PPF

Doki Doki Literature Club, New Software, and Earthbound Preview!

Added 2018-05-05 11:45:52 +0000 UTC

Hello everyone! Sorry for the delay again. I’ve been working on a couple of Earthbound related tracks that took a lot longer to put together than I anticipated (more on that at the bottom of the page). Also, now that I have all this cool equipment that helps to simplify my work flow, I’ve felt a lot more comfortable in taking on really complex projects that I never would have attempted in the past. As a result, my videos end up taking a lot longer to produce than they used to. I do want to start uploading more frequently though, so maybe I’ll try to be less ambitious with my piece selections.

Anyway, here are a few updates on what I’ve been up to, plus some previews of my upcoming Earthbound uploads!

Suggestion Box Update

Just a brief update on the suggestion box! In the interest of generating more activity in the Suggestion Box, I am now opening up VOTING to $1 supporters! Supporters from the higher tiers are still the only ones who can add new entries. I’ve also completely revamped the submission process to make it a lot easier and intuitive to participate in the Suggestion Box. Each time I post a new update on Patreon, you will also receive a private message with a link to a Suggestion Box form that you can fill out. Also, in order to cut down on email notifications, starting with this update all of your other rewards will be lumped in to that same private message instead of being posted as a separate Patreon post.

Acoustic Window Plug

Recently my neighbor’s A/C unit started making the sound of a Coke can in a blender, which is unfortunate because his A/C unit is right outside the window of my studio. Luckily I’ve been trying to save up some Patreon money so I can have an emergency stash for situations like this, so I was able to quickly build an acoustic plug for my window frame out of two layers of MDF, a couple tubes of Green Glue, and some weather stripping. I built the plug outside, and after it was complete I realized it was way too heavy for me to get it into the house and up into the window frame, so I eventually had to just hire some furniture movers to do it for me.

Ta-da! I wanted to paint over the plug to seal in the MDF stank, so I decided to take the opportunity to paint a big Hyrule royal crest over my work area. From a functional perspective, the plug provides some pretty good isolation. Not only does it reduce the sound of my neighbor’s A/C unit, it also really helps to cut down on the sound of cars passing through the street and nature-related sounds (like rain and strong winds). The only noise that really makes it through my wall now is airplane sounds, but I reckon there’s not much I can do about that.

But anyway, just thought I’d mention this here, because I’m VERY THANKFUL for the extra money you are providing me with, as I was able to take care of this problem within a matter of days. Without your support, I would have been royally screwed, as I probably wouldn’t have been able to record any more audio until I was able to scrape up enough money to buy the materials needed to build a plug. So thank you!

New Storyboarding Software!

When I begin working on a new project, one of the first things I do is draw up a storyboard, which serves many purposes:

It helps me to plan out the composition of all the shots I’m going to be using
Helps me figure out which parts of each instrument I actually need to film so I can film difficult parts in fragments if I choose to
Helps me keep track of all the line templates I’m going to be using for each project
Serves as a guide during the video editing process so I know exactly what I need to do. It’s a lot easier to sketch out ideas on paper than it is to mess around with different video layouts in Resolve

For years I’ve been doing my storyboards by hand with pencil and paper, which sometimes takes a really long time if there are a lot of instruments I have to cram into a frame. But I just recently discovered a free and open source storyboarding program called Storyboarder, and I’m REALLY excited about it, so I thought I’d share it with you. Here’s the interface!

I can add new frames to my storyboard down at the bottom, and in the text boxes on the side I can define the duration of the frame and add a caption that describes what part of the musical track it corresponds to. Storyboarder has a few sketching tools included in its interface, but the awesome thing about this program is that I can click a button that opens up my frame in Photoshop, and once it’s there, I can quickly drop in my line template and a few instrument icons and save the PSD. When I save my work, the frame thumbnails automatically update in Storyboarder. HOW COOL IS THAT. Now it only takes a few seconds to construct even the most complex of storyboard frames, whereas manually drawing them might have taken several minutes.

Storyboarder also allows me to import my audio track so I can play my storyboard as I’m going along. This allows me to get an idea of what the timing is going to look like in the final video so I can make sure the editing isn’t too frantic or too slow.

When I’m finished storyboarding, I can export everything to a worksheet and choose how many rows and columns I want on the sheet. Here’s an example of what one of my old storyboards looks like:

And here’s an example of a worksheet that I generated with Storyboarder:

Huge difference. The new storyboard is a lot easier for me to read, and it was FAR easier to generate. And since I was watching my storyboard as I went along, I can be sure that I didn’t accidentally omit any parts of the track.

I’m really excited about using this software for my future projects. For some reason most storyboarding software is web-based and uses a subscription model, which means you must pay infinitely many dollars if you wish to use the software indefinitely, so I’m really glad that there’s a free, open source solution available.

Earthbound Previews (Work In Progress)

So I decided to dip into the Suggestion Box, and one of the most popular suggestions (with a grand total of 4 votes) was “something from Earthbound.” There are a lot of tracks from Earthbound that I really enjoy, and many of the ones that I like are really short, so initially I thought about putting together a medley. However, the music from Earthbound is so diverse that I felt that a cohesive-sounding medley wouldn’t really be possible, so I decided to just take a handful of Earthbound tracks and produce two separate videos. And since the tracks that I chose are less complex than the stuff that I normally produce, I decided that I’m going to just bundle both videos into one Patreon post and only charge once for both of them. Anyway, here’s what I came up with:

Video 1: “Sailing to Scaraba” with a surprise encore of “Buy Something’ Will Ya”