I found another avenue to combine my voice acting with my love for comic books.

Over the holidays, I picked up a stop-motion animation "toy" at Toys R Us. It was Marvel branded, and included put-together cutouts of Spider-Man, The Incredible Hulk, Dr. Doom, and the Green Goblin.

This week I animated a quick scene (no storyboarding this round), recorded some dialog for the four characters, put it all together and uploaded it to YouTube.

Why YouTube, rather than encoding the video myself and hosting it on my site? Since Marvel owns the licenses for the characters, I'm not worried about losing creative control of this particular clip, due to YouTube's user agreement.

Besides, one of the goals is for me to try out YouTube, have fun with it, and see if it's a decent marketing tool to drive additional like-minded folks to my site. And I may be a bit of an eyeball whore. But only when I get paid for it.

My weekend review of my weekly Web traffic stats shows a noticeable upswing for the days following the clip posting. Oddly, referrals don't show anyone coming from YouTube.com to adamcreighton.com; I say "oddly" because I did this twice at set times to make sure it was working. Ah well.

The only change to my voice is a slight mechanization filter to Doctor Doom -- no change in pitch / octave /etc. -- that's all me. The sound effects are a bit tinny, which is probably due to them being sampled at a different rate than the other video audio pieces that went into the final product. Lesson for next time.

The Tools:

• "Animation plane": Jazwares Marvel Heroes Ani-Movie
• Microphone: MXL-990 (with shockmount)
• Preamp: M-Audio MobilePre USB (the model before the M-Audio FastTrack)
• Audio Post Processing: GoldWave
• Video post processing: Roxio VideoWave (though it's a bit short for what I need it to do)
• Editing: Adobe Premier Elements 2.0 (ditto, but slightly less so)
• Rendering: Adobe Premiere Elements (message boards are alive with the known bugs that bit me here, so I've lost a lot of love for Adobe this round; and their pricing already cost them a lot of love)

Labels: acting, acting process, animation, comic books, voice acting