Fireside Reading

New movie for your viewing pleasure: Fireside Reading.

This was a footage and composite project. On Monday I had been thinking about footage and voice dubbing, naturally Mr. Ed came to mind and I recalled hearing a rumor that they had used peanut butter to get Mr. Ed to move his mouth rapidly so he appeared to be speaking. My poor dog had no chance. To my surprise, as long as I gave Tearsa the peanut butter, she did not mind the scarf, the glasses, the sitting still or the recording one bit. Some of her nuances amazed me, I am confident that my star will be nominated for an Emmy this year. I must commend her patience as she was worked overtime due to my neglecting to have the book prop in the first track, thus the need to shoot the scene again, with the book.
The dogs voice track was edited to sound deeper and more sluggish than the original to match up with her physique. I gave the intro and exit narration the old college myself by just using an accent. I did have to do some clean up on the audio as well as the footage.
On Tuesday I put it all together and of course the rendering was the most excruciating, since this actually ended up being a rather long piece (over 2 thousand frames) I had to wait a lot. I thought it was worth it since I really did want there to be some substance in this video. Then of course I noticed glitches (I had to cut out a spot that I wish I didn't have to as it rendered out a couple frames of what looked like water had been spilled?) and had to keep going back in.
When I was filming I over filmed so that I would have some room to pick and modify, which I did for her footage alone first in Vegas and then introduced into Combustion where I imported the book zoom in and added the text (which by the way looks a lot better in the uncompressed version which you can see in the still). I rendered this footage out together and then pulled that back into Vegas where I added each of the voice tracks, and the music and did some final touch ups. I rendered again and compressed for download and did some minor color alterations in QuickTime before I uploaded. The work was completed around 3 am in the morning last night.

Click here to go to the download page at my website.

P.S. The green screen has not arrived yet, but I did have a dream about it last night.