My first amateur attempt at motion graphics, influenced heavily by Andrew Kramer’s ProScores assets and tutorials.
My good friend Brad, our awesome mobile developer and product lead, was leaving our small company after many years to take on a much larger leadership role elsewhere. We would all miss him and he was a perfect subject for a promo-style homage.
Sound Processing
In addition to the motion graphicsy bits, this project was also about sound processing. As a test, I’d recorded my voice while sitting in my basement with a very loud commercial beverage cooler. Due to my old crappy microphone, the initial recording only came through on one channel and was around the 20% level on the meters. This was all I could get without manually pushing the mini-phono plug against the cheap case jack.
The sample was also chock full of wide-spectrum refrigerator noise, but I had been working on audio processing and noise removal so I decided to see how well I could clean it up using Adobe Audition.
I’ve used a lot of sound processing and sequencing apps in my day and Audition is an awfully good one, especially for sound processing. After the half-hour it took to clean the sample, it sounded like it had been recorded in a studio! The test track became the final raw recording for this project and I was ready for processing. To get the final voice track, I did the following:
- Equalization – bump base and treble
- Normalization – expand dynamic range
- Compression – compress dynamic range
- Reverb – like a good martini, mostly “dry”
- Pitch shift – slightly deeper
- Time compression – get the message out quicker!
- Re-Normalization
Because I was more familiar with sequencing in After Effects, and because I needed to synchronize the sound with the motion graphics, I brought the final voice track into AE and created simple draft graphics and sound effects from ProSounds.
From there, I mixed down a final composite soundtrack that included the voiceover plus all the whooshes and dings. In another post, we may cover the development of motion graphics but that’s enough for today!