Confering With Yoda

Sunday night, I got a text from one of my dearest friends.  He's now an animator.  He says, "Hey, remember that little side project you put together when you were in broadcast school?  I think I'd like to animate it.  Do you still have the audio?"

Well, I couldn't find the audio, but I did find this.  I remember scrapping the side project and turning this in for that assignment.

This was for production class.  The assignment was, as I recall, "Go nuts and do whatever you want.  You just need to hit these three criteria to show that you've picked up this particular set of skills."  And we were off.

Now, we had a guest speaker recently who referred to our production instructor as "the Yoda of production," so we were giving him a hard time about that.  This was also around the same time that the original trilogy had finally hit DVD for the first time, and so I was watching it quite a bit.

And then it hit me:  I would me and some Yoda clips together and set it up like I was asking my instructor for help with the project.

We didn't have the tech to rip audio from DVDs, so I grabbed the audio the old-fashioned way.  I checked out a portable audio recorder from our equipment stores, took it home for the weekend, ran the audio outputs from my DVD player into the portable audio recorder and grabbed the clips that way.  I grabbed the Yoda clips I wanted to use.  I also grabbed the ambient sound from several establishing shots.  I figured it would be easier to use that to fill in the gaps, rather than try to build my own Dagobah soundscape.

For the first half -- where I try to record something and it comes out all messed up -- I just took my voice over and threw about a dozen different effects on it to get it as messed up as possible.  The creepy "seven days" was voiced by one of my classmates who I grabbed in the hallway.

Piece it all together in CoolEdit (the forerunner to Adobe Audition) and voila!  Assignment done!




The class got a charge out of it.  The instructor loved it.  At the end of class, he pulls me aside and says, "Do you mind if I play that for future classes?  Because you do illustrate some common problems, and I think it would be useful."  I said, "Sure, why not?"

I reached out to that instructor about two or three years ago for a little help, and he said, "Oh, by the way, I still play that Yoda thing for the class."  So if you came up through NAIT's RTA program in the last 10-12 years and you heard that...yeah, that was me.