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Showing posts from November, 2015

Book Review: Screen Acting - How to Succeed in Motion Pictures and Television

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For a book that was last published back in 1987, Screen Acting, How to Succeed in Motion Pictures and Television by international Australian Actor and TV show host Brian Adams is remarkably not very out dated at all. Except for a few organisation names which may or may not still be the same and actor salary tables the majority of information in this book is still as relevant today as it was back in 1987. You may be wondering why I'm reading this book? Well, it's one I bought as part of a directors course I completed back in the mid 1990s and never read. Now that I'm seriously back into animation and doing some of my own voice acting I figured this book would probably have some good pointers. At 373 pages it's packed with information about every aspect of acting from how to break into the business through to TV studio floor manager hand signals, director speak and more. A chapter that particularly stood out to me was the one dealing with vocal exercises. I'm challen

Review (Kind of): iSK CRU-1 USB Studio Condenser Microphone

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iSK CRU-1 USB Studio Condenser Microphone If you're serious about animation or video and plan to record your own voice for narration or characters, sooner or later you're going to want to upgrade from those cheap, $12.00 gaming mics, that you can buy from most variety stores. I'll admit I don't know what makes for a good microphone having nothing for comparison than the $12.00 cheapies - and I'm too lazy to actually visit a real audio/music equipment store to test equipment out. Which is why this is only a 'kind of' review. The way I see it, almost any professional microphone is an improvement on what I've been using so it's hard to go wrong. I did know that most serious microphones tend to connect to your computer via a USB cable so with that in mind I started Googling around for Professional USB mics. What I finally settled on was an iSK CRU-1 USB Studio Condenser Microphone  which I purchased through Swamp Industries as a pod casting package deal

Project Updates - Where Have I Been and What Am I Doing?

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TET all dressed for the Peanuts Movie. It's been almost a month since I last posted in this blog largely due to a family matter that involved travelling back to Western Australia from South Australia to actually be with my family over there. Rest assured I haven't forgotten about this blog and things are still happening on my projects. JAC Cat CrazyTalk Animator 2 "I just do eyes..." Last time I updated you on this character I was drawing hands...so many hands... it's one of the things Reallusion don't actually make clear in their advertising that their character templates are much more involved than drawing seven character views. Even less obvious is all the work that goes into giving the character a wide variety of facial expressions and the ability to lip sync. After finishing the hands I'm now creating eyes... so many eyes... I feel like that bio-engineer from the movie Blade Runner that says "Eyes, I just do eyes." Replacing the Dummy Templa