholder for that and the cymbal part until I can do some more searching around.  Here’s a link to the preview:

https://soundcloud.com/user-789983357/ww-unmixed/s-qkehA 

That’s all for now!  Thanks for reading, and thank you so much for supporting my work, I truly appreciate it!  The video for the Turnabout Sisters Theme was really fun to make, and I don’t think I would have been able to afford to pull off that green screen sequence without your help.  And thank you for your patience!  I’m sitting on quite a few projects that are on the verge of completion, so hopefully I’ll see you again soon.  Cheers!