Showing posts with label tools. Show all posts
Showing posts with label tools. Show all posts

Thursday, 19 September 2013

Libertaria: The story behind the virtual opera, by composer Sabrina Pena Young

Award-winning composer and published author Sabrina Pena Young composes works heard in Asia, North America, Australia, and Europe.

In this exclusive guest blog post, Sabrina tells the tale of the story behind the virtual opera and why she chose Moviestorm.
"I've been wanting to create a film for a long time, and Moviestorm had the perfect tools that I need to make my dream of a sci-fi animated opera a reality.
Sabrina's work has been performed at venues like the Beijing Conservatory, the International Computer Music Conference, Miramax's Project Greenlight, the Athena Festival, the New York International Independent Film Festival, Art Basil Miami, Turkey's Cinema for Peace, and Pulsefield International Exhibition of Sound Art.
---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

The story behind Libertaria


In 2011 I started writing a story about a young geneticist that worked in a cutting edge facility that absorbed the energy from the ill and dying to make a new serum that rejuvenated the younger, healthy populace. In the short story, the scientist, orphaned at a young age, discovered that one of her test subjects was actually her mother.

The short story evolved over time and instead o ffocusing on the scientists, the young girl was placed in the genetics factory herself, escaping it to discover her addict father runs the resistance against the factory. With a hundred twists and turns, Libertaria tells the story with true operatic drama and sci-fi energy.

Libertaria is an opera for the Digital Age. Created with virtual characters in a computer-generated environment, Libertaria is easily disseminated through the internet and simple DVDs. An animated opera offers a lower cost than a full live production, although there has been acoustic versions of songs like Lonely Mother’s Cry.

In the end Libertaria is a groundbreaking opera experiment. Creating an opera for a fraction of a budget, an opera that requires no rehearsals to enjoy, appeals to the masses, and has a diverse cast of characters reflecting the global nature of our culture.

Libertaria questions our current sociopolitical reality and the actions of the government, it questions war and even family.

Libertaria challenges musically and ideologically and will change our time.

Production for Libertaria was entirely online. The cast auditioned virtually through Music Xray and other sites, the animators worked together using Moviestorm, communication continued through e-mail and facebook." 

Why Moviestorm?


"I enjoy using Moviestorm because it is very intuitive, affordable, and easy-to-use. As someone with a film and music background, it was easy to jump into animation head-first using Moviestorm's excellent tools and simple platform. 

For my film Libertaria: The Virtual Opera I needed to use a program that could quickly lip sync over an hour of original vocal music, and Moviestorm was up to the task with the help of talented Moviestorm animators like Kera Hildebrandt. 

The easy integration of Moviestorm footage with third-party software like Final Cut and the use of settings like Cel Shading helped Libertaria: The Virtual Opera have a distinct graphic novel with epic visual effects for a micro-fraction of the cost. 

The Moviestorm community is invaluable and incredibly supportive, even volunteering time and talents towards production. Moviestorm made my dream a reality. I look forward to using Moviestorm for many years to come."


More information

What:  World Premiere Screening of LIBERTARIA: THE VIRTUAL OPERA, by Sabrina Peña Young

Where: Calvary United Methodist Church, 301 1

When: 3:00 P.M., Saturday, October 5th

Cost: $10 Donation. FREE admission for students (w/ID).

Contact: Call the church office at 561-585-1786 or email shoreclare@aol.com

Further links

Official Film Website: http://virtualopera.wordpress.com/
Trailer: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kQqnHt3a-Oo
Soundtrack : http://www.cdbaby.com/cd/sabrinapenayoung4

Baby Machine from Libertaria (Rough Cut) Youtube Link: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I8x4ZUw-_oo
Opening Credits (Rough Cut) Youtube: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BWdNH5rxpsQ

Friday, 19 February 2010

Camstudio - free open source screen capture software

Over the last few weeks, I've made about 20 short video tutorials. To get the screen captures for these, I've been using a neat little tool: CamStudio. Despite being ultimately an Adobe product, it's free, it's open source, and it does the job on both Vista 64 and Windows 7.

It's capable of recording the audio from the app and from a microphone, so it's great for narrating as you demonstrate something, which is perfect for what I'm doing. Admittedly, I then re-dub it with a better script and a nicer voice, but it serves as a guide. Apart from that it's just really basic. Start recording, do whatever I'm doing, stop recording, render, and do everything else in post.

There are one or two down sides, as you'd expect from a free product. It's not great at handling huge amounts of data. Capturing my 1920x1080 resolution monitor it tends to run out of memory when trying to render anything more than about 4 minutes long, so I work in short bursts, and then save & render. That's just fine for my purposes though, because it gives me a chance to watch that segment and re-do any bits that went wrong without having to step back too far. The other irritant is that (ironically) Premiere doesn't like importing the avi files CamStudio puts out. However, I just run everything through Windows Movie maker, trim the start and end there, and output them at the target size, which takes just a couple of minutes, and means that everything is Premiere-ready.

So, it's not the greatest screencap tool ever, but it's good enough, and a lot cheaper than some of the alternatives.

Download it from http://camstudio.org/