Adobe CS6 Production Suite and The Animated Fairytale

Well, we just finished recording the narration for our new animated short - working title: "The Birthday Princess".  It's a cute story about a princess and her mother, the queen.  The princess learns many life lessons during one wonderful afternoon.

We recorded at Stewart Sound in Santa Ana, California using ProTools as our DAW.  All the files are in straight AIFF.  Dave Myslek, "Wookie", our engineer was awesome!!!  From there we will move almost completely into the Adobe Production Premium CS6 suite. We are editing the dialog in Adobe Audition for the rough cut.  We'll also use Audition for the final sound design and mix out at the end of the project.  In the middle we will use a combination of Premiere Pro 6 and After Effects to bring the animation to life.

Once the dialog is roughed in we will be giving it to our animators.  We'll continue the sound design during the animation process and give them the final audio locked dialog + M&E tracks in the home stretch for fine tuning.  We'll then use Premiere to do the final video edit and layback of the mix.  Output will be done with Adobe Media Encoder.

We are using Smart Sound to create the music. Their product, Sonic Fire, is a fantastic tool to create an "almost" original score.  If you haven't checked this software out yet, I highly recommend it.  You can create very original sounding pieces of music from their library and tailor the cues to meet and match your project.  Add hits, mood changes and even variations in side of one long piece of music.  We pulled our temp tracks while we were editing the narration selects - Very Cool.

This is one of the new projects we are starting for 2013 at Polydactyl Pictures.  We hope to have good luck with it at the festivals.  It will also allow us to build "the machine" a little more before jumping into some of the larger projects we have on the horizon.

I realized this piece sounds a lot like a sales pitch for many of the software companies - but I really just want to show a step by step of the process.  I want indie filmmakers have yet another road map to follow showing different kinds of projects and their workflows.  Indies (including ourselves) need to have resources at our fingertips to help keep us creative and forward thinking =)

Stay tuned.  I'll be posting our progress on "The Birthday Princess" as we go.  When we find out something cool (or problematic) I'll give you an update and suggestions.

Until next time, good shooting, editing, animating, mixing....

TDTrey.com