Weekly Reflection 3
After hitting a roadblock last week, I began to change my perspective on the approach I was taking. Rather than trying to figure out how to use a function in After Effects that I was unfamiliar with, I decided to do what I knew would work. In the end, it was less time consuming to do the more “tedious” work as opposed to learning a way to make the program do the animating for me. With that being said, I haven’t completely given up on learning expressions. I’m still searching for solutions to the problem I had last week and if I can find a way to implement expressions before a bulk of the work is done, I’ll gladly implement it. I’m also getting into contact with different IMM faculty who specialize in motion graphics so that I may get advice on which programs would be best to use and how to overcome the issue of “real-time MIDI animation.”
Today, I had spoken with Dr. Nakra about the samples I was using and what the best option for the instrumentation would be. While she didn’t completely go against my original fix of using MIDI instruments, she highly suggested that using a live orchestra sample set sounds and appears more professional to the audience. Dr. Nakra also mentioned that many professional within the field would more so use live orchestra samples, if not a live orchestra recording, than MIDI instruments. While the MIDI instruments in Logic are competent and work well for simple purposes, they have an artificial sound to them and don’t sound as authentic. Considering professional composers use orchestra samples, I am going to try and stick to that as much as possible for the final project. It is important to note that I am researching into the EastWest Orchestra sound library, which Dan Renna recommended to me. Before I purchase any orchestra pack, however, I need to be sure that the samples are compatible with Logic and that the audio files are high quality.
For next week, I will start composing the demo that I want to show at the final showcase, which will ideally be a short piece lasting around 2 minutes. Even though I may not have all of the instruments set up, I can still compose it all on piano/MIDI instruments until I finalize my decision on what to use for instrumentation.
