I have finished collected the remainder of the screencaps and other images I need to create the intro, and I've finished retouching and alpha-matting almost all of of the ones I plan on using more than once, and a few of the ones that are just going to slide in and out of view during the intro.
Other than gathering a few more angles of the NERV crew working on stuff and a set of Kawashima images to match the ones I had collected of Yukino, most of the rest are "topic" images like the bits of random footage sometimes shown at the opening of news and documentary programs. I think the wood vaneer images that I collected earlier will be all I need for "textures" that I'm not making with gradients. I've posted most of the ones that are ready for use, and am adding the rest to the "outbox/intro/characters" folder of the FTP as they are edited and renamed.
I've recieved the first three narratives from Songbird, and am now able to put together a narrative preview for you all, which should probably be done some time tomorrow.
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Songbird: I do wonder on the pronunciation of a couple of the words in the description of "Tomoe in the Moonlight". It might just be the fact that I'm not used to hearing French words in the context of an English accent, but "Debussy", "bass", and "Burgmanesque" seemed a bit off. Going off of how my piano teacher always said the three words (he's a fairly fluent speaker of French and Spanish as well as English), I'd say they are:
Day + beau (as in the first syllable of 'Beauty') + see (or 'sea', take your pick)
Bass as in 'baseball', 'bass guitar', or 'all your base are belong to us' - as opposed to "sea bass" or "Big-Mouth Billy Bass".
Burg (as in 'Iceberg' or or 'Burger King') + man (as in adult male) + esque (as in "picturesque" or the first syllable of "escape").
Other than the pronunciation of these three words, though, I think everything very clear and nicely paced. I might try to use some light noise removal or a lowpass filter to take the edge off of some of the inevitable crackling - but, even as is, the audio quality is a vast improvement over my first recording attempt.
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I still have to get to the Video cage in the arts building to borrow one of their mics. I'll probably have to wait in line for an hour holding one of those little bits of numbered paper you get at the deli section of the grocery store, but i'll most likely be able to get a professional condenser with XLR connectors, shockmount, and external windscreen - which should be pretty sweet (and exactly what I need to be able to get the kind of high-frequency definition I'll need to get my voice to come out anywhere near as clear as Songbird's).
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So far I have the end-credit video images from the following people:
Otohiko (for both of his submissions)
Rose4Emily (well, I should hope so)
and photographic portraits of three people:
Jasper-Isis
Otohiko
Rose4Emily (just dug out my Palm this morning to take it. a bit blurry, but it'll do)
These are up on the FTP as well, if you want to see examples for the three videos and three people of which I currently have images. I'll be applying to each of the video-identifying pictures the same two-part border I've put on the portraits:
Image [cropped to 268x268, or scaled if cropping would ruin the image's composition]
2px black inner border
8px white outer border
268px + 2x2px + 2x8px = 288px (the target image size)
This will help to make sure all of the images stand out from the background nicely, and to make them look more like they belong in a set.
No
big rush on getting the rest of these pictures in, but you might want to think about how you could best represent your videos in a one simple frame.
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I've been doing way too much photo manipulation lately. My sister's the photo major. I should have her do all of this for me, and get back to programming. Ah, but she's just starting out as a freshmen, and I've had all of this extra practice...
