The Making of Pre-Battle of Vijay

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1st:

I list out all parts of Black Tongue which are interesting to be made as motion graphic. First time, I picked the poem of Sea Beast and Saw Binnya, but I considered that the foreigners would not be able to understand it without reading subtitle. The other parts that I have in my plan were; Battle with Siam, Pre-Battle of Vijay, Attack of Utahraptor, Battle of Martaban and the Death of Saw Binnya. I did not take any thing on the list out, but I jump to pick music.

2nd:

I download all songs that suitable to my story from incompetech.com. I put more than 100 songs into my phone and listen to them everyday to find the right music. One week later, I narrowed it down to be 20 songs. I listened to these 20 songs along with thinking about the list of parts of story. Like, which song is suit to which part.

3rd:

I got 2 songs which sound similar which are “For the Fallen”, and “Long road Ahead” and they are suit to “Pre-Battle of Vijay”. The beginning of For the Fallen are sad and emotional and it got louder at the second half. This is suit to how Vijay leaves the hometown, and also suit to the first time he leads his solders to the pier. Structure of “Long Road Ahead” is the same as For the Fallen. The first half is suit for the scene of traveling in the ocean, and the second half is suit for both armies reach to each other.

4st:

I put two songs together in Audacity, and saw the wave shapes of the sound. I pressed “Play” and “Stop” at the end of each chunk, and wrote the start time and end time of each chunk in my book. It has 20 chucks and each chuck is about 6-10 minutes long.

5st:

I listed all the possible scenes of Pre-Battle of Vijay in order. They are about 30 scenes. I listen to the songs again and again to fit the scenes into the right places or the songs.

6st:

Then, I had the list of 20 scenes that I have to work with. I began to paint with the water colors. I could paint only when the temperature was 25 degree up, and only in the sunny day. The lower temperature would freese my hands, and the color would look right just in sunny day.

7st:

I scanned all my paintings at school, and make the cut-out in Adobe Photoshop.

8st:

I worked with After Effect, the lenght of each composition was matched to the lenght of each chunk of the songs, that I had in my book. At this stage, I had to go back to make some more paintings that I forgot.

9st:

I put all videos together with music in Final Cut. It seemed like I finish the project when most classmates just started, so I planned to do 2 more compositions, one of intro and one of outro.

10st:

I recorded my voice for both parts, and tried to find the right music for both parts again. This is similar to the early steps I have explained. I mark down the start time and end time of each chunk.

11st:

First time I worked on Adobe Flash for this project. I made a map mover to tell the early story and at the edge, I have the RGB red line for motion tracking in After Effect, but after that I gave up, and I took the red line out, as you can see in the final video.

12st:

After I got movie file from Flash, I did the scene-shot from the main video I had. And I put both Flash video and these scene-shots in After Effect for intro part. This part has some effect from After Effect to make it looks like the tailer of legend movie. And I do the similar thing to outro part. “Achilles” is the song for the end credit as always. I had used this song in “Black Tongue: Return of Leviathan” for Flash Animation class in previous semester. I got the idea then, that I would use this song to the end credit of all Black Tongue project, included my major project.