In the last article I promised to spend my weekend producing a prototype cutscene between two characters. Something to familiarize myself with the workflow, not anything that would ever make it into the finished product. My $10 Dynex microphone made my voice terrible, but that shouldn’t matter too much in terms of gaining experience with these tools. I had decent Crowder and Peterson voices, so I got to work making this.
In hindsight, it wasn’t a smart move to start with such a long cutscene. I should have started with that Kardashian fake interview I did years ago. Audio splicing is not exactly a quick job, even with such a rough cut.
You may have noticed that the audience background murmur and responses, present in some of the earlier interviews such as the one below, aren’t present here. This subtracts quite a bit from the final product. To fix this I’m building a library of those sound effects. To their credit, ElevenLabs makes this fairly easy, even if everything else is annoying, like the fact that, for no apparent reason, they gave me low energy Jordan Peterson overdosing on Xanax at the start there, then wildly switched it up. Then again, maybe that’s true to life. Who knows.
I have a recording session booked for Tuesday, which is when I’ll get my own voice in these cutscenes. In the meantime I’ll keep hammering away at this, adding the necessary graphical touches, and I’ll have another, much shorter cutscene tomorrow.
