Honestly, I haven’t gotten to really working on my thesis much yet. Homework in both this class and other classes as well as outside factors (work and home life) have been really taking up a lot of my time, and making it very difficult to find the time to do more than a little planning here and there for my project. I know pretty much exactly what I want to do though, which is a start at least. I need to get my main character ready so I can start the tedious process of animating sign language.
I have been thinking about voice acting and I may turn to my sister (who is experienced in acting) for this. I am thinking about only having one character (perhaps Alice’s sidekick) speak; the rest of the characters would be Deaf and use ASL only, and this one character could translate for the audience and maybe be a CODA (Child Of Deaf Adults). This is both practical and realistic, as most Deaf people don’t speak and I don’t want to enforce the idea that they can or will, and it would also mean I only need one voice actor. I think it could be fun to have the sidekick be an animal that has hands, such as a raccoon, as the whole thing with a main character that has a helpful animal sidekick is a pretty popular and successful format for kids. I’m not yet decided on this, though.
As for the intro, I may not go for a long intro song; I don’t want to deal with the words or composing that long of a thing. It may just be a cute short little thing where I have numerous voices saying “ASL with Alice!” (I can record me and my sister multiple times as well as some friends) and animated hands signing that, maybe a small bit of music which I can do by myself with flute, trombone, and/or piano (I can also reach out to my trumpet and saxophone friends).
Stacie,
I think the animal sidekick is a wonderful idea! Having one voice actor also makes a lot of sense. As you mentioned, I think this would help normalize deaf people not speaking, which would be good to teach kids. The intro could probably be like 10-20 seconds, honestly I think short intros are always the way to go, since it could get boring and repetitive when being used across a whole series (if you’re only making one episode that shouldn’t matter too much, but if you ever wanted to make more it’s something to keep in mind!)
If I had any advice for you, I’d honestly just say to do a little test animation with your characters signing just to make sure that will work out. Maybe even making the hands and animating before attaching them to a body? I’m not sure if that’s feasible, but I assume that the actual animating of the fingers will probably be your biggest challenge, so it might be a good idea to work on that first!
Good luck with everything, I’m really excited to see this once it’s all finished in the Spring 🙂
Hey Stacie,
I think going to your sister for voice acting is a great idea, especially because she has some experience in it already. Ironically enough, my brother loves to do voices and would probably be the first person I would go to if I needed help with voice acting. Having one voice actor also makes a lot of sense. You wouldn’t want to worry about having to contact multiple people, have different recording sessions, etc. If you really have to, I say go for it… but the less, the better. And the sidekick animal – amazing idea. Dora’s done it, Shrek’s done it, a bunch have done it. But they’ve done it because it works, as it’s friendly and can help support the main character or plot of the story (in your case, ASL). In terms of keeping the intro short, I definitely agree. With the current timeline of things, you don’t want to feel rushed and I think having a shortened and cute intro will help combat that and be enough to introduce your show and get people interested in watching.