As a relaxation, I created my first mini-short with sound, 5 secs long. Though it is really short, I learned how much time must be spent on creating such a tiny candy.

All has started with watching a stunning flash animation on the internet, inspired by a catching jazzy piece. The short was rather cubistic, but in all aspects splendid and stylish. Later, the idea of creating a similar musical mini-movie came into my mind, this time based on my favourite jazz piece, the George Gershwin's First preludium (which is round about 1 minute long). The motive of rythmical dominoes was chosen, for they are as perfect, allegro, intricate and jovial as the piece itself.

This 5-seconds animation was just a skills-practice for the final project and the task proved to be slightly more complicated than I expected .

After firing up Blender, the model of domino was created (simple), the material was set and duplicated to a curvy row. Dynamics were set, the first domino was tilted and the physics engine started. Voila - the base animation is finished. Tweaking the render, AO and camera settings - the file is now ready to be saved.

While the .blend file was being cooked on RenderPlanet, some clicking sound from the Flash 5 audio library was extracted and imported to Audacity. Now comes the tricky part - synchroinising the animation with the sound layer: the 'click' must be exactly in line with the domino collisions, otherwise it looks (and sounds) strange. The sound track eventually got littered with 'clicks' and randomised, so that it does not sound too fake. Now, the coda from Gershwin's Third preludium (!) was interleaved into the background and everything was saved into a WAV.

Meanwhile, RenderPlanet has finished its job and all the JPGed frames were downloaded and magically joined togetha in RAD Video Tools. The high-quality not-yet-sounded AVI ate 178 MB (!) on harddisc. What a hog! :?

Now it was Virtual Dub's turn. Video layer was loaded, WAV line imported and after the compression adjustments and 16 seconds, the final video was born...

Well, PHEW! Certainly it was a new experience, as I said I never sounded an animation before, but now I am proud I can do it (although only on nano-scale). Nevertheless, I feel ready for the real thing (but not now, maybe during the summer holidays)!

zip	Dominoes pack 20.05.2006 | 665 kB Includes the blender file and the sound track in WAV