During the holiday weekend millions of Americans take off work and travel. Whether they're traveling to see family or traveling, work is often the farthest thing from these families minds. However going anywhere is a chance to meet new people and in no field is it more important to network than in the game industry. This past holiday weekend I traveled to Akron, Ohio to visit family. Like the average American I wasn't thinking of school or game design, instead I was more concerned with setting up my Amazon Dot and working on the huge puzzle in my uncle's house.
Then I walked by a company called New Territory. Initially I wasn't planning to even stop. They had what appeared to be a VR arcade set up in a small shop area in downtown Akron. However it was my dad who decided to step in and ask them what they were doing. This led to a longer conversation where Bill Myers, the company's founder, talked to me about his company; New Territory. New Territory at its core is a VR and AR software development studio. However, on nights and weekend the company transforms into its other function, a VR arcade. This sounds like a great idea for a company that needs to make money while it develops its software and brand name. While talking with Bill Myers, it also came up that I was in the game design pathway at my high school. After hearing this he encouraged me to email him if I ever wanted to do an internship. This is the golden key of networking. Opportunities like these only come if you go out and find them. A lesson we can all take as we wrap up traveling this holiday season.
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One thing I ran across while editing audio recently was my real lack of knowledge in what certain effects actually do to the audio. Effects such as "Echo" and "Delay" sound simple in theory but when you apply them to your base audio they can be hard to control. When you add an effect in Audition, the program pulls up a comprehensive sound board of adjustments you can make. While these controls give you a lot of power over the effect, if you don't know what things do things are bound to get messy.
For the purposes of this post we'll be diving deeper into Delay and Echo effects. First up is the three different kinds of effects that fit into this category: Delay, Analog Delay, and Echo. Echo effects are basically what they sound like. It creates a series of decaying echoes to a sound much like what you would hear at the Grand Canyon. By adjusting things like the Delay Time Units and Successive Echo Equalization, you can make a sound die out quickly or make it seem like the sound originates in a large room. You can even make a sound jump back and forth from side to side with Lock Left & Right. Delay effects are different from Echoes in that they are more controlled. Delays will only occur a specified number of times. They can fade into nothing, or ramp up into huge sounds using feedback. They can also be used to create more subtle echoes. With Analog Delays you can also distort the sound for different types of effects that mimic vintage delay units. Studying these effects and what they do has already seriously increased my understanding of audio effects. Where there was once rows of meaningless toggles and numbers I now am beginning to understand how to create amazing audio effects. This past week our class has been focused on video editing. To do this we've been using Adobe Premiere Pro to create videos for different projects. The thing that has so far stood out to me the most in this unit is simply how time consuming editing a video is. Without a good plan on how the storyboard of your video will go a lot of time is wasted in the editing process simply figuring out what you want in your video. For example on the last project I completed I had to make a game trailer for a game I was just given a large amount of raw footage for. This meant I not only had to find the shots I wanted in my video and cut them out of a much longer footage reel, but I also had to find and add things such as sound effects and music to use in my video.
One thing that could help the problems I'm having is the use of a storyboard. Often when I make a video I jump straight into it. I only take time to maybe think up a loose timeline of what I want in my video beforehand. This leads to many problems farther down the road and leads to a sloppy end product. Storyboards would help me plan out my videos ahead of time and keep them on task and unified in theme. Here is a good link I found to help me with my storyboarding skills: |
AuthorSamuel Henry is a Senior at DSA in NC. He has 3 years of prior experience in the game design pathway and he's looking forward to becoming a great game designer. The views and opinions expressed in this blog are solely those of the author and do not represent those of Durham School of the Arts or Durham Public Schools Categories
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