Today I’ve spent most of my time working on sound design. I’ve been adding the narration track to my work and also been working with the ambient and music sounds

The process has been relatively straightforward i used Adobe Soundbooth to clean up and adjust the audio tracks. I could  then quite simply import them into flash. Artistically however, it has been more difficult. Mostly because new doors are opening to me rather than closing so i am finding ways to constantly improve the impact of a scene through minor adjustments. Many sounds have been chopped up for seamless loops and others for one time fade out pieces, it hasn’t been easy, but i feel enough progress has been so far.

Other jobs have also been done, for instance i have added a number alpha fades for parts of the animation that require text and also those that need to give the impression of considerable time elapse that way they soften the impact of certain images appearing on screen. I’ve also removed a few buttons as i felt that once certain scenes had there dialogue added they’d look better flowing seamlessly into the next scene rather than isolating it as its own mini movie. Removing buttons and tweaking action script hasn’t been without its problems, I’ve had to deal with sound running through scenes that they shouldn’t have and also sort out problems where clicking a button to go to the next scene seems to skip ahead parts of movie clips as if it had been running in the background.

Today has just been a day for odd jobs and just making sure every last detail has been examined i am constantly learning and getting more comfortable with this way of working so new problems always seem to be popping up. This is essential to ensure my work looks as good as it can, but also so my sound level are correct and most critically the interactive parts are all functional.

Another take on my desert background, very similar although i removed the lizard and increased the size of the mountains to give the impression of looking from a different angle.

An example of the typical sound layers in my work. The top layer stops sounds carrying themselves over into new scenes. However, sometimes i want ambiance to carry over when i use the same location across consecutive scenes.

A black layer that has a fade in and a fade out point. For this particular scene, I’ve kept it at 80% opacity so the user can still make out the characters whilst being able to read the text comfortably.